Summer seems to have struck Buenos Aires early and suddenly this year, and the city has wasted no time in filling itself with short skirts, tank tops and mosquitoes, and a refrain of “que calor de loco!”
Already?!?
This might not provoke much surprise from those of you living in the Northern hemisphere who are already getting tired of the exhausting summer humidity. But I’ve been back in town just under two weeks and I still remember acutely the feeling of stepping off the plane that had just gotten in from Miami. Something like “why the hell did I come back?” Two days later, the weather turned absolutely gorgeous (and considerably less humid than Miami had been!) and my friends and neighbors begin to complain about the heat, causing me to wonder if Porteños might actually give Clevelanders competition in their ability to complain about everything…
You might well be wondering now “what were you doing in Miami?” Or if you’ve been reading faithfully—“how the hell did you get there from Posadas? And did you ever make it to Paraguay? (If not you’re just wondering what the hell I’m talking about…)
As I’m typing this I have a several page word document, open in another window, of the things I’ve been writing about my travels through Argentina and Paraguay, which transpired almost a month ago. I have two journals back in my bedroom which have bits and pieces of things which I wrote on the way; all things that I really wanted people besides me to read at some point.
The reasons they are still there are at once complicated and simple, a blog is something you don’t have to do, and, at least in my case, is mostly for your own vanity (though you hope other people might get something out of it). The more time passes from the events of the story the less relevant they seem. This is also one of the qualities of the blog as a writing medium. As Andrew Sullivan suggests in an essay for his blog The Daily Dish, the blog is a medium of the now. Because it is possible to write about events that happened literally five minutes ago, the very immediacy of it, the unedited quality—with most blog sites now you view the finished product in the same HTML-free script that the author used to write it—means that it is a medium constantly in the present tense. This makes it difficult to go back and add things once they’ve passed, puts pressure against any tendency the author might have towards a kind of narration, or some kind of gradual development of ideas.
Yet this problem can actually be a very good thing. For those of us who write or essays or journals or novels in our spare time, the tendency for our work to sit in dusty old notebooks and make it no farther than that is extremely high. This isn’t only because we’re terrible writers, or because the market is tiny and no one will publish us. It’s also because it’s very difficult to generate a push for the writing to move beyond that point, for ideas to be developed, for drafts to be edited. After the initial inspiration and the scribbling in journals the initial impetus to publish often fades. Tomorrow becomes eternity.
By contrast a blog has a certain kind of deadline. It still isn’t an explicit one—at least for most of us there’s no one breathing down our necks making sure it gets published now—and yet there is an implicit deadline inherent in the fact that you have to believe that if you don’t write it—and publish it—right away it will not happen. Other things will come up, more interesting ideas, other things to write about. Digging into the archives of writing topics will seem absurd.
Besides the euphoria of this August Indian summer, getting back to Buenos Aires has meant getting myself into the rhythms of a new semester, new classes and gearing up for writing my senior thesis, which I’ll be spending the semester on. Understanding well the natural propensities of college students, my study abroad program in conjunction with the Fundación Simón Rodriguez (the foundation which organizes the research option for IFSA) designs the research option as a series of meetings with an advisor, where every week you’re required to turn in a part of the project by email the day before the meeting. It’s a good system and not a bad way for me to organize the blog as well.
If only the rest of life were like that. I’m a senior now, with the knowledge that when I return to Case it’ll be to finish up my last semester of college. The question of “now what?” is not the one that worries me so much—I’m going to look for a job in at whatever they’ll pay me to do. I’ve lowered my expectations about what that will be. No, I’m more worried about when I’m going to get around to doing what it is that I want to do. I’m worried about the absence of those week deadlines.
Of course there is a deadline. But if the best deadlines are the ones that come often and predictably, then death is a pretty poor one, as it is neither. For most of your life it’s far away and you don’t see it, and then when it comes you often didn’t see it coming. “If I’d known I was going to die at fifty I would have done things differently!” But you didn’t and now you’ve got the rest of eternity to be frustrated about it.
