Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about
PASSPORTS
1. In 1783, Benjamin Franklin ordered the first US passports to be printed.
In 2019, there were about 147 million valid passports in the hands of Americans. This means that only about half of the U.S.citizens have a passport. This shows that although Americans generally love travelling, most of them travel inside their own country and have never been abroad.
Did you know, that for travels to Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands or the Northern Mariana Islands, Americans do not need to have a passport?
2. Passport Facts for Kids: Did you know that there are more than 9,000 passport offices in the USA! Many passport service centres are actually located in post offices and some even in public libraries.
U.S. passports can be applied for in person and renewal passports can be ordered via mail.
3. In the UK, every 2.5 seconds one passport is printed! This allows for 5 million passports to be printed each year in the UK. And every year, more than 25,000 UK passports are stolen or lost!
4. More than 40 million travel documents and passports have been lost or stolen since 2002.
If you loose your passport or it is stolen, you always must report it to your nearest police station and to your consulate when travelling abroad.
Once a passport has been reported the passport number is invalid for travel and can not be used for international travel anymore. The missing travel documents are registered on an Interpol database.
At border posts at airports as well as at ports and road and train border posts, immigrations officers check passports against this Interpol registry to find criminals who are travelling with these passports. Also many fake passports are found doing the routine checks.
5. Passport Facts for Kids: Most of the world's passports have a red cover! There are different shades of red, but still red colour is more common for passports than is blue, green or black.
Interestingly, the UK passport is nicknamed the 'red book', while the U.S. passport is often referred to as the 'blue book'.
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