no, it's not a credit card.

The Visa to which I referred in yesterday's post is not a credit card. It is a document that allows us to enter Vietnam. As of 11:53 this morning our applications were in the mail. Woo hoo!

According to Wikipedia:

A visa is a document issued by a country giving an individual permission to formally request entrance to the country during a given period of time and for certain purposes and usually stamped or glued inside of a passport, or sometimes issued as separate pieces of paper.

Many countries require possession of a valid passport and visa as a condition of entry for foreigners, though there exist exemptions .

Visas are associated with the request for permission to enter (or exit) a country, and are thus, for some countries, distinct from actual formal permission for an alien to enter and remain in the country.

You can apply for a visa in person or by mail, but since we don't exactly have a VN Embassy in our town, the applications were mailed to the embassy in D.C. In our case we applied for a 3 month travel visa and we can technically enter Vietnam as of June 15. Assuming of course that they approve our visa applications, which I'm sure they will. If only we could get there that quickly. I expect it to take 7-10 days to receive our visas, and will gleefully update the blog once they arrive.