Slogging On

When I last wrote about our journey through the tangled web of Portuguese bureaucracy, I mentioned that we were in a new mess of our own creation. Since then we have also waded through an additional road block to our goals. What follows is a brief overview of where we’ve been and where we hope to go.

After obtaining our temporary residency visa in the USA before arriving in Portugal, we knew we had a few steps to complete before we could earn our residency permit. In no particular order, we had to: get our national tax identification number (NIF), open a Portuguese bank account, and schedule an interview with immigration services in the hopes of being granted a one-year residency permit. You may have read that we checked the NIF off our list last week. Now for the rest.

The first thing we did within days of arriving was present ourselves at the local immigration office, which, for reasons I don’t understand, is called SEF. The clerk at SEF explained that we could not schedule the appointment at their office, but must instead call a centralized phone number to schedule the interview. She wrote that number down for us and sent us on our way.

We were a little intimidated to call the number because we spoke barely a word of Portuguese, we’d been told that hour-long hold times were not uncommon on the SEF phone lines, and our American cell phone would charge us 20 cents per minute for calls. We asked our experienced expat friends how they had made their appointments and they told us we could make them online at the SEF website. Tim did just that, even though it meant stumbling through the Portuguese instructions he found on the site. At length, he was able to make our appointments for May 29. We received almost immediate email confirmations in both English and Portuguese. So far, so good.

Except several days later, we read an article that claimed the only appointments that could be made on the website were for those immigrants who had been granted their first one-year permit and wanted to apply for a two-year renewal. Tim tried to call the central phone number to see if we, in fact, had appointments for the wrong kind of interview, and if so, to try and schedule the right kind. He called from his US cell phone, deciding we’d just have to bear the cost, whatever it was. The SEF number would not accept calls from a US phone.

He walked a half hour to a phone store to buy a local burner phone and made sure it could connect to the SEF number. Returning to the apartment, he placed the call. It rang for a very long time, but Tim hung in there until someone finally answered. After asking for an English-speaking clerk, he was placed on hold for nearly an hour. (No exaggeration.) He hung up and dialed again. The second time, the phone was answered quickly by a woman who assured Tim, in English, that she could help him. He explained we were new in the country, here on a 120-day visa, and were in need of an appointment for the first interview, but had unknowingly made appointments for renewal interviews. She said she could change the appointments for us. After placing him briefly on hold, she returned to say she was unable to set up another appointment because we were “in the system” already. She’d have to cancel the existing appointments before making new ones. Tim reiterated that we need a different kind of appointment, not just a different date. From what I could hear over the speaker phone, I wasn’t confident that she was listening to what Tim really needed, in spite of his efforts to make it clear to her. After a moment, she told Tim our appointments had been changed to late July and confirmations would be sent via email. As you have probably guessed by now, all she did was delay our appointments for the wrong type of interview! Somehow, for all Tim’s effort, we had taken a step backward.

We admitted defeat and did what we should have done from the get-go. We contacted a company called Timely Solutions for Expats. For a mere 150 euros ($187) per person, they would be happy to deal with the SEF scheduling nightmare, assist us with the documents necessary for our first appointment, and accompany us to said appointment, wherever in the country it happened to occur. We willingly agreed to cough up the cash and proceeded to enter the quagmire of trying to transfer funds overseas from long-abandoned PayPal account. That story will have to wait until tomorrow…