Even what it is we wanted to do can be hard to figure out? While you’re studying you have a vague sense that there’s something you want to do after you graduate but you’re not sure what. You get sidetracked (but from what?), you fall in love, get married and take a job that has nothing to do with your masters degree, so you can pay the bills while your spouse gets his PhD. And then twenty years later you’re a widow with grown children and trying to remember what it was you wanted to do when you grew up.
Or maybe you always felt a sort of vague unease with the system but you never really knew what else there was out there. You drop out of the University where you were studying French or physics (and what the hell were you supposed to do with that, no one ever let you in on that). You start working because it’s something you’ve got to do and you dream about doing great things, though it’s not quite clear what really. In the meantime you learn a lot about the world, making lots of friends and open yourself up to life’s possibilities. But you still don’t have your own family and you live with your aunt and you’re starting to get old enough so that you have to lie about your age to get dates.
I know these people and you probably do too though their stories may be a little different. Modernity has confused the hell out of people of my age, from age twenty to thirty; our great-grandparents all had families of their own right now. In Buenos Aires there’s a generation of kids that grew up in the new democracy and who were told they were supposed to take advantage of opportunities to live the lives they love, which their parents couldn’t have dreamed of. Then the crash of 2001 comes along, so these kids, now in their thirties, all live with their parents because there just isn’t money right now.
A decade younger than these guys, I wonder what I have to look forward to back home in America...or wherever else. It seems pretty daunting at this juncture to look ahead at ten or twenty years, but then it doesn’t really make any sense to worry about it. Probably makes better sense to concern myself with this week. And maybe finish up that word document in the other window for next week....
Blogger allows you to put whatever date you want on your posts, so when I do get around to posting the story about my travels I’ll be sure to mark the date as earlier than this one (not a complete lie since some of it was already written at that point!)
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Saturday, August 22, 2009
No Room at the Paraguay Inn
After the visa debacle we finally made it to Encarnación, the Paraguayan town across the river which I´d been staring at since I got to Posadas nearly a week earlier. Getting a bus from there to the capital of Asuncion was truly a whirlwind experience. Within about five minutes we were off the bus, offered tickets to the capital from a bus-ticket vendor about five meters away, had our Argentine Pesos exchanged for Paraguayan Guaraníes, bought tickets and climbed on a bus where we were promptly sold chipas and fresh fruit by two different street vendors. Capitalism is a beautiful thing.
Six hours later we woke up in Asunción where it became clear very quickly that Paraguay is not a common place for backpack-toting foreigners to visit. After calling Emily from a telecabina and checking my email for other news (and to try to locate our hotel) we hopped on a bus for the center of town to find our hotel and sleep more comfortable than a bus.
This search turned out to be more difficult than we thought, and has us thinking that we might have settled for a bus! Having been spoiled by the availability of cheap hostels in other places we’d showed up in Asuncion without a hotel reservation, but rather the names of about four hotels that were located close to one another downtown. None of them had availability. A few were nice enough to call nearby hotels to see if they had any availability. After two hours of playing hopscotch from one hotel to another—and feeling comically like Mary and Joseph—we were start to seriously contemplate the possibility that were going to have to sleep outside (and it is not warm in July).
It was at about this time that we encountered a pair of policemen whom we asked for directions to a hotel that might be available. This was an odd and sometimes comical experience for several reasons. The Paraguayan police look a lot more like the military who just twenty years ago ran the Paraguayan state than their black clad, pistol-wielding counterparts in Argentina. But looks notwithstanding they were very helpful. Perhaps more out of boredom and curiosity than out of a sense of civic duty the two walked with us from hotel to hotel while they asked if they had any room, explaining to us in their heavy Paraguayan accents (which we had difficulty understanding and which we made fun of brutally when they were no longer around) that this area of the city (just blocks away from the national palace) is a dicey one where there are robberies and people frequently break windows. Or something like that—like I said their accents were challenging. But the sight of young women in short skirts standing alone on these same street corners, gave us all the evidence we needed to feel fortunate that we were so accompanied.
