This is the 21st century, which means that every adventure starts with paperwork. And if you are moving to Spain there will be a lot of paperwork.
An American can travel in Spain for 90 days, no questions asked. But if you want to stay longer, you need a visa. To get that visa you must gather a host of documents including (for example) marriage certificate, various financial records, and proof of Spanish health insurance. These records must be obtained, certified, translated, and presented in person to the Spanish consulate.
I had imagined walking into an elegant embassy building. We would be greeted by a pretty Spanish receptionist with intelligent brown eyes. She would smile at our punctuality and intercom a diplomat. The diplomat, a handsome and well-dressed person, would stride into the waiting area and extend her hand as we stood. We would exchange pleasantries before she guided us to her tastefully-appointed wood-paneled office. Lighting would be somewhat dim. A small light would shine down on an original oil painting, probably depicting a bullfight, hanging behind the diplomat’s high-back office chair. She would reach across her ornate mahogany desk to take our documents, complimenting me on the fine way I had them organized in matching three-ring binders. “Perfecto,” she would say, “muy bien.”
The reality was a bit different.
The Los Angeles consulate is on the eighth floor of a very large prison-gray Class B office building. The door to the consulate is about halfway down a long narrow hallway. You open the door and see what looks very much like a DMV in a bad part of town. The wall opposite the doorway, from waist-level up, is bullet-proof glass. Look to your left and see a row of lightweight red plastic chairs. You know from prior instruction that you are to sit in one of these chairs and wait to be called.
Consulate employees, all of them middle-aged women, sit behind the glass. Three are busy helping other people. Another three are not busy but we know from overhead signs that their function is to help people with passports, not visas. They ignore us and we ignore them.
We read somewhere that we should dress nicely. I wear a sharp business suit with a colorful Salvador Dali tie. Denise is in her best dress. All other visa applicants are wearing tee shirts or tank tops, flip flops, and blue jeans or shorts that reveal a lot of leg. Denise and I chat, each a little nervous, each fearing that we have arrived on the wrong day, or at the wrong time, or that our appointment was cancelled and we did not get word.
Forty-five minutes past our appointed hour one of the ladies calls our name. We get up from our plastic chairs and approach the lady. She motions to chairs, identical to the ones we just vacated. We sit. The lady asks for a document. I slide it under the glass. She asks for another document and she gets that also. The process continues.
The lady seems nice but a little impatient when I fail to understand her heavily accented English. I think she is bored and regrets whatever long-ago decisions brought her to this moment. She is, however, very efficient. The process takes about 15 minutes.
Spain gave us our visa, but with the standard requirement that we would have to perform additional administrative functions once we land in that country. That’s when things got really weird.