Small towns and expensive passport photographs.

It's times like this that I do not like small towns...

I sent away for my E2 Korean work visa today. I had to send my passport, my letter of visa issuance, download, fill and send out a visa application from the Korean consulate website, a $65 money order and a passport sized photo. That is where it gets annoying to live in a small town. There's really only a couple of places to get a passport photo done here; at Wal-Mart and in the local camera shop. Wal-Mart charges around $12 for a couple of photos. You always get them in pairs. There is no choice. As the Polish guy that I worked with last summer in Kelowna would say: "Moose eye! (mosie=have to)". If you ask for more than one set of two photos, you still get charged the same. No discount for buying in bulk here. The local camera store is the same, except that they charge around $15 for a pair.

What a rip off!!!

Being the supporter of small businesses that I am (sometimes), I paid the extra $3 at the local shop. I still feel ripped off, but at least I feel a little less bad about it. What really sucks is that this is the third time that I've had to get passport-style photos done in the last couple of months, due to my having to send so many documents around in order to get a work visa. I've spend over $40 on six stupid little photographs of myself looking expressionless. Had I lived somewhere with an actual shopping mall, I probably could gotten the rest of my photos (I needed three out of the final four) from a instant photo machine for $5. A Zellers, with a handful of shops beside it and a gumball machine, all under one roof, in Kenora (over an hour drive away from me) doesn't count as a shopping mall.

Ok, I guess any building with a few stores in it; all accessible under one roof, does count as a shopping mall..., but that doesn't mean that it's a good shopping mall. I used to live in Edmonton. I've heard that there are around 18 different malls in that city. In the five years that I'd lived there, I had been to most of them. Maybe four or five of them were good malls (unless you count West Edmonton Mall as ten malls, then Edmonton has 14 or 15 good malls). So what is a good mall? It needs at least three things: a food court (preferably with sushi), a record store, and a damned instant photo machine.