Apart from their accents, they also asked us questions that were both somewhat comical in the time, but have also made me think. They were interested in what we were doing in Paraguay and in Latin America in general. They seemed not to understand why we were studying in Latin America or why we spoke Spanish. They asked us if we spoke Spanish amongst ourselves (we do, which admittedly is a bit strange) and with other people, which was pretty self-evident.
But the questions made me reflect on the truly strange nature of our enterprise here. The fact is that for the vast majority of the people on this earth, the number one goal in life is progress in material well-being—for yourself, for your family. An absolutely daunting fraction of humanity’s six billion souls are concerned just with having something to eat tomorrow and even those of us who eat well are concerned with making more money, or keeping our jobs, whether this year’s crop goes bad or the factory closes.
Studying abroad in Latin America doesn’t really make sense in this context. People risk their lives and fortunes just to make it to the United States from places like Cuba or Mexico, or as far as China or Paraguay. And here we are, wandering through poorly lit streets in a country we barely know, for reasons that really have nothing to do with advancing our well-being. From this context it makes my travels seem very much like a bourgeois luxury, it makes me feel class in a way I never have before. For us this is relatively normal—I have many friends who have studied abroad, they leave for a semester and come back reporting how wonderful it is, wonder being sufficient justification for doing it.
As an Argentine friend of mine recently told me “you can go to work in the silver mines of Potosí if you want, to try to understand how the miners live, but even then you won’t understand a crucial aspect of their reality—that unlike you there’s no way out for them. They have no hope for a different life.”
Most creatures on this earth have to struggle daily for survival, but we live off of the world’s surplus, somewhere along the line our parents or our parent’s parents fought so that we wouldn’t have to. In exchange they gave us a path, something to do, with parameters to follow, whether explicit or not; do activities, play sports, graduate from high school, go to college, get a job, and support a family.
About a year ago a good friend of mine singlehandedly changed my conception of this path. We met during her only semester at Case Western Reserve University, the place where I’d applied to early at seventeen and where I left behind any thoughts of attending a different school. I was attracted by her attachment to the city that I loved, even though it was based on reasons that I couldn’t have understood at the time. And unlike me she was never really thrilled about the idea of going to college. She applied practically at the last minute and almost didn’t go at all. She transferred to Case for personal reasons and for similar reasons she left after the semester was over to follow other pursuits she’d postponed for years.
Our society would seem to judge harshly her attitudes towards school and her decision not to continue with it. But it’s hard to dispute that there is something odd about the extent to which the American liberal education system is divorced from reality, in which you read about struggles instead of living them and have imaginary deadlines based on the necessities of the academic system and after which you graduate with a degree that has little to do with the careers pursued by such graduates.
I have inherited from my mother a great skepticism for the notion of going off to “find yourself” (particularly on someone else’s bill, as so often happens). And yet I now have equal skepticism of affixing oneself to the preordained ladder of success, the one that dictates a parent be ashamed if his child decides to become an auto-mechanic instead of going to college and that leaves so many of my generation floundering around for four years trying to decide what to do with themselves.
When confronted with what are admittedly peculiarly bourgeois dilemmas about choosing what to do with your life (what a blessing that you have a choice!) the present can be a powerful antidote. Existential angst is easier to set aside when you’re concerned with finding a place to sleep. It is good then, that I have the opportunity to reflect about all this now, and that I was successful months ago in Paraguay, in finding a hotel room and collapsing into sleep a half hour later, leaving such philosophizing for another day.
Six hours later we woke up in Asunción where it became clear very quickly that Paraguay is not a common place for backpack-toting foreigners to visit. After calling Emily from a telecabina and checking my email for other news (and to try to locate our hotel) we hopped on a bus for the center of town to find our hotel and sleep more comfortable than a bus.
This search turned out to be more difficult than we thought, and has us thinking that we might have settled for a bus! Having been spoiled by the availability of cheap hostels in other places we’d showed up in Asuncion without a hotel reservation, but rather the names of about four hotels that were located close to one another downtown. None of them had availability. A few were nice enough to call nearby hotels to see if they had any availability. After two hours of playing hopscotch from one hotel to another—and feeling comically like Mary and Joseph—we were start to seriously contemplate the possibility that were going to have to sleep outside (and it is not warm in July).
