There was also an email from Yummy Jobs to say that the visa petition was coming that day. They give you a big help sheet with what to do/who to phone for an apppointment/helpful answers for things on the forms that you otherwise wouldn't know the answer to.
At this point you haven't actually received your visa - its basically a big list of names of everyone leaving between certain dates called the I-797 (in my case from the 7th April to 25th May) from all over the world that Disney have stated they are supporting the application for a visa. The next step was to phone the embassy for an appointment. This is an expensive call (I called from work!) expect to pay £1.23 per minute from a BT landline and around £1.75 per minute from a mobile for a good ten minutes on the phone. You need to have everything ready beside you to give them the information they will need which was..... name, DOB, passport number and issue date, your I-797 for the receipt number and the date it's valid from, email address... and a debit or credit card. They don't take visa electron or switch. The fee is $190 and you type your c/c number into the phone when asked and then your security code. Once that has all been processed they will ask you which date you want (they had availability every day when I called) and if you would rather have an 8am or 8:30am appointment, which are they only appointment times for that type of visa. I chose to go a week later as I wanted it all over with ASAP! This phonecall isn't scary at all, the girl I spoke to on the phone was really nice. They also ask you a couple of typical security questions, like if you have been convicted of a crime, etc but its not too demanding!
After this I booked my transport to London and accomodation for the Tuesday night (today) as there's no way I could travel down and make it to the embassy for 8am! (my appointment is at 8:30am but it is highly recommended that you get there half an hour early as there will be a queue). I could have saved money and got the megabus down to London and back for like £24 but I am already EXHAUSTED from working a 14 hour shift on Sunday and a 9 hour shift last night so I booked the train which gets me there in 4 and a half hours instead of around 11hours! The embassy is in Grosvenor Square so all the hotels in that immediate area are pretty damn pricey! Even pulling back from the area the hotels are still expensive and the cheaper ones didn't seem that great (heating is not a facility that should be listed as your only facility! It should be expected!) So I got a hotel near to Euston Station which is where my train gets into and found a variety of reasonably priced independent hotels that were far nicer than others I had seen. For all of this I used Booking.com as I could search hotels by map and by typing in the area and it worked out best for me.
Then I had to get to filling out the visa application stuff.... eeek! Again have everything to hand! Have the help sheet either printed out beside you or open on your computer. Besides normal stuff like your name, DOB, address you will need a wholllleeee bunch of other information. Every persons application is different but you will need your passport, parents names and DOB (if known), your job history, the dates or at least approximate dates of your previous 5 visits to the USA and or/any previous visa for the US that you have had. When you start the form it will give you a code - WRITE IT DOWN! This code will let you save your form and then come back to it later. The system has a history of crashing and times out after 20 minutes so click the "save" button after every page! Once you have done all the filling in, you will then answer another lot of security questions with yes/no answers and then you need to upload a suitable photo. There is lots of help sheets about filling this in but you HAVE to at least try to upload a photo, it will tell you if its not suitable and tell you to bring suitable photos to the embassy appointment.
To do my photo I took a picture of a spare passport sized photo that I have, emailed it to myself and then saved to my desktop. I then cropped it and resized it and luckily it worked! I will still be taking photos with me though as they can still reject your photo at the embassy and will send you off to get new ones there and then! So for the sake of £5, take an extra set!
Follow Yummy Jobs advice on what you need to take with you to the appointment... I have all my forms printed off and in a folder with my passport to take with me today :) Now I need to run so I can quickly pack and then head off to get the train! Only 28 days to go!!!!!!!!
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