A visa (short for the Latin carta visa, lit. "a document that has been seen") is a document issued by a country giving an individual permission to formally request entrance to the country during a given period of time and for certain purposes (see below for caveats and exceptions) and usually stamped or glued inside of a passport, or sometimes issued as separate pieces of paper.The OAT instructions made completing the form easy. And we sent the application off to the company recommended by OAT, PVS International. We sent ours in by UPS on November 30, 2007, and using the UPS online package tracker, are able to see that it was received by "Evangeline" at PVS on December 4. Update: We received our passports back, FedEx, on December 12. Pretty painless, and we did not pay any extra for expedited handling, which was an option. The visa is a sticker for each of us that almost entirely fills up one of our passport pages.
Because we were not certain what quality of printed photograph was needed, instead of taking our own and printing them out ourselves, we each went separately to a FedEx/Kinkos, and paid about $14 for two photos. More guidance at this point as to whether our home-grown photos would work or not would have saved us a bit of money. I suppose we should have called the OAT customer service line, but we did not.
We had to mail in our passports to do this, so we made photocopies of them, as well as of the forms we completed and sent in with them. Good thing, because just a day or two later we received a request from OAT to share our passport numbers and expiration dates, which we were able to access on the copies.
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