It was at about this time that we encountered a pair of policemen whom we asked for directions to a hotel that might be available. This was an odd and sometimes comical experience for several reasons. The Paraguayan police look a lot more like the military who just twenty years ago ran the Paraguayan state than their black clad, pistol-wielding counterparts in Argentina. But looks notwithstanding they were very helpful. Perhaps more out of boredom and curiosity than out of a sense of civic duty the two walked with us from hotel to hotel while they asked if they had any room, explaining to us in their heavy Paraguayan accents (which we had difficulty understanding and which we made fun of brutally when they were no longer around) that this area of the city (just blocks away from the national palace) is a dicey one where there are robberies and people frequently break windows. Or something like that—like I said their accents were challenging. But the sight of young women in short skirts standing alone on these same street corners, gave us all the evidence we needed to feel fortunate that we were so accompanied.
Apart from their accents, they also asked us questions that were both somewhat comical in the time, but have also made me think. They were interested in what we were doing in Paraguay and in Latin America in general. They seemed not to understand why we were studying in Latin America or why we spoke Spanish. They asked us if we spoke Spanish amongst ourselves (we do, which admittedly is a bit strange) and with other people, which was pretty self-evident.
But the questions made me reflect on the truly strange nature of our enterprise here. The fact is that for the vast majority of the people on this earth, the number one goal in life is progress in material well-being—for yourself, for your family. An absolutely daunting fraction of humanity’s six billion souls are concerned just with having something to eat tomorrow and even those of us who eat well are concerned with making more money, or keeping our jobs, whether this year’s crop goes bad or the factory closes.
Studying abroad in Latin America doesn’t really make sense in this context. People risk their lives and fortunes just to make it to the United States from places like Cuba or Mexico, or as far as China or Paraguay. And here we are, wandering through poorly lit streets in a country we barely know, for reasons that really have nothing to do with advancing our well-being. From this context it makes my travels seem very much like a bourgeois luxury, it makes me feel class in a way I never have before. For us this is relatively normal—I have many friends who have studied abroad, they leave for a semester and come back reporting how wonderful it is, wonder being sufficient justification for doing it.
As an Argentine friend of mine recently told me “you can go to work in the silver mines of Potosí if you want, to try to understand how the miners live, but even then you won’t understand a crucial aspect of their reality—that unlike you there’s no way out for them. They have no hope for a different life.”
Most creatures on this earth have to struggle daily for survival, but we live off of the world’s surplus, somewhere along the line our parents or our parent’s parents fought so that we wouldn’t have to. In exchange they gave us a path, something to do, with parameters to follow, whether explicit or not; do activities, play sports, graduate from high school, go to college, get a job, and support a family.
About a year ago a good friend of mine singlehandedly changed my conception of this path. We met during her only semester at Case Western Reserve University, the place where I’d applied to early at seventeen and where I left behind any thoughts of attending a different school. I was attracted by her attachment to the city that I loved, even though it was based on reasons that I couldn’t have understood at the time. And unlike me she was never really thrilled about the idea of going to college. She applied practically at the last minute and almost didn’t go at all. She transferred to Case for personal reasons and for similar reasons she left after the semester was over to follow other pursuits she’d postponed for years.
Our society would seem to judge harshly her attitudes towards school and her decision not to continue with it. But it’s hard to dispute that there is something odd about the extent to which the American liberal education system is divorced from reality, in which you read about struggles instead of living them and have imaginary deadlines based on the necessities of the academic system and after which you graduate with a degree that has little to do with the careers pursued by such graduates.
I have inherited from my mother a great skepticism for the notion of going off to “find yourself” (particularly on someone else’s bill, as so often happens). And yet I now have equal skepticism of affixing oneself to the preordained ladder of success, the one that dictates a parent be ashamed if his child decides to become an auto-mechanic instead of going to college and that leaves so many of my generation floundering around for four years trying to decide what to do with themselves.
