![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3890_near_miss.jpg\")
<\/p>\nNear miss #1: Adrian and I are going to London for a few days during autumn break, which is this week, and I was this close to missing the fact that you now need a permit to enter the UK. I know they’re out of the EU but for years that didn’t actually mean anything for travel, and somehow I’d missed that this had changed.<\/p>\n
The confirmation email from airline even mentioned it, but the new permit thing is called an ETA – a most unfortunate naming choice, I have to say. As I skimmed the email, I saw the term in passing, naturally interpreted it as “Estimated Time of Arrival” in the context of a flight booking, and didn’t pay any more attention to it.<\/p>\n
Today I finally noticed it for real and had a minor bout of panic because it can apparently take days to get an ETA (“Electronic Travel Authorization”, why couldn’t they just call it a visa) and we don’t have that many days. Spent a good chunk of the afternoon going through an online application process only to realize, when my payment didn’t go through, that I had landed on a scam website and had to start all over on the real site.<\/p>\n
The process required photos and face scans and scans of the passport and whatnot. I got the applications in just before Adrian had to leave for his week at Eric’s, and thankfully got an approval back within 10 minutes, so our trip was saved.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Near miss #2: Due to the ETA panic I nearly forgot the fact that I had a concert ticket for this evening, and almost missed a concert with Grigori Sokolov. Missing it wouldn’t have been quite as sad as missing a London trip, but still, I’m glad I remembered it in the last minute. Beethoven and Brahms. Just the thing I needed to get my adrenaline levels back to normal again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Near miss #1: Adrian and I are going to London for a few days during autumn break, which is this week, and I was this close to missing the fact that you now need a permit to enter the UK. I know they’re out of the EU but for years that didn’t actually mean anything […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,18,5,768,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art_entertainment","category-dailies","category-music","category-photography-2","category-travels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21346,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21345\/revisions\/21346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}