U.S. Entry: A Little Detour to Ottawa
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Sometime during the summer of 2022, I found myself on an exceptionally long work rotation: one full month in the field. Usually, after about two weeks of work, the mind starts to become tired and worn out. This was when having something fun and exciting waiting on the horizon could make all the difference, giving me a little extra motivation to push through the repetitive, increasingly exhausting workdays.
It was probably during that extended rotation that I first started dreaming up a holiday for later in the year. Autumn seemed like the obvious time. The field season would be over, I would have plenty of free time, and after another long summer in the Canadian wilderness, I wanted to go somewhere different. More urban and less naturey.
At work, some of the guys and I entertained ourselves with nostalgic recollections of quirky video games and old 80s music. One particular game came up more than once: Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, a violent and satirical take on 1980s Miami that many of us had grown up playing. After almost three years of living in Canada, the idea of escaping to a warm, sunny beach somewhere far to the south sounded increasingly appealing. So why not Miami?
The idea of turning an old childhood gaming memory into reality sounded more appealing by the day. If nothing else, I wanted to see just how much the real Miami resembled the fictional Vice City I remembered.
I had an idea now. A desire, even. And more importantly, I had a clear holiday destination with the potential for a pretty cool story. There was just one problem. As always, I first had to make sure I could actually get into the country.
Complications?
The story of visiting the U.S. had actually started several months before my Miami idea ever entered the picture. Back in the spring of 2022, I was already thinking about visiting the United States again. New York was the obvious possibility. I’d enjoyed my week there in 2019, and I had been curious to return ever since.
As a Hungarian passport holder, I would normally have expected a relatively straightforward process: apply for an electronic travel authorization a few days before the trip, receive approval, and go. Except this was early in the post-COVID period, the United States had recently changed administrations, and I was hearing increasingly confusing things about the rules for Hungarian citizens.
Hungarian news outlets were reporting that the United States was restricting electronic travel authorizations for certain Hungarian citizens. Specifically, people who held Hungarian citizenship but had been born outside the territory of modern-day Hungary. People like me.
This sounded strange and a little suspicious. So I did what I thought was the sensible thing: I went looking for confirmation from the American side. I checked the relevant U.S. government websites and searched for official statements. Then, I looked for American news coverage explaining what was supposedly happening. I couldn’t find anything that clearly confirmed the claims I was reading in the Hungarian media.
The only information I could find came from Hungarian news outlets.
Definitely Complications
I wasn’t sure what to make of it.
I didn’t particularly want to turn a holiday-planning problem into a political discussion, but the timing was difficult to ignore. Relations between the Hungarian and U.S. governments had become increasingly strained, and the idea that political considerations might somehow be affecting the treatment of certain Hungarian citizens was certainly not impossible.
Still, I had no way of knowing whether that was actually what was happening. And rather than speculate, there was a very simple way to find out. I submitted my electronic application well in advance.
A couple of days later, it was rejected. No explanation. No useful clarification. Just a rejection. Curious… Very curious.
I requested an explanation for the decision, but never received one. Obviously, I couldn’t use my single case as definitive proof of the broader claims being made in the Hungarian media. There could have been another explanation for the rejection, and I had no access to whatever criteria had actually been used to make the decision. But the lack of an explanation certainly did little to ease my suspicions.
From my perspective, there was no obvious reason why I should have been refused. I’d already visited the United States in 2019 without any problems. I’d provided border officials with the information they requested, stayed for exactly the amount of time I’d said I would, and had no incidents whatsoever. I was a foreign worker legally living and working in Canada, holding Hungarian and Romanian citizenship, and I had simply wanted to spend some of my hard-earned money visiting the United States again.
Now, however, I had no travel authorization. My plans for a holiday on the sunny beaches of Miami seemed to be dead before they had even begun. Unless… There was another option.
How about a Visa?
While discussing the situation with an old friend from Chicoutimi a few months earlier, I heard just how difficult it could be to get a U.S. visa at the time. He’d gone through the process himself and told me about the enormous backlogs at some of the U.S. visa processing centres in Canada.
There were multiple visa application centres across the country, but the difference between them could apparently be enormous. Montreal, for example, was completely overwhelmed. Depending on when you checked, there were either no appointments available at all or waiting times stretching absurdly far into the future. My friend had found a way around this.
He told me that he’d applied for an expedited appointment by claiming that he needed to travel to the United States for a professional conference. The trip was actually for a personal event, but the conference provided a reason to request faster processing.
The other important factor, apparently, was choosing the processing centre carefully. He had managed to find an appointment in Calgary with a much shorter waiting time than Montreal. Instead of potentially waiting years, he was looking at only a few months.
That got my attention. At the time, this seemed to be my only realistic route toward getting a U.S. visitor visa. And without one, there wasn’t going to be any holiday south of the border. I thought about it for a while and eventually decided to give it a shot.
