If you want to hunt vampires like Christopher Lee did in the old Dracula movies (above), you might want to get a visa… or at least that was one reason a traveller gave when applying for travel documents to get into Romania.
The strange holiday request has come top in a list of strange reasons for wanting a visa compiled by a visa-application website.
As part of the application process via Global Visas, applicants reveal their need for a visa and why they’re planning to move to/work in/or visit a certain country.
With the permission of those who applied, the team at Global Visas has put together a list of the top 10 most unusual reasons for visa applications received via the site in the past 12 months.
The complete list is:
- A South African man applied for a European visa as he stated that he wanted to go to Romania to ‘hunt vampires’ for a living.
- A Brazilian man applied for a UK visa to bring ‘flamenco to the streets of Norwich’, claiming to be a teacher of the dance.
- A Russian lady was looking for a European visa to work ‘her trade’ in the Netherlands. That trade being prostitution.
- An embalmer got in touch who wanted to move his skills preparing dead bodies for burial from Mexico to Spain. It later emerged that the applicant had an ‘extensive criminal record’ so the visa was subsequently refused.
- A gondolier in Venice – one applicant reckoned they were a dab hand with a pirogue in their native Mali so wanted to transfer their skills with a punt to the Venetian waterways after ‘seeing it on television’.
- A dog food taster – somebody had allegedly applied for the position and been given the nod based on ‘previous experience’ and they were now applying for the relevant visa to move to the US from the UK.
- A man openly claimed during his application process that he was ‘evading the local authorities’ in his native Philippines and wanted to join his family in Australia.
- A ‘foot model’ applied for a visa to move from France to the US where their feet were apparently in ‘high demand’.
- A woman applied for a UK visa after apparently securing ‘seasonal work as a zombie’ after going for an interview whilst on holiday.
- A Peruvian man applied for a European visa to work as an ‘alpaca shearer’ during ‘shearing season’.
Liam Clifford of GlobalVisas.com said: “We do come across some unusual reasons for visa applications in our office! The majority of the time they’re quite straightforward but now and again we see some applications surface that really take us by surprise.
“Some of them are more surprising than others. Particularly those that refer to illegal activities. We’d advise all visa applicants to look at the laws of the countries they’re trying to move to at the very least before applying. But for those with unusual, yet legal, reasons we commend them for their ingenious career choices. Despite their perceived relative obscurity in this country, an alpaca shearer is actually a comparatively common visa application when compared to gondoliers or dog food tasters!”
