UK Travel Guide: How to Apply for a UK Visa

If you don’t travel, even if you win life, you still lose. Traveling is a very meaningful thing. When you are tired of traveling in China, you can go abroad. There will always be something that makes you feel a little excited, so pack your bags and set off.

UK Visa

You need to fill out a form online first for a UK visa. After filling out the form, you will need very few materials. The visa is relatively easy to obtain. Here are the materials I prepared:

1. Original passport

2. Application form

Fill it out online. I filled in my itinerary and accommodation on the form, of course, I made them up. The hotel information was also the address and name found on Booking.

3. Information about your visit

For this, I prepared a flight booking, the kind that Ctrip issues without payment.

4. Current employment

Proof of employment, I found a template on QiongYou.

5. Money

I submitted three bank statements for the past six months. One is for my basic salary, with a monthly income of over 1,000 yuan, and no balance. One is for my allowance card, with a monthly income of over 2,000 yuan, and no balance. One is for my bonus card, with an average monthly income of over 5,000 yuan, and a balance of over 30,000 yuan.

6. Home address

I guess this is to prove that your domestic residential address is real and valid. I submitted a credit card statement with my home address on it, translated it, and submitted it.

7. Evidence of assets

Proof of assets. I didn’t submit any because I don’t own a house or car.

8. Accommodation in the UK

I randomly booked two cancellable Booking hotel orders based on my itinerary above.

9. Additional information

Evidence of family members remaining in your home country whilst your
travel

I checked online and some people said to submit a declaration written by a family member saying that they will wait for me to return home, etc. I thought it was a bit strange so I didn’t submit it.

The above 1-9 are the documents required by the official website after you fill out the application form. Except for the passport, application form, proof of employment, and money, everything else is not required. You can consider them yourselves. The visa fee plus service fee is a total of 1,335 yuan. My heart is bleeding. The visa is valid for two years and multiple entries. I don’t know if I will have another chance to go there in two years.

French Visa

The requirements for a French visa are significantly more than those for a UK visa. For example, accommodation reservation, itinerary, insurance, etc., which are not required for the UK, are mandatory for France. Therefore, you can buy refundable insurance on Taobao, book free cancellation hotels on Booking, and issue a non-payment flight order on Ctrip, which are all necessary homework.

For bank statements, I submitted three cards again, with one of them having a balance of about 70,000 yuan. Let me elaborate on what I think you should pay attention to.

1. Itinerary

These are the cover, calendar, and content of my submitted itinerary.

Cover

Page 2

Content

The more detailed the itinerary, the better. Because I applied for a long time and need to travel to multiple countries, I need to make the itinerary as detailed as possible, proving that my first entry is in France and I will stay the longest in France. In this way, France should not be able to refuse. Then I also emphasized that I will leave the Schengen area once, and I need a multiple entry visa. I also made a cover and a calendar table, and printed them in color, which looks pretty formal. The content of the itinerary is like this.

2. Explanatory letter

Because the route is long and the time is long. I wrote an explanatory letter. A beautiful girl in the group helped me enrich the clumsy vocabulary and modify the absurd grammar. It shouldn’t have any negative impact. If you’re like me and need to travel for a long time to multiple countries, you should write an explanatory letter to state your purpose. It’s safer.

3. Insurance

The materials required for a Schengen visa must include insurance. The medical coverage should be over 30,000 euros, which is about 300,000 yuan. Actually, even if you don’t need it for visa application, you should buy insurance for your own safety and peace of mind. After all, the medical expenses in Europe…hehe…

I had two successful claims with Allianz before. So now I always buy Allianz insurance when I travel. This time I bought “Happy Insurance Schengen Visa Insurance-Global Coverage”, 31-60 days practical model for 420 yuan. If you are rejected, you will be compensated 500 yuan.

The most important protection provided by insurance is probably medical coverage. The limit is 300,000 yuan, which meets the requirements of the Schengen visa. And you must buy insurance that states “medical expenses (including outpatient and inpatient)” in the policy. If it’s not written, it should only cover medical expenses for traffic accidents and other accidents, not regular medical expenses. If you have insurance and a theft occurs, you must report it to the police immediately and keep a record so that you can be compensated later (I asked the insurance company).

France is much more efficient than the UK. The French visa fee is over 630 yuan, and the EMS fee is 75 yuan, for a total of about 700 yuan. So the two visa fees are 2,000 yuan. Taiwanese, Japanese, and Korean friends I met along the way were visa-free, so I can’t compare with them.

Photography and Image Editing

About photography equipment:

iPhone 6s plus

5D mark 3 24-70 f2.8

gopro black hero 4

Tripod + remote control

The camera card has Wi-Fi so you can transfer directly to your phone. You can buy it on Taobao. In the middle of the trip, my card had a problem and I wanted to buy a new one. I searched all over Europe, including some big cities, but I couldn’t find this kind of card. It’s really crazy.

