After a crazy night out on Saturday night in BA that ended at 7am (went to a dance club called Bahrein that was really fun/smoky/lite-brite(y)/etc), Brianna and I sleepily headed to the airport on Sunday for our flight to Brazil. At check-in, we found out that you need a VISA to get into Brazil*.
MCA: “Ok, great here is my Visa Card.”
Check-in lady: “Um, not that kind of visa”
MCA: “Oh, yeah, we don’t need a visa. We’re not going to work in Brazil, we’re just going for a week”
CIL: “Yeah, you still need a visa.”
MCA: “You need a visa just to get into the country?!?!”
CIL: “Yes”
MCA: (muttered under breath) “$@(%^&)(#////1”
Yeah. Welcome to Suckville, population: you.
Grabbed a cab back to our hotel. Was one of those cab rides where you see your whole life flash in front of you….you know the type…. where the cab driver is driving as fast as his held-together-by-duck-tape car will go, all the while turning around to talk to you the whole time trying to tell you in broken English how he used to play baseball and all you can think about is, "how do I say shut the f*ck up and look at the road" in Spanish?
After a chat with the front desk of our hotel, I thought getting a visa would be as easy as going down to the Brazilian consulate the next morning, filling out the paperwork, getting our visas and getting on a plane that evening*. Yeah. Um, NO. Here are the things you need to get a visa to get into Brazil:
- A roundtrip ticket or proof of inward and outward travel (printed off)
- Contact information in Brazil & in the country you are departing from (in our case, Argentina)
- Passport, valid for six months at least (obviously)
- Passport size photo (whatever that means)
- Copy of your credit card and a copy of your most 3! most recent bank statements (HUH?!)
- 14 toothpicks
- A case of pudding
- Michael McDonald Greatest Hits CD
- A ‘clean’ metal spatula
If you have all this, they take your passport and tell you it will take 3-10 days to process. Needless to say, we didn’t have 3-5 days, as we had planned to be in Peru in 7 days! SO, back to the drawing board. We spent nearly all day Monday changing reservations and trying to figure out what we were going to do for the week.
Dejected that we were not going to get to go to Rio, we thought we would try to ease the pain by hitting the beaches in Uruguay (Punta del Este) or in Argentina (Mar del Plata). But tons of locals we talked to said that the beaches were pretty weak (Mar del Plata sounded like Daytona Beach). So, we decided to get a really phat apartment and stay for the week in the Soho district in Buenos Aires. Our place is super modern, has a pool and it is good to be back in a cool ‘hood (Hotel PanAmericano was great but the location was next to the really touristy stuff). Only drawback is that we didn't every get the internet (as promised) in the apartment. Hence why this post took forever to get out. Keep on keepin’ on peeps.
* Apparently OUR government requires Brazilians entering the US to have a visa and this was Brazils retort. SO, we can’t even really be mad at the Brazillian government. I’m going to naively blame he whole thing on W.
** I also thought that Brianna and I would also be able to develop a cure for cancer that evening in our free time.
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