When confronted with what are admittedly peculiarly bourgeois dilemmas about choosing what to do with your life (what a blessing that you have a choice!) the present can be a powerful antidote. Existential angst is easier to set aside when you’re concerned with finding a place to sleep. It is good then, that I have the opportunity to reflect about all this now, and that I was successful months ago in Paraguay, in finding a hotel room and collapsing into sleep a half hour later, leaving such philosophizing for another day.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Rivers, Ruins and Scavenger Hunts
There is something satisfying in traveling with a mission and it was with that of crossing the river Parana that I showed up in the bus station at Posadas. This satisfaction was replaced pretty quickly by that now familiar feeling of "now what" that comes from traeling alone without much planning. I just had an address and a bus number (the latter turned out to be wrong) and an empty stomach as I stepped out into the cold and rainy street . After a half an hour of waiting and crossing the street to get the right bus, I was on my way to the hostel, chewing on the baked good I bought from a street vendor (called a chipa) rendered barely palatable by the rain.
But I instantly fell in love with the hostel, which overlooked the river Paraná and had a view of the country on the other side. This is fortunate as I would spend another five days staring across that river in the bureaucratic labyrinth that followed…
My first order of business was finding the consulate which took me a while for reasons that should be abundantly clear to anyone familiar with my navigating skills. The difficulty in finding the place was compounded by the fact that the consulate is a tiny little building which you’d never peg as a government building from the way it looked from the outside. When I finally got there (I believe it was a Friday) I discovered that the place wasn’t going to be open until Monday.
Still, the wandering around provided me with a great excuse to explore and the consulate not being open gave me a reason to stay in Posadas for longer than I would have otherwise. I got a call from my friend Sam, another student from the study abroad program who was in Puerto Iguazu at the time and was also planning on going to Paraguay, albeit on the way to Salta (one of Argentina’s Northern provinces on the other side of Paraguay). I told him the hostel where I was staying and how to get there and we arranged to meet up in a few days when he got there. This a good display of the amount of planning that had gone into my traveling—the two of us were going to all the same places and yet we’d managed to construct a travel plan wherein we only saw each other for about a week out of our nearly a month of traveling.
The day after Sam showed up we went to the consulate to complete a process we figured would just be a matter of hours. We were sadly mistaken. Here are the things we wound up needing:
Three (3) passport-style photos
Three copies of different parts of our passports
45 American Dollars (which were more difficult to obtain than you might think)
When we showed up at the office it was already siesta (the afternoon nap not observed in Buenos Aires, but in most of the rest of the country). But at 4 o’clock, when siesta was over the office was going to be closed. This meant a catch-22, we could get the required items during the day, but we would have to come in the next day in order to actually get the visa processed. We resolved that we would come in early the next day to do just that, which would leave us with plenty of time, to make it to Asunción (which was only 5 hours away).
So the next day we got up bright and early and headed down to the consulate, letting them process our visas while we went to the bank to exchange for American dollars (how ironic). After a long wait in line we came back with our dollars only to have them tell us that the dollars weren’t good enough—the consulate required only dollars in pristine physical condition, and one of our five dollar bills had a small tear in the upper left corner. Seriously?
And then came a hurdle that was more interesting still: apparently my tourist visa had expired the day before. I was an illegal alien!
Just to clarify a little bit what this all means, I’ll have to explain something of the visa process. For those of you who have been reading this a while, you may recall the long arduous process of getting my visa. In reality, it was not a visa I was applying for, but rather a student residency, one that lets me live in the country, study and even have a state ID, but not work (in theory at least). I had however not brought these residency papers with me, getting around just with my passport.
This is usually fine—you don’t need a student resident to get around the country (although it helps for getting student discounts, I’ve got a college ID from UCA that sometimes works too). For a while anyway, 90 days to be exact, you can get around with a tourist visa. Obviously I’d been in Argentina for longer than 90 days, but the visa renews every time you reenter the country. In my case (Sam’s too but he brought his residency papers) that latest entry to the country had happened exactly 91 days prior when I reentered Argentina from Chile.
