Today something big happened, something that has been the focus of worry and stress and annoyance for months; something that at several low moments we thought was never going to pass. As of today, The Mister and I are now the proud owners of two shiny new very official resident ID cards in Spain.
You'd think it wouldn't be that big of a deal to make sure our visas got renewed. After all, we work directly for the government, all of our papers are in order, we filed them well before the deadline, and, as I am sure you are thinking, what else is there to say? But this is Spain, and when it comes to shenanigans like paperwork, nothing is that easy.
Really, we had to use all our wits and cunning to get our papers processed, including but not limited to: talking our way in without an appointment at the foreigner's office, speaking "tourist Spanish" to avoid the obligatory lecture from the security guard, and providing all manner of extra copies for everything, including our fingerprint cards after the guy got so talkative that he failed to notice that he had entirely fingerprinted The Mister on my card.
We waited in line for hours, we traipsed all over town, compulsively checked our online status update for months, and in the end you know what happened? The lady at the foreigner's office approved us with a smug smile, saying, oh sorry about that, your paperwork was upstairs on someone's desk for a few months, and nobody had touched it yet.
We were like, "!!!!!!!!" and "#%@#&!" and "!!!!!!!" again.
But now we have our official cards in hand and we can breathe easy. We won this particular battle, but make no mistake, the red tape in Spain is winning the war.
Winning it handily, I must say.
Not even a contest.
Congrats!
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