Every wedding comes with a flurry of last-minute arrangements, but Sunil Dhar has an unusual task on his to-do list when his younger son gets married this June: make sure everyone is in the right country.
The Dhars are from the San Francisco Bay Area. But the wedding is set to take place nearly a thousand miles north in Blaine, Wash., near the Peace Arch, a monument along the border of the United States and Canada with a park that extends into both countries. The park is considered a neutral zone, where people from both countries can mingle without going through immigration checkpoints.
It’s the only way the bride’s parents, who live in Delhi, can attend. They would need visitor visas to enter the United States, and the wait time in India to apply for these visas is nearly a year.
So the wedding will take place in the southern half of the park in Washington in a rentable building called the American Kitchen. The bride’s parents and other family members, who already have Canadian visas, will enter the park from the northern half in British Columbia. The parking lot on the American side is as far south as they can go without having to show IDs and immigration documents.
Mr. Dhar, 65, said he did not want to see a repeat of the visa-related absences during his elder son’s wedding last year in the Bay Area — especially when it comes to his future daughter-in-law’s family.
“This is a memory that lasts a lifetime,” Mr. Dhar said. “And I wouldn’t want her to not have her parents there at her wedding.”
by Prozco®