On Global Travel

It is always exciting when you have a new trip abroad planned and you are busy working out the logistics. If you are fortunate enough to be travelling to a country that requires you obtain a visa in advance of entry, then the trip just starts a whole lot earlier as far as I am concerned. The Cuban embassy in London is a tiny, dirty office room (or at least, it was about three years ago when I went there), filled with smiling people who do their best to assist you with the absolutely useless machinery with which they have been provided. I seem to remember a guy 'popping next door' to use a photocopier at one point. And more recently, my chaotic trip to the Indian Embassy in London gave me another 'visa acquirement experience'. Despite arriving only an hour after the doors opened for Trading, the queues snaked throughout the building and out onto the streets. There wasn't any attempt at organisation, and it took four hours of sitting in a large, airless room crammed with people in brightly coloured clothes to get the relevant bits of paper in my passport. The people working there came across as intelligent and organised in their own right, merely battling against the poor equipment and technology they'd been provided with to run the service.
My point is: the embassy office is a part of the country to which you are headed. It offers you a 'sneak preview' as it were to a country. To eradicate all border controls or complex visa issues would be stripping a country of part of it's identity. The surly guards in all American airports - surely they are trained not to smile? - have asked me some of the most ridiculous questions related to my travels. ('You don't have enough luggage for three months, as a woman you would have more than that one bag for three months' being a particularly perceptive comment at Houston airport once). I've obviously never had to go through the application process myself for a visa to the UK, but I have an understanding of what it is like for Peruvians to get a visa. Close to impossible, is the best summary, and with a constant battle against paperwork and complete idiots in the offices. If that doesn't encapsulate a system that operates throughout the UK, I don't know what does.
Essentially, the embassy of a country is regarded as both a sneak preview and a trial. If you can't cope with the office, chances are you're pretty much doomed when you get to the country. I view it as a wonderful addition to my travel plans when I get to head towards a new embassy, and if you are travelling for the only right purpose - to discover and better understand a new culture - you will see it that way too. Furthermore, it is the height of insensitivity for a wealthy (in relative terms) traveller to another country to complain about the 'difficulties' encountered while trying to enter that place. Anyone blessed purely because of their location of birth with a European passport should be damn thankful and not complain about any hoops they are required to jump through in order to travel - at least the hoops are at acceptable, manageable heights. A Peruvian may as well try and get to the moon as America.
(In addition, to the person who this is obviously directed at: don't try and justify arguments when you have no data to back them up. A genuine 'Traveller' relishes the embassy prospect, rather than fights against it. I know. I've met enough).