For image editing, I usually edit the photos I post on WeChat Moments with my phone. The software includes some common ones, and also ENLIGHT, which costs 25 yuan.

There is a software called “Pola Editing”. It’s very good. I remember occasionally posting some photos in the WeChat travel group. There was always a girl who jumped out and criticized me, saying that they weren’t as beautiful as I made them out to be, and that she had been there before. Then she posted her own photos. Sister, you took those photos with your 4S, they are not composed, they are not well-lit. I used a full-frame camera. Every photo was carefully considered. I went through mountains and rivers to find a beautiful spot. I was frozen into a fool many times to capture the sunrise and sunset. So what if I edit them? Someone in the group said that image editing is the most basic respect for the audience. I rarely add filters. Some of them are nostalgic filters. I won’t tell you about the configuration. Haha.

I don’t like the LOMO style, which is popular in Japan. It gets boring after seeing too much of it. Most of my photos are adjusted parameters, lowered exposure, increased saturation, decreased highlights, increased shadows. I was originally an outsider, but after editing so much, I have some experience. Unfortunately, I still don’t know how to use PHOTO
SHOP.

Don’t doubt it, most (99%) of my photos are selfies. The method is to use a tripod to set up a DSLR and control the shutter with a remote control. More selfie techniques will be mentioned in the article. Because of too many selfies, I’m completely dissatisfied with photos taken by others for me. So when I organize them, I find that selfies outnumber landscape photos.

SIM Card

The SIM card is very important. There are two types of Europe N-country cards on Taobao, including Switzerland and excluding Switzerland. I bought two cards that exclude Switzerland, 750 MB (67 yuan) each, and one card that includes Switzerland, 750 MB (98 yuan). As a result, 750 MB was just enough for a week, so I had to contact the seller on Taobao to top up my data. 500 MB for 100 yuan, and I topped up three times. I regret not buying a 3 GB data card directly.

You can buy local SIM cards in Morocco. There are stalls selling them as soon as you get off the plane. Don’t worry at all.

Overall, the internet speed in Europe and Morocco is not good. Don’t expect to be able to watch videos. You can still browse Weibo and post on WeChat Moments.

Transportation

I recommend a very useful app for checking and buying tickets: GoEuro. It’s a comprehensive search platform that includes buses, trains, and planes. You can pay directly with your Visa card, and the price is the same. I bought a bus ticket from Madrid to Barcelona, and the payment failed on the ALSA app in Spain. But it worked immediately on GoEuro.

Another app is Skyscanner. Then you can look at the cheapest and most suitable bus or airline and download its official app from the app store.

Therefore, I won’t go into details about each app. For example, Air Arabia, which flies to Morocco, is available on the app store! There are also apps for airlines like Wizz, Transavia, etc., whose Chinese names I don’t know. The premise is that you need a Visa card.

Regarding budget airlines, except for the flight from London to Edinburgh, all other airlines I took required you to pay for luggage. However, I carried my belongings in a backpack and a carry-on suitcase throughout the whole trip. At first, I was worried, so I wore all my clothes, put miscellaneous items in my pockets, and hung my camera around my neck. I only packed a carry-on suitcase. Later on, I boldly carried a backpack and a carry-on suitcase, and I was able to board all flights smoothly. I took Ryanair the most. They really didn’t check strictly. Even if I was a few kilograms over, the ground staff didn’t say anything to me. It’s really as conscientious as AirAsia, a must-have for poor people going abroad!

Because most of the transportation was booked online, I have records of the prices.

The total transportation cost is over 12,000 yuan. You still need to save money. For example, I slept on the bus for three nights, which also saved me three nights of accommodation expenses.

Expenses

The total cost of the entire trip is about 11,000 euros. I bought clothes (only wore what I was wearing when I left, and bought everything else on the spot) and bought some cosmetics for my mother, for a total of over 2,000 euros. The expenses for the trip itself were only 9,000 euros. The food and accommodation expenses are not clear, and it’s too troublesome to keep track every day. I just kept track of the cash I withdrew, and added the credit card statement when I came back, and I could calculate the total amount.

Regarding bank cards, a Bank of China card and a Visa card are enough. Bank of China worked perfectly everywhere except in Morocco (I didn’t try it, but I heard that UnionPay doesn’t work well there). The Visa card is used for accommodation, dining, ticket purchase, etc. where you can swipe. Especially in McDonald’s, you can use the Visa card to order at the self-service machines, which is fast and avoids the need to communicate with the staff in English.

Oh, right. From January 7, 2017, the Bank of China card has canceled the first free transaction every day and changed it to the first free transaction every month. It seems like this card is about to lose its status. There are still some other banks that charge transaction fees. You can search on Baidu. I switched to a Chang’an Bank Changchang card, but it’s only available in Shaanxi Province.