It is the story of two people who fell in love, Peter from Alkmaar, Holland and Jennifer from San Francisco, California. They wanted to live their lives together in the USA. It is about the immigration issues that arose as a result of their situation.

It is written as a guide for people who are in similar situations and want to know how we dealt with it. And anybody else who wants to read it.

The Immigration and Naturalization Service is at this moment being integrated in the Department of Homeland Security and was renamed Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services and then renamed again U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. All those names are used throughout this website. Some of the links might not work because of all this renaming. I apologize.

For those that just want a quick overview of the whole process, go to immigration for dummies

links that might be useful | frequently asked questions | immigration for dummies | timeline

the first vistit to the consulate | the second visit | medical and the third | epilogue | photos
Our big wedding in 2003

mailto:peter_onderwater@yahoo.com

Chapter one.

The story in short.

Damascus, Syria. I am on a one month backpacking trip through the Middle East. In a hostel in Damascus I share a dorm room with an English girl named Gigi. She introduces me to an American girl, Jennifer. The three of us go out for dinner that night and never see each other again for the rest of our lives, or so we thought. But it was not meant to be like that.
Ten days later I run into Jennifer again, waiting in line to get on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Two months later she asks me to meet her in Paris end exactly two years after our first dinner in Damascus we got married.

Chapter two.

About the cold fact that love is not enough to live in the US.

After we spent over a year flying back and forth to see each other we made the decision that we should live together for a while to get to know each other better.
So I sold my car, rented my house out, boxed up the rest of my stuff and flew to the big country for six months. She didn't drive me crazy and my kissing slowly improved (more tongue, less tongue...) so she told me I could stay.
At first we thought it best to do the K1 visa thing ( faq ) but after posting some questions in a newsgroup it became clear that the best thing to do was to get married and do the DCF thing ( faq )( immigration for dummies ) in Amsterdam.

But that meant we had to get married!
So what should we do? Best thing maybe was to fly to Las Vegas and ask Elvis Presley whether he had time for a quickie. But after a bit of research I found out that it is pretty simple to get married in California, so why go to Nevada?
Next thing we found out that Jennifers very old (very old!) uncle Al who lives in New Jersey was going to be in town on the weekend of our two year aniversary, for a barbeque beside her uncle Larry's pool. So why not join the party and get married right there?

To make a short story even shorter, Larry didn't want to barbeque so he hired a caterer, and some twenty five people were there on that little barbeque for uncle Al that wasn't a barbeque, including my mother and three sisters who flew in from Holland.
It was a great day.

So what happened next?
Peter's first visit to the consulate.