Worst case scenario? They would reject me, and I’d simply never bother visiting the United States again. Their loss. I’d spend my money somewhere else. Best case? I’d get a ten-year visa and hopefully never have to deal with this ridiculous process again.
If I was going to request an expedited appointment based on a professional conference, I figured I should at least know something about the conference I was supposedly interested in.
Doing My Homework
I started looking for conferences taking place on the U.S. East Coast around the time I was hoping to travel. As luck would have it, I found a geological conference in New York City scheduled for mid-October. Perfect.
The conference actually fit my original plans quite neatly, since I had already been considering a return to New York. I read up on the event and its topics, trying to understand enough about it that I wouldn’t sound completely clueless if anyone asked me about it.
I also started thinking through all the questions I might be asked. One kept coming back to me: Did I have a ticket for the conference? That could be awkward.
I wasn’t about to spend money on a conference I wasn’t actually planning to attend before I even knew whether I would be allowed into the country. So, in my head, I had an answer ready: no. I would only buy a ticket once I knew I could actually make the trip.
I tried to anticipate every possible hole in my story. It was an absurd exercise. I was essentially preparing for an interview about a conference I had no intention of attending, simply because I wanted a chance to visit a country I’d already visited legally without any problems. Still, I’d made my decision. Now I just had to find somewhere that would actually process the application.
Montreal was out. The appointment system was effectively useless, with no reasonable availability in sight. I checked several other major Canadian cities and found similarly ridiculous waiting times. Then I looked at Ottawa. A couple of months. That was manageable. I booked an appointment for the end of August.
If everything went according to plan, I’d have my visa well before my intended autumn trip and plenty of time to book flights, accommodation and everything else. If it didn’t work out… Well. Maybe Mexico. At that point, the United States was simply one possible destination. I had no idea whether I would ever make it back there at all.
Then, during that exhausting month-long field rotation, Miami entered the picture. Suddenly, that little visa application I’d been nervously waiting on had a much more interesting potential purpose.
Ottawa
I set out for Ottawa at the end of August for my appointment. Fortunately for me, this part of Canada had a decent commercial railway system connecting the major cities. For the distance, it was more cost-effective and hassle-free than flying. And personally, I always enjoyed train rides — one of the things I had missed since leaving Europe.
Montreal’s central station, like New York City’s, had been moved underground decades earlier and lay hidden in plain sight in the city centre. I always appreciated a train station that was both aesthetically pleasing and conveniently located. In contrast to some other cities… wink, wink… Toronto… Calgary…
In Ottawa, I had booked two nights at The Century House Bed and Breakfast, an elegant historic home near the city centre. It was a very pleasant stay, run by a warm and friendly host named Vittorio. One of the highlights was the home-cooked breakfast included in the price.
Once I had arrived and settled in, I went out to explore the nation’s capital that afternoon.
First Impressions
My first impressions of Ottawa weren’t all that great. The main street I walked along to get to the city centre, Rideau Street, was fairly bland and concrete-heavy, with little to no vegetation and, at least at the time, quite a few drug addicts. It was also quite dirty. While large major cities all share many of these problems, the visual contrast here seemed strikingly disproportionate to the relatively small size of Ottawa.
Once I reached the Rideau Canal bridge, however, the sights improved considerably. There were significantly more green spaces, along with several visually pleasing buildings with intricate architectural details to admire. Of course, one of them was the hotel-castle known as Fairmont Château Laurier, part of the luxurious Fairmont hotel chain. Further down the street stood the Canadian Parliament.
The federal Parliament buildings were housed in an elegant old British-style complex made up of three individual buildings perched atop Parliament Hill. The Peace Tower stood tallest at the centre, rising above the rest of the complex. The front courtyard consisted of a simple, well-kept lawn, with the Centennial Flame burning in the centre in honour of Canada’s 100th anniversary of Confederation.
This was clearly the nicer part of town.
The Heart of Ottawa
Walking back from Parliament, I discovered Major’s Hill Park and the promenade along the Rideau Canal locks.
The canal itself had an impressive history. Built in the early 19th century under Lieutenant-Colonel John By, it was originally intended as a secure military supply route that would provide an alternative to the vulnerable St. Lawrence River in the event of another war with the United States. Construction began in 1826, and the canal eventually connected Ottawa with Kingston and Lake Ontario. Today, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the best-preserved canal systems of its era.
The Ottawa Locks form the northern entrance to the entire system. Eight locks sit one after another, lowering boats roughly 24 metres from the Rideau Canal down to the Ottawa River. The locks were built right beside what is now Parliament Hill, and their construction helped give rise to the settlement that eventually became Ottawa.
It was a strangely peaceful place considering that I was standing in the middle of the country’s capital. The old stonework, the water, the park and the surrounding historic buildings gave this part of the city a character that Rideau Street had been conspicuously lacking. At the far end of the park was the National Gallery of Canada, and just beyond that the Alexandra Bridge crossing the Ottawa River. On the other side lay Gatineau, in Quebec.
