Every day they open a pouch of preprocessed manila envelopes that arrives, each filled with the paperwork requesting visas submitted by (for the purposes of my dream, at least) hopeful Americans. João now has the chore of opening those pouches and sorting the envelopes. In practice the paperwork is simply piled in an available cube, although care is usually taken to keep the ones marked as being family units or married together, and to put the newer paperwork at the back of the cube. The paperwork is picked up by workers as they have time and availability. Some take only one (or, one family unit) at a time; others take several because they don’t like to leave their desk to walk to the cube.

Since the paperwork has already been vetted by VFS, (we’ve shared thoughts on this part of the process already), most of the requests are in good order, making their task one of verification and double-checking. SEF workers are proud of their country and fiercely protective about who they allow to reside here. Discovering an error is a cause for much discussion and story-telling of previously made errors and their discovery. Horror stories are rare, but loom large in everyone’s memory. Translations of the personal statements often produce unintentionally hilarious assertions. Some dreams shared in those statements are met with cynical head-shaking. All are read with care and attention; every detail verified to the best of the caseworkers’ ability.

Most requests are approved within the 60 to 90 day window (un)officially set by SEF administrators, although holiday times, strikes, politics, the weather, and personal issues contract and expand that window greatly. Requests from individuals for updated time frames are sent one of three politely worded templates, chosen at random and translated into the inquiring language by a program written a few years ago by the child of a former supervisor. (The employee in question has since retired and no one has checked the translation since it was installed. Some errors in syntax and word choice remain unverified; frequently provoking a sense of unreality in receivers.)

When approved, the paperwork is placed in a secure location where a colleague collects it, makes sure all check listed items are verified, and then hands it off, back to our friend João, for finalization. This is the tedious part of the process, involving the printing and gluing of the actual visa into a page of the passport (presuming it was included) after the scheduling of the all-important residency appointment. This appointment gives SEF a last chance to verify the fitness of the person applying for residency. Choosing an appointment time and place has been made exceptionally easy. João opens a scheduling window and is told the next available time and location approximately 90 days after the scheduled date of arrival. The chosen time/ place is added to the visa , which is then printed and added to the passport. Sometimes a new intern prints the visa before making the appointment, which provokes great consternation and shaking of heads. The appointment is still scheduled, as SEF workers know that the information as to how to find one’s appointment is easily available on their website.

Finally João places the completed paperwork into its own mailer, affixes its designated FedEx mailing label (printed by VFS and included in the original packet), and sets it aside for mailing. Granted, I know absolutely none of this to be true, but it the best theory my dreams have come up with that fit the facts as we know them. John and I are about a month out from our SEF appointments and so I’m understandably concerned with it.

Our first few posts here at The Ramble have been recounting the story of how Lisa and I came to our decision to move to Portugal, and we’ll get back to that in a little bit. However, in going back and telling those stories we’ve been neglecting to share the present with you, and recently the present has been plenty interesting. (If, that is, you find any of this interesting. YMMV.) We kicked around several pithy titles for this post, mostly along the lines of “the last 48 hours have been one heluva day.” Allow me to explain.

In the middle of all of our plans for getting ready for our transition, we scheduled (wisely, we told ourselves) a week of forced relaxation; a chance to recharge our batteries, to “sharpen our saws” as Stephen Covey would say. Lisa went to Maui with her sister, and John went to South Carolina to visit his parents. We will set aside any thoughts on the fairness or lack thereof regarding these arrangements and move on to the relevant bit. This past Sunday we each flew to San Francisco where we reunited with each other (and also with our luggage; a story for another time). The purpose for this diversion from home was a critically important step in the process of our move – the formal handing over of our applications and supporting documents for our D7 visas. Our what now?

