Belize Visa

Belize Visa

When I was a kid I used to collect stamps from all over the world and I would marvel at the names of foreign countries and at the small, elaborate pictures that supposedly purported small bits of the soul of those places. So far away, so mysterious!

One of the countries whose names I came in contact with by way of my stamp collection was Belize. I used to think that the name Belize was too strange to be that a country, it sounded to me rather like the name of a girl. What made this country so odd in my eyes was the fact that I didn't have any context about it, no history and no location (until I looked it up in the atlas), it was known to me only as a stamp. Obviously people were living there... what language were they speaking?

But it seems that now, 20-odd years later I will be making my way into the land that is still tucked away safely in my stamp album in Romania. The visa, stamped on the passport, just arrived in the mail today! Tomorrow, the South Africa visa package goes off to the consulate. I met South Africa through the stamps as well; I remember they were marked "RSA" and I had to ask my dad what those letters meant...