At first, this felt a little strange. I had travelled for hours by train from Quebec to get here, only to find myself standing directly across the river from it again. But the provinces have a rather unusual shape, and Canada’s capital actually sits right on the border between Ontario and Quebec, with the Ottawa River separating the two.
During my evening stroll, I also scouted out the location of the U.S. Embassy, where I would have my appointment the next day. It was a massive, high-security building situated right in central Ottawa, conveniently close to my lodging, and directly across from the famous AWATTO city sign.
Tomorrow, I’d find out whether all of this effort had been worth it.
The Interview
The following day, I was waiting outside the embassy with large groups of other people. The whole process was very neatly organized, with only a select few people being invited inside the building at any given time. Once inside, there was another round of waiting to be done. There were several queues leading to several kiosks, each seemingly dealing with different cases or different stages of the same process.
The large crowd was made up of people from all over the world, presumably representing an equally wide range of nationalities and circumstances. Students? Workers? Visitors? Probably a little bit of everything. Security cameras and security personnel seemed to have their eyes on everyone at all times. Somewhere among them, I stood in line, waiting to see what the official person I’d be speaking to would have to say.
Eventually, I got to the head of the line. The person before me was being questioned by the official, and I could mostly make out the answers and infer the questions from where I was standing. They seemed thorough, but not unreasonably so. Finally, my turn came.
I presented all the documents they had asked for and patiently waited for them to take me through the questioning process. In my mind, I was anticipating the part where they would question my conference-related motive.
However, they never did.
I assume they ran their background checks and asked me a few things about my status in Canada. Perhaps even something about my previous visit to the States. I can’t recall exactly. But the “interview” process was surprisingly smooth and straightforward. There were no questions about why I had opted for the expedited visa process. Nothing about the conference, nor about my ESTA being rejected.
Honestly, I had a few of my own regarding the latter, but didn’t think it was particularly wise to press them on that. After a few hours spent at the embassy, I walked out with a huge smile on my face and a shiny new U.S. visa in my passport, valid for ten years.
I felt great!
A Change of Heart
I spent the rest of the day strolling around and exploring the capital with renewed interest. With the main task of my visit concluded, I was now on a mini one-day holiday.
I took my time revisiting some of the places from the day before, but this time with a somewhat softer attitude towards the city. Perhaps it was simply the relief of having the visa problem solved, or the satisfaction of finally being able to relax and enjoy myself. The weather seemed to agree with me. The overcast sky had opened up to allow gentle, warm rays of sunlight to paint the city in a much better light. Suddenly, Ottawa seemed a bit nicer.
Since I was in tourist mode now, I took the opportunity to visit the National Gallery of Canada. The collection was much broader than I had expected, but Canadian art was clearly at the heart of it, spanning different periods and styles. There were works from some of Canada’s most recognizable artists, including the famous landscapes associated with Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven, alongside Indigenous art and more contemporary works.
After the gallery, I continued wandering, slowly making my way back towards Parliament Hill. I passed the Rideau Locks again, then continued along Wellington Street.
Final Thoughts
This part of Ottawa felt distinctly different from the rest of the city. Most of the buildings seemed to be government offices of one sort or another: elegant, imposing, increasingly modern as I walked further along, but also somewhat… samey. On the parallel Sparks and Queen streets, things became more lively, with restaurants, bars and the usual collection of downtown commercial buildings. Eventually, I made my way back towards the National Arts Centre and Confederation Park.
One thing I did appreciate about central Ottawa was how easy it was to explore on foot. Most of the interesting sights were packed into a relatively compact area, and you could cross much of the central part of the city in an hour or two without really trying. And that, to me, was also where Ottawa’s appeal seemed to end.
Outside of these central areas, at least from what I saw, the city felt fairly bland and typical of North America. Nothing particularly bad, but nothing especially unusual either. My overall feelings about Ottawa were therefore somewhat mixed. Yes, it had some beautiful and interesting parts, particularly around Parliament Hill, the canal and the historic centre, but I couldn’t help feeling that it was a little underwhelming for the capital of Canada.
If I were comparing cities of a similar size, I thought Quebec City looked considerably more impressive. And Montreal? Montreal was peak. Incomparable. Still, I had a good time during my short stay in Ottawa. Especially because the main goal of my trip had been successfully accomplished.
That evening, I remember going out for dinner and trying something for the first time: chowder. I had heard about this seafood dish for years in films and cartoons, but had never actually tried it. I stumbled across a restaurant that apparently served some of the best chowder in the area, so naturally, I had to investigate. It was creamy, thick and rich in flavor. I loved it.
And with that, my little visa adventure was over. I was now ready to return to my dual life between my home in Montreal and my work in Northern Quebec. Within a couple of months, I’d be flying to Miami. Sea. Sun. And a crazy adventure awaited. And boy… It sure was going to be something alright.
Oh, and by the way… Those suspicions about restrictions affecting certain Hungarian citizens that I had encountered back in 2022 turned out to be true.