I haven't had to apply for a visa to visit a country since I was 18 years old and returning to Australia for a summer visit. And because there's no embassy in Moncks Corner, South Carolina - I know you're shocked - I just had to mail off the application.
But in these intervening years and especially since Jimmy's worked for the State Department, we've never had to worry about that pesky visa process. There have been "people" who take care of that stuff.
Until we decided to return to Brazil for Mac's Easter vacation.
I did the paperwork online but knew that we had to present in person within 30 days of the online application. This has all got to be timed right because you have to have enough time to get the visa processed and put in your passport pre-vacation (within that 30-day window), but you have to show proof of a round-trip ticket and we don't tend to do things too far in advance around here.
So we got the airline tickets, we did the online application and Jimmy and I went to the embassy this morning to present. Now I have never had to "present" for a visa but I'm married to somebody who has worked as a consular officer and we have lots of friends who are still on the opposite side of the visa window. And I know those people can be mean to the visa applicant.
To make matters worse, we all had our visa photos taken yesterday and we look like a family of deranged thugs who escaped from the insane asylum moments before.
The directions on the Brazilian embassy's website say you need a neutral facial expression on the visa picture, so I told Mac we couldn't smile when the lady took our pictures. Neutral facial expression for the Storys equals a mug shot for Nick Nolte. We really look like we've been on the lam and just got caught. (Sadly, the visa officer didn't bat an eyelash at the offensive pictures. We just got a gluestick to the back of the head and got stuck right on the page. I guess that means that unfortunately we look in real life as bad as our visa mug shots.) Then came the moment of pain. We had to pay the visa application fee. Now the fees are reciprocal, so what we (as the US) charge a Brazilian visa applicant is what Brazil charges American visa applicants.
And let me tell you it's a lot of money.
(I would like to apologize now for everybody who came to see us in Brazil and had to pay that fee. I hope your trip was worth it. If it wasn't, I'm very sorry but you can come see us in Colombia without a visa. We will try to make it up to you if you visit us here. And I would also like to apologize now to every Brazilian who just wanted to go see Mickey Mouse and had to pay that fee. I hope you got an inside tour of Cinderella's castle.)
I'm really hoping we get a 5-year (or lifetime if such a thing exists) visa after that hefty payment. We're just going to have to plan semi-annual trips to Brazil to make that visa fee worth it! (And for the record, you pay this fee whether you get a visa or not. In other words, you pay for the pleasure of the visa officer's company. That's how I see it anyway, and no, I don't need to hear from any of you current or former consular officers out there who will give me a line-by-line breakdown of everything that money pays for.)
Now to pay this fee, you have to leave the embassy (which is in a big office building), walk around the corner to the Bank of Colombia and pay the money directly into the embassy's bank account. You can't pay with credit card - we learned that the hard way - so because we hadn't drained our bank account prior to getting in the bank line, we had to leave the bank, go to an ATM, do multiple withdrawals, go back into the bank, wait in the line again, and pay. It would have been easier and maybe less painful for Jimmy to carve out my kidney and hand it over to the consular officer. After all that, the bank teller stamped the slip "paid" which we took back to the consular officer at the embassy.
Now here's the anticlimactic part. We handed over the paid slip and the officer gave us a little card that I have to bring back next week to pick up our passports with new visas.
No questions about our intentions in Brazil, about whether we had money to support our vacation there, about where we were going or staying. NOTHING. I was very disappointed. (For the record, I expected this to be very short and painless because we'd had almost 4 years' worth of diplomatic visas in the past, but still.... It was my one and only visa interview in nearly 40 years and not even one question? I'm starting to think all those visa stories I've heard over the last 13 years are a bunch of baloney!)
So the long and short of it is that I'll return next Wednesday to get our passports and we're set! Insane asylum-worthy, thug photos and all!!
For jumping the last hurdle to our long-awaited Sao Paulo vacation, I am truly thankful!