As has been discussed in other posts, most countries have a variety of visas (the legal instruments that say a person from country A is allowed to be in country B) to cover the multitude of reasons that foreigners might have for wanting to visit their country. What Lisa and I are shooting for is a temporary residency visa in the country of Portugal. HOWEVER, the formal meeting at which you request this visa must occur in Portugal. To facilitate foreigners (e.g. us) being able to come to Portugal they are issued an interim visa – it says “these people aren’t just tourists, and they can stay as long as it takes for the residency meeting to happen.” This is a “D7” visa in Portugal’s system. By all accounts, the meeting that occurs in Portugal is far less rigorous than the D7 application process; if you get approved for your D7 the next step is (almost) a formality. We’ll talk about what goes into a D7 visa application in detail in future posts in this series; today, we’re just sharing the adventure surrounding the application meeting.

Our appointments were set for 9:30 AM on Monday, September 20th, at the VFS Global office in San Francisco. VFS Global has carved out an interesting little niche for itself in the immigration ecosystem. To simplify the lives of embassy employees throughout the world, VFS will “vet” the applications of prospective immigrants. They don’t make value judgements as to whether a visa should be approved. What they do is they make sure that the applicant has appropriately provided documents to satisfy each of the parts of the application. For example, some (but not all) of our requirements were to fill out an official application form, provide proof of sufficient funds to cover our expenses, and show that we have arranged housing for one year. So, our VFS agent made sure that our application was filled out properly (the right places were initialed, the right places were signed etc…), they looked over our documentation showing sufficient funds, and they looked over the lease for our apartment and the proof of wire transfers showing we had paid the deposit and 1st two months’ rent. (Y’all have an apartment?? We do! We’ll tell you all about that later.) There’s much more to it, but you get the idea. Our VFS agent doesn’t actually say “this looks like enough money”, they just make sure that we’ve shown something and that it looks to be in the ballpark of what the Portuguese embassy will be looking for.

So! Monday morning we get up bright and early (ok, 8 AM. You try dealing with a couple suffering from 3-4 hours of jetlag from two different directions trying to sleep at the same time :p), make ourselves presentable, and head out. We booked a room at the Hyatt, 3 blocks from the VFS office. We stroll down, find the place, make our way up to the 5th floor, and present documentation of our appointments – an initial step that they take very seriously. We’re a few minutes early, so we sit ourselves down to wait. The waiting room is like an upscale DMV – it’s still lit with flourescents, and the carpet is Industrial Chic, but it’s at least air conditioned, clean, and there’s only 8 or so people waiting so it doesn’t feel too crowded.

9:30 comes and goes, but we’re pretty sure we’ve figured out which of 7 cubbies is dealing with Portugal and they’re working with someone, so no biggie. 9:45, no problem. 10 AM, that person finishes up and the VFS employee calls out “next person for Norway?” Oopsie. Ok, we wait. 10:30, we’ve slipped from excitement, to anxiety, and are now drifting into boredom. Plus, just a hint of “is something wrong?” 10:45 or so, we finally decide to ask. I slip out to the security person staffing the front and ask her if something’s up with Portugal. She says we should be helped soon, but she’ll go and ask. A few minutes later, another staffer calls out some other country (I forget, but for example “next person for France?”) at which point Lisa very calmly stands up and says “is anybody doing Portugal?” Around 11, a very nice man named Duane (Dwayne? Didn’t see a nametag) kneels next to us and explains that the woman who was working Portugal today had an emergency and is out. Combined with some other staffing issue that was aluded to vaguely, this left nobody that could handle Portugal. Could we please call you tomorrow, he asks, to confirm an appointment with you for that day?

I mean… what was our option. “No, screw you?” Of course we’d do that, we had no choice. Except, we do have some other important things going on, like beginning the estate sale-like liquidation of our household on Wednesday (more on that process later, as well.) But, no, technically Tuesday is not a crisis. We spend some time arranging our flights and an extra night in the hotel, then spend an afternoon with Lisa’s mother who lives just outside of San Francisco. Fine. Dandy. We get back to the hotel and bunk down, ready to start fresh on Tuesday.

