Natalie Probst

Review of United States Department of St...

After going through the awful experience of having...

After going through the awful experience of having a wallet (with greencard, license, euros, debit/credits cards inside) get stolen on our first day in Madrid the Embassy made a stressful situation even worse.

We were not even allowed to enter the embassy without finding a way to pay the $575 fee for letters of transportation and printing out the forms on our own to fill out prior to entry.

This required a very stressful experience in a local Starbucks in order to get WiFi to pay the fee followed by begging in broken Spanish to the employees at a local bank to print out the forms for us after sending them via email.

Afterwards, the men guarding the doors to the US Embassy do not even speak English! Therefore, it became a whole new process to explain that we had paid the fee and had the proper forms for entry. One would think that the minimum requirements to work at a US Embassy would be the ability to speak English, but apparently that is not the case.

This Embassy made a truly horrendous experience even worse.