Getting married - papers arrived ... and not yet all are in MK

Oh YESSS!!! Yesterday the papers from Brazil arrived. This went a lot faster than expected - we received it 5 days after it was posted. This is a lot faster than my new birth certificate, which was sent to me 12 days ago from the Netherlands.

Sigh... the waiting continues.

Getting married - the legalized docs for NL have arrived

Parallel to our certificate of residence surprise yesterday, San's birth certificate and statement of civil status were picked up