Passports

Passports are beautiful things. My passport is one of my most prized possessions. It has taken me so many lovely places. I cherish it to because so many Americans do not have one. My students in Turkey were always amazed that most Americans don't have passports. My parents just got passports this past year in order to visit me. (I kept trying to get them to get one earlier with the guilt trip of "what if something happened to me in Turkey" with a pitiful look.) To my students getting a passport is like getting a drivers license in America. That leads me to sharing the following:

I love my friend Brenda. When I was in Turkey she was all the time telling me some interesting tidbit that she had read in the paper or seen online, especially interesting things from the Turkish paper. Recently she made a post on passports. With her permission, I'm sharing it below. [Or you can read it at http://brendayaziyor.wordpress.com/2009/10/04/those-little-blue-books/]

Those Little Blue Books

I complained a little in an earlier post about the challenges and surprise costs for some of us when we renewed our work visas. Today’s English-language version of the local paper has a story about local citizens’ challenges and costs when they want to travel out of this place.

A first-time US passport is $100, and I think renewals are $70 or so. Each is for a 10-year period.

A British citizen pays about $115 for the same 10-year passport.

Many of the European neighbors, and Canada, issue 5-year passports, and the costs are somewhere between $50 and $125 in their own currencies. Russia wins with a $13 passport, according to the article.

Citizens here can purchase a passport for varying amounts of time: a 6-month passport costs about $166, with a 5-year passport at $463. Along with auto fuel prices, we claim passport fees as “most expensive in the world.” To add insult to injury, the article continues, this non-EU-member country’s citizens have to pay exorbitant costs for visas to enter most any country its citizens would want to visit. A flight from here to Switzerland on the low-budget airline is just less than $70 one-way. The round-trip cost equals the cost of the visa a citizen of this place would need to enter Switzerland.

Only 1 in 10 citizens has ever been abroad. That means if you want to meet them and talk to them, you probably have to come here! Go ye!