Getting a visa is a real bitch. In Argentina, the process included a thirteen-hour vigil in a sweltering warehouse-turned-public-office in a ghetto of Buenos Aires. To come to Spain, I made two trips to Chicago (a three-hour drive from my hometown) and spent weeks waiting for various papers with various official stamps from Washington, Madrid, Mérida and, inexplicably, The Hague. Upon arrival in Spain, I paid four highly stressful visits to the federal police station in Almendralejo (Zafra being too small to merit national police), where I spent hours arguing with one of the most arrogant, mean-spirited people I've ever encountered before finally leaving (half in tears) with my residence card.
So, when I read the website of the Thai embassy in Madrid and learned of the apparently simple and straightforward process, I should have been more suspicious. They wanted merely a package, delivered by a private messenger company, containing our passports, resumés, the paperwork from our Thai school, and a police background check. Since neither of us are registered with the Spanish police, we ordered this last item from a online company in the US and sent everything off with the required 55 euros each (because apparently in Spain it's cool to mail cash).
After a few days of radio silence, I called the embassy. No one there spoke English and the Spanish of the receptionist was broken and heavily accented in a way with which I was completely unfamiliar, so the conversation was...tricky. The background checks are no good, she flatly informed me. You've clearly just gotten these off the internet. We need something official, something with a stamp and besides, we can't read English. Get an official translation. That should also have a stamp. (Our boss in Thailand had warned us of this Thai affinity for stamps but I still had trouble suppressing my laughter at her insistence on this point). There was no swaying her, and my phone credit was spent, so I gave up.
Peter, our boss in Thailand, advised us to show up at the embassy to smile, plead, and if it came to it, panic and cry. So we printed off more internet background checks (the tab for the endeavour is over 200 bucks at this point) and caught the immensely unpleasant midnight bus to Madrid. After killing the early morning hours in a cafè, we rang the doorbell at the embassy.
The consular officer, a gorgeous Thai woman not much older than me, turned out to be tough and sarcastic and visibly furious with her lot--we'd had several phone conversations at this point and she was entirely fed up with me. 'This is from the internet again!' she exclaimed, her hands actually shaking in her rapidly-escalating irritation. 'I'll have to talk to someone else. Come back at eleven.' She flashed us an forced smile (or maybe she was just baring her teeth) and turned to the next customer.
From a café down the street, we sent a slightly desperate e-mail to Peter, who we calculated would be in the middle of his workday and probably too busy to help. We knew we needed help from someone who spoke Thai, and thought maybe if someone made a phone call to halfway around the world...right this second, preferably...a bit of a Hail Mary. The e-mail remained unanswered and as we walked back to the embassy in the pouring rain, I tried to whip up some tears.
As we waited in the lobby, my Spanish cell phone rang and Peter, who had been trying to call the embassy since receiving my e-mail, told me that his Thai wife would call me in a moment, and that I was to give the phone to the woman. She called, and I passed it to the baffled and aggravated receptionist. We were clearly making no friends here, but we had confused them into complacence and harassed them into a state of such profound annoyance that they wanted only to be rid of us. Send us this one more paper, my pretty amiga told us, and you can have the visas. Triumphantly, we left the office in search of wifi to thank Peter and his wife for their incredible helpfulness.
The visas arrived in the mail on Monday; everything is all stamped and official. Only twelve days left in Zafra.
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