Brazil: The Paperwork

It seems I'm off to Brazil. My boss asked me to go a few weeks ago, but I didn't really take him seriously until the team meeting on Monday when he asked how my visa was coming along. Whoops.

So I got online and began poking around the Brazilian embassy website to see what I needed to do. Naturally, the webpage comes in two flavors: French and Portuguese. Finally I found the list of requirements, and learned that as an American citizen, I need a travel visa. The German guy I'm going with does not.

Normally, we have a travel company that arranges visas. However, I learned a lesson from my boss a few weeks ago: because he is Spanish living in France, he had to jump through a number of extra hoops to get a travel visa for India. I was strongly recommended to skip the travel company and pursue the visa on my own. Super.

And one of the requirements for getting a visa is a photocopy of my carte de sejour, or residence permit. Sure, no problem, except when it occurred to me that my carte de sejour had expired. And suddenly the words of the guy behind the window at the prefecture were ringing in my ears: "Here is a piece of paper proving that you have requested a new card, but you cannot leave the country". Of course I had ignored him and gone to Spain the following week, but that's because of the freedom of the European Union. Going to South America is another ball game.

More specifically, getting back from South America.

After some fruitless phone calls (if the Brazilian Embassy doesn't answer questions by phone, why do they have a phone number?), I sent an e-mail to the Brazilian consulate. Within an hour I had a reply: no problem, I can get a visa with my expired carte as long as I had the extension request.

Great! So the Brazilians will let me in. But will the French let me come back? And this is what has been hassling me ever since Monday afternoon.

At first I thought I'd just try to get into France as a tourist, but I have a temporary work visa plastered in my passport and I am a terrible, terrible liar. And surely an American coming to France from Brazil won't be something the French passport control will find commonplace. I can't expect them to give my passport the cursory glance and toss it back at me. I imagined getting thrown into a French holding cell for lying to the government. Or worse, being shipped back to Brazil.

So I enlisted my colleagues to call the prefecture for me. They took turns. After a few days of being hung up on, transferred, and berated, Caroline finally got through today. They told her that all I needed was a récepissé, which is a temporary carte de sejour, which they would issue immediately for me if I showed up at the prefecture with proof of my trip.

I had already been gathering the other documents I needed for my visa, so the proof wouldn't be hard to come by. However, I need copies of my plane tickets. And because it's a trans-Atlantic trip, I'm not allowed to get tickets without a few upper upper management signatures. And guess where the upper upper management is this week: Detroit.

This is how I found myself calling my old office this afternoon (at least I could speak the language), begging so-and-so's assistant to track down the executive director of engineering, interrupt whatever he's doing, and get him to sign a travel request and a letter I invented "from" him, stating my reasons for travel to Brazil. I hope he doesn't mind if I give the Brazilians his phone number.

What's funny is that I never talk to these management guys when they're in the same building as I am. In fact, I avoid them (they like to test my French). But today I was calling their cell phones, hassling their assistants, and sending them text messages.

Let's hope they forget the whole incident before they get back to the office tomorrow. By then I should be standing in a line at the prefecture anyway.