Sunday, June 25, 2006

Goodbye comic passport!

I have to renew my passport before going to New York in July. I'm sort of sorry about that for two reasons: The first is, that in order to comply with international and EU agreements, a new passport containing biometric marks and an RF-chip will be issued from August 26th this year, and the new passport that I will have to get before July 6th will be valid for 5 years. So I'll be stuck another 5 years with an outdated passport. 'Another' 5 years that is, because my current passport is already outdated: I am one of the relatively few people who 'ownes' a Dutch passport that is also a comic book about the entire written history of the Netherlands... writen in very tiny tiny but still legible fine print. Unfortunately, when I renew, I will have to hand the current one. And although I can ask it back (which I always do), they will have to make it 'clearly invalid'—which means that they wil make a big cut with scissors or drill three large holes through it. To rescue the internal images, I scaned my entire passport and save it to my blog. (I was amazed that no one appears to have put this unique passport online yet...)         

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