We’re up at 8 on Tuesday, not wanting to miss the call. We decide that if we don’t hear anything by 10 or so we’ll just go down and start making very polite nuisances of ourselves. We scrub up, scrounge breakfast from a bodega-esque joint, and settle down to wait. It’s just after 10 AM when we decide enough is enough, and we begin to dress for the day and to head out. As we are doing so, we get the call from Duane(!). Come on down, he says, there’s one appointment being handled right then, then we’d be made a priority, he says. Lisa and I have read a lot about this process, one appointment should be 20-30 minutes, tops, so we got moving. (I’m new at this; how’s my foreshadowing doing so far?)

We make it back into their offices and have a seat in the same chairs as yesterday. We draw a bead on the person who is being helped with his visa, and we immediately know that there’s going to be at least a litle trouble. The man at the counter has got a 500-page three ring binder in his lap. We soon grok that he is there with his wife/partner, who also demonstrates the ownership of a similar binder. We also overhear that they are applying for thier two children as well. Now, if you haven’t gleaned all the “oh fuck” in the above, let me illuminate you. There are 11 steps to the D7 checklist. Several of them are satisfied with 1-2 pages. NONE of them require more than 20 (that’s a stretch, honestly, but how you demonstrate your finances can vary wildly I suppose.) This family is WILDLY over-prepared for this process. And here’s the thing. When you’ve brought THAT much extra stuff, it’s clear (to us at least) that, in fact, you don’t which of those things you actually need. We even heard the guy mutter a few times “I’ve got this organized in just my special way, hang on, I’m sure I’ve got it somewhere.” This is, as we say in our household, no bueno.

We’re not com-PLETE-ly eavesdropping, so we aren’t sure what step they’ve made it to, but around noon or so Duane sneaks up to us again (oh boy…) and tells us that he’s been told it’s likely to be another hour or so, and would we like to go get lunch, or perhaps we would like to wait in the British waiting room? We don’t need lunch, but the “British waiting room” was certainly intriguing. Lisa also sussed out that they had COVID protocols and we were probably taking up seats that they needed. So, to the “British Waiting Room” (“BWR” hereafter) we went!

Y’all. Take a look at that photo. This place really cracked us up. Seriously, the Brits our so prissy that they even want prospective immigrants to be given dignified digs. They even had little bottles of water and grocery store biscotti under glass. Meager fare, perhaps, but the default waiting room offers diddly squat. Plus, the chairs are much nicer than the Ye Olde Conference Room Chairs in the other room. Seriously, we giggled. (I posted this same photo to the main facebook group we follow for these things, and many people were tickled as well.) Anyway, I got us a couple bottles of water and for the next couple hours we sat comfortably waiting for…

… why are you looking at me like that? Oh, the “next couple of hours?” Yeah sure, it absolutely took that long. Longer, actually. Our hotel checkout time was 2 PM, so during that time I slipped out, finished packing our bags and took them down to the lobby where they graciously checked them for us, then made it back to the BWR to settle back in with the missus, where we happily passed another hour before finally being brought in to the regular waiting room because “we’d be seen any minute now”. Which, by the by, I knew was incorrect when they said it because I’d heard the VFS staffer telling Duane that she had missed her lunch two hours ago and her blood sugar was getting dangerously low. I don’t begrudge her lunch at all, but that’s another half an hour.

In the end, our actual appointment was anti-climactic. We had done our research thoroughly and were almost impeccably prepared. One or two little niggles (our checks were made out to the wrong office, easily fixed) and we were passed with flying colors. Seriously, we really were done in ~30 minutes or so. By 4:20 or so we were back at our hotel, summoning a Lyft, and by 5 PM we were at the airport. We had, with some foresight, rebooked ourselves to the latest flight available, 9 PM, and so we had a relatively leisurely meal in the D gates, chatted, and boarded our flight. I’m typing this somewhere between San Francisco and Seattle from an altitude of 12,000 ft or so. It has been, as we said at the top, a heck of a 48 hours we went through today.