Who needs an appointment? - Brian
As we set out on our plan to live in Spain we started with the simple things. Where? When? How?
Where and when was easy – Granada and in the fall when I finished a project at work I’d been working on for four years.
How has turned out to require a lot more effort. I’ll start with the Spanish embassy.
To live in Spain you need permission from the Spanish government – a visa. For Shannon and I that means the Spanish Embassy in San Francisco is the all-powerful force that can make our dream of living in Granada come true, and it turns out this means there is exactly 1 person who controls our fate from our point of view.
The embassy doesn’t employ many people, as such they don’t accept many applications for visa’s. Travelling to San Francisco is fun, so we tried to figure out when to go. I started by talking to the embassy itself – how does the application process work? Easy – first come first serve, the embassy opens at 9am each day, if you line up by 8am you’ll probably be all set. Excellent! So we purchase 2 tickets to San Francisco and plan a wonderful weekend with friends too.
Because I’m skeptical this could really be so easy, I decided to check in with the embassy about 2 weeks before our trip. The rules changed (exactly 3 days after I was told the “old rules” it turns out) – no more first come first serve, you must make an appointment. Sounds ok to me, sign me up. Of course there are no appointments for the time we’ll be in San Francisco. No amount of explaining how I was told one thing, purchased tickets I can’t change, etc etc was able to get us an appointment. If anything I’ll say the embassy people are good at politely saying the same thing over and over no matter what you say to them.
The next 2 weeks of my life went roughly like this – spend 15 minutes doing whatever I should be doing (work, having dinner, driving…) and then spend 5 minutes desperately checking the appointment website for a cancellation or open slot. 6 hours before our flight left I was able to get an appointment, we were overjoyed! Of course there are 2 of us needing to apply…..
My recommendation is not positive »