Visa Interview Post!
WHEW OK FRIENDS BUCKLE UP!
Portugal outsources their visa application process to a company called VFS Global, and despite living in a world class city like Chicago, they do not have an office here. Illinois applicants need to travel to their Washington DC office! It is very challenging (and confusing?!) to get an appointment time and the entire process was one of the reasons we decided to hire someone to help us.
Shane and I both needed separate appointments, even though I’m the main applicant and Shane is going to be my dependent? And there aren’t clear rules about this, you just have to hope that they’ll take Shane as a walk in at the same time my appointment was? This feels… insane?! Especially when you’re traveling to a different state for this?
So back in May I got an appointment for Monday, July 28th at 9:20am. Shane got an appointment for August 8th at 9:40am just because of rules? We made no travel plans for this date though because apparently it just exists to remove appointment times available for real applicants?
Continuing from my newsletter? Start reading here!
The lead up to getting everything we needed for the appointment, even though I started the process four months ago, was CRAZY! Our lease documents were tied up until literally Thursday evening. Everyone at the Portuguese bank was non responsive and I couldn’t get an updated bank statement showing a funded account until Wednesday!
If I have one piece of advice to anyone thinking about going through this process it would be to not do it in the summer. Everyone in Europe is on vacation! Like, you hear that all the time, but truly. The past month has been a series of waiting for someone to come back from vacation and then someone else is on vacation.
BUT! By Thursday afternoon everything was printed and collected and we felt relatively ready to go to this appointment.
I was teaching a class on Sunday from 3-4:30pm, so our flight was scheduled to leave O’hare at 7:30pm CT and land in DC by like 10:30pm. After our appointment we were going to take the train up to Baltimore for a little vacation before flying out of Baltimore and back to Chicago on Tuesday morning. Fun, right?!
I started noticing our flight get delayed around 1pm. Every 30 mins or so it would get delayed further and further until right around 2:40pm it got cancelled. CUE FREAKING OUT!
American could only get us in Monday morning, landing at 9am ET (nope!), so we bought $1200 United flights in and out of Washington leaving at 7:30pm (still really hoping for that American refund!).
In the middle of all that I popped into my class, CRIED, and left promising to reschedule lol SORRY ORAEFI CREW!
Just as we were about to leave to get dinner before heading to the airport, that flight got delayed 3 hrs! Luckily they let us bump to a flight that was originally scheduled to leave at 4pm but was delayed until 5:45 - it was about 3:30 by that time so we grabbed or stuff and go to the airport as quickly as we could!
… only to have that flight not leave until like 8pm. EVERYTHING at O’hare was cancelled or delayed for weather issues all over the country so we felt very lucky our flight actually left! Even when we got to DC though they couldn’t get us a gate until after midnight.
Monday morning we got ourselves to the office around 9am! The security person then informed us we were WAY to early to even think of coming in and that we needed to come back in 5 minutes (?), and also that we needed a SECOND money order for $126.67 because they could see Shane as a walk in but his application is separate and also needs the application fee.
We then RAN THREE BLOCKS TO THE CHASE where we got another money order, ran back (did I mention it was 98 degrees?!), and got back at a cool 9:17am. JESUS!
I was immediately called to the window were I was sweaty, out of breath, and pretty dialed to fucking 11 trying to make sense of what the person was asking me for!
I was worried about a couple things - our background checks didn’t have our middle names on them? would that be a problem? Did I have enough copies of everything? (I didn’t! But they just charged me $1 for each page they needed to copy so whatever at that point!)
The biggest problem? My photo was “too smiley” and “not serious”, so I needed to take new pictures.
“Portugal only accepts serious pictures”. This feels really sexist to me but whatever! I’ll look at you like I got 4 hrs of sleep and ran 6 blocks through 100% humidity to be here, no problem!
All told we were out of there in about an hour! Shane overheard a few people getting turned away for various reasons and told a bunch of conflicting information so yeah! I feel like we did pretty well, thanks to the crew I hired to help, and we promptly got the fuck out of DC, trained up to Baltimore, and had MANY beers and crab cake sandwiches.
We also battled 100 degree heat and went to the Orioles game where I was able to cross a new ballpark off my list!
It was really nice to not have just turned right back around and flown home. We were able to take a little 24 hr vacation to calm down a bit and celebrate crossing this milestone off our list!
Even though we then had to train to train to train back to DC to fly out because we couldn’t replace that first flight back out of Baltimore, all that went smoothly! We got to sit an a beautiful lounge in DC and flew back to Chicago with no delays anywhere.
And now it’s just a waiting game! And that waiting game might be crazy, unfortunately. Weirdly, it seems like visa applications are really backed up and we might not hear anything for 3-4 months. Stressful considering we already have a sublet moving in on November 1st but hey! We’ll worry about that later.