So I was in a pickle. The nice folks at the consulate explained to me that I would need to pay a fine of 250 pesos (almost a hundred dollars) on top of what I was already paying for the visa before I could get the visa processed. And not to them because I owed money not to Paraguay but to the Republic of Argentina. This implied getting down to the bridge between the two countries and paying the fine to the Argentine customs officer, at which point I would cross back over and pick up my visa with my newly stamped passport.
At this point I started to get cold feet. It was a lot of money—my travel budget as a whole was just under 500 dollars. Meanwhile the consulate insisted that I would have to pay the fine at some point anyway, as I was in the country illegal and risked harsher penalties if I was caught in transit on my way back home. I wasn’t sure how likely this was, but I decided to do it anyway, and resigned myself to losing an absolutely absurd amount of money.
We took a taxi to the bridge and the driver waited for us while I sidled up to the customs officer and explained that I was here to pay a fine (probably one of the stranger pronouncements he’s heard on the fine). As I told him what I was paying the fine for, he kindly explained to me that it would be cheaper to just apply for a residency, which I could do in Buenos Aires. I explained to him that it would indeed be cheaper if I could magically stop by Buenos Aires because there I had my residency papers in my apartment, with which I wouldn’t need to pay a fine. “Oh” he says and then takes my passport and disappears into the office.
Meanwhile Sam and I stand outside looking at each other wondering if this is a good sign or not. Then I see the guy pull out a stamp and start to get hopeful. A few minutes later he emerges from the office with a piece of paper with my picture on it and lots of helpful information such as where I am from and where I live in Buenos Aires. A copy of my residency!
Of course it hadn’t occurred to us that the Argentine government might have a digitized system with all this information in it. Certainly the consulate couldn’t have done this for us, they’re Paraguayan and so wouldn’t have access to Argentine legal documents. And so, feeling somewhat foolish but extremely relieved we shuttled back to the consulate got our visas stamped into our passports and picked up a bus to Paraguay.
All in all, the bureaucratic nightmare was really sort of its own adventure and Sam and I managed to get a few laughs out of it after our thousands of gripes. It was also an excuse to stay a few more days in what was a really fantastic (if cold) hostel and meet lots of cool people, which it now occurs to me I have written next to nothing about. And although there might not have been anything particularly noteworthy about those experiences (nothing compares to the excitement of international bureaucracy!) the days I spent in Posadas, a city which isn’t known for its touristic attraction, were some of the happiest of my trip.
But I instantly fell in love with the hostel, which overlooked the river Paraná and had a view of the country on the other side. This is fortunate as I would spend another five days staring across that river in the bureaucratic labyrinth that followed…
My first order of business was finding the consulate which took me a while for reasons that should be abundantly clear to anyone familiar with my navigating skills. The difficulty in finding the place was compounded by the fact that the consulate is a tiny little building which you’d never peg as a government building from the way it looked from the outside. When I finally got there (I believe it was a Friday) I discovered that the place wasn’t going to be open until Monday.
Still, the wandering around provided me with a great excuse to explore and the consulate not being open gave me a reason to stay in Posadas for longer than I would have otherwise. I got a call from my friend Sam, another student from the study abroad program who was in Puerto Iguazu at the time and was also planning on going to Paraguay, albeit on the way to Salta (one of Argentina’s Northern provinces on the other side of Paraguay). I told him the hostel where I was staying and how to get there and we arranged to meet up in a few days when he got there. This a good display of the amount of planning that had gone into my traveling—the two of us were going to all the same places and yet we’d managed to construct a travel plan wherein we only saw each other for about a week out of our nearly a month of traveling.
The day after Sam showed up we went to the consulate to complete a process we figured would just be a matter of hours. We were sadly mistaken. Here are the things we wound up needing:
Three (3) passport-style photos
Three copies of different parts of our passports
45 American Dollars (which were more difficult to obtain than you might think)
When we showed up at the office it was already siesta (the afternoon nap not observed in Buenos Aires, but in most of the rest of the country). But at 4 o’clock, when siesta was over the office was going to be closed. This meant a catch-22, we could get the required items during the day, but we would have to come in the next day in order to actually get the visa processed. We resolved that we would come in early the next day to do just that, which would leave us with plenty of time, to make it to Asunción (which was only 5 hours away).
So the next day we got up bright and early and headed down to the consulate, letting them process our visas while we went to the bank to exchange for American dollars (how ironic). After a long wait in line we came back with our dollars only to have them tell us that the dollars weren’t good enough—the consulate required only dollars in pristine physical condition, and one of our five dollar bills had a small tear in the upper left corner. Seriously?
And then came a hurdle that was more interesting still: apparently my tourist visa had expired the day before. I was an illegal alien!
Just to clarify a little bit what this all means, I’ll have to explain something of the visa process. For those of you who have been reading this a while, you may recall the long arduous process of getting my visa. In reality, it was not a visa I was applying for, but rather a student residency, one that lets me live in the country, study and even have a state ID, but not work (in theory at least). I had however not brought these residency papers with me, getting around just with my passport.
This is usually fine—you don’t need a student resident to get around the country (although it helps for getting student discounts, I’ve got a college ID from UCA that sometimes works too). For a while anyway, 90 days to be exact, you can get around with a tourist visa. Obviously I’d been in Argentina for longer than 90 days, but the visa renews every time you reenter the country. In my case (Sam’s too but he brought his residency papers) that latest entry to the country had happened exactly 91 days prior when I reentered Argentina from Chile.
So I was in a pickle. The nice folks at the consulate explained to me that I would need to pay a fine of 250 pesos (almost a hundred dollars) on top of what I was already paying for the visa before I could get the visa processed. And not to them because I owed money not to Paraguay but to the Republic of Argentina. This implied getting down to the bridge between the two countries and paying the fine to the Argentine customs officer, at which point I would cross back over and pick up my visa with my newly stamped passport.
At this point I started to get cold feet. It was a lot of money—my travel budget as a whole was just under 500 dollars. Meanwhile the consulate insisted that I would have to pay the fine at some point anyway, as I was in the country illegal and risked harsher penalties if I was caught in transit on my way back home. I wasn’t sure how likely this was, but I decided to do it anyway, and resigned myself to losing an absolutely absurd amount of money.
We took a taxi to the bridge and the driver waited for us while I sidled up to the customs officer and explained that I was here to pay a fine (probably one of the stranger pronouncements he’s heard on the fine). As I told him what I was paying the fine for, he kindly explained to me that it would be cheaper to just apply for a residency, which I could do in Buenos Aires. I explained to him that it would indeed be cheaper if I could magically stop by Buenos Aires because there I had my residency papers in my apartment, with which I wouldn’t need to pay a fine. “Oh” he says and then takes my passport and disappears into the office.
Meanwhile Sam and I stand outside looking at each other wondering if this is a good sign or not. Then I see the guy pull out a stamp and start to get hopeful. A few minutes later he emerges from the office with a piece of paper with my picture on it and lots of helpful information such as where I am from and where I live in Buenos Aires. A copy of my residency!
Of course it hadn’t occurred to us that the Argentine government might have a digitized system with all this information in it. Certainly the consulate couldn’t have done this for us, they’re Paraguayan and so wouldn’t have access to Argentine legal documents. And so, feeling somewhat foolish but extremely relieved we shuttled back to the consulate got our visas stamped into our passports and picked up a bus to Paraguay.
All in all, the bureaucratic nightmare was really sort of its own adventure and Sam and I managed to get a few laughs out of it after our thousands of gripes. It was also an excuse to stay a few more days in what was a really fantastic (if cold) hostel and meet lots of cool people, which it now occurs to me I have written next to nothing about. And although there might not have been anything particularly noteworthy about those experiences (nothing compares to the excitement of international bureaucracy!) the days I spent in Posadas, a city which isn’t known for its touristic attraction, were some of the happiest of my trip.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)