What Colour of Tape Did You Say? (Part I)

If there is one thing which everyone wants to ask me since I came to South America to learn Spanish it is whether getting the red tape sorted out is as hard as people say. My answer would have to be that it is about a hundred times harder than I had expected, and here are a few examples.

Where’s My Visa?

My wife is from here and when we went to live in the UK for a year or so we sent off the visa application which we found on the internet and got the visa back in a couple of weeks. It was expensive but undoubtedly a slick operation. Here I have now made about 300 visits to the migration office and the whole thing still isn’t over yet. After my Spanish lessons were done I would go online each day to try and investigate the matter. There is very little official information on the internet here and even when I printed off the application form which I found on the official migración site the staff in the office didn’t have a clue what it was. They even made me go to a local lawyer to get a stamped memo done instead.