Triumph!! After three very frustrating days of trying to book appointments at the VFS office in San Francisco to submit our visa application and accompanying paperwork, we finally cracked the code this morning and have booked appointments on January 11th. This will allow us time to get our documents in order, get a lease for a place to live in Portugal and then cross our fingers that we have everything we need for the visa application.
Needless to say, the VFS website is not the most robust and user-friendly website in the world, but we finally were able to book appointments. The first hurdle was just getting an account set up so that we could log in. Once that was done, it was frequently the case that after one or two tries, the system would kick you out, tell you to come back in a couple of hours after clearing your cache files!!
Once we were finally able to log on, we could never get the appointment calendar to fill out and show available appointments. We had been trying to book appointments together because the system seemed to allow more than one person to apply at the same time. After many failed attempts over the last couple of days, I decided to try to book individual appointments this morning and voila!!! I was able to secure an appointment and then I ran and got Barb who after a couple of tries was able to book an appointment on the same day but a couple hours later!! I’m thinking that because our last names are different, the system would not allow us to book appointments together. Maybe not, but as soon as tried the ‘individual route’, everything worked.
So, the bottom line is we are now going to San Francisco in January. That gives you some idea of how far out they are backed up for visa applications!! In any case, we have now secured our appointments so the next big hurdle will be to secure a lease when we go over in November! I am certainly learning a lesson in patience and perseverance!
In addition to securing a lease, we also need to set up bank accounts in Portugal and have them funded with a few thousand dollars prior to securing the lease and submitting the visa. We have already gotten our ‘NIF’ which is essentially a Portuguese tax ID number but now we need to actually set up accounts and transfer money into the country. Prior to our trip last year, we established accounts with ‘WISE’ which is an international money transfer organization and that worked great. It makes it very easy to transfer money between dollar denominated accounts to Euro denominated accounts (or many other currencies). I even have a WISE debit card that allowed me to make purchases in Euros while we were in Portugal last year.
This whole process is one big learning experience for sure. Fortunately, there is a Facebook group of expats who have moved to Portugal that is filled with useful information from those who have already trodden this path. Even so, reading about it is often not the same as actually doing it. It’s almost like reading about how to drive a car but until you actually hit the road, you don’t learn about all the little subtleties involved. Not to mention the fact that rules and organizations change as do the people that you deal with sitting across the desk.
The visa application has an accompanying checklist that is straightforward. However, we have read numerous accounts from people submitting applications at the three different offices across the US who have had totally different experiences and been asked for things that weren’t on the checklist or had things on the checklist totally ignored. We have already decided that if they ask for three months-worth of bank statements on the checklist, we will go in armed with 6 months – just in case.
Now that we have appointments to submit our visa paperwork, we are trying to think through the logistics of getting ourselves and the dogs over there. We will hopefully sign a lease in November but must be back in San Francisco in January. Once we submit our paperwork, and assuming we can retain our passports, we may go back to Portugal as tourists to live in our newly leased place for a little while until our D7 visas are approved. Once they are approved, we either need to physically go back to San Francisco to have the visas placed in our passports or send our passports to San Francisco and have them couriered back to us.
This is where it gets sticky. They will only courier the passports to somewhere in the United States. So even if we get second passports, which we are thinking about (it’s legal!), we somehow have to reunite with our passports with the Portugal visa in them somewhere outside of Portugal. The only way the D7 visa is validated is to show entry into Portugal from outside the Schengen Zone. Up to this point, we could figure out a way to make all of this happen. But we have the two dogs to factor into the equation!!
If we take them over when we first go back in January, we will be faced with the question of what to do with them when we have to come back to the US (or somewhere outside the Schengen Zone) to get our passports with the D7 visas so we can re-enter Portugal to validate the visas. If we choose to just stay in the States until our visas are approved, we will be paying rent on a place in Portugal for three or four months!! Like I said, reading about how to do all these things is one thing but when you start working through your own personal situation, it becomes a bit more complicated!
So, that’s where we are now. We have our visa appointments – step one accomplished!! We have begun the swim across the pond and so far, the bureaucratic crocodiles are still sunning themselves on the beach and haven’t entered the water yet. Although we did have the nasty encounter with the VFS website crocodile but ultimately beat it into submission. The name of the game is to get ourselves and the pups to Portugal without being eaten alive by the various bureaucratic crocs we will encounter along the way!! And that’s why they call it an adventure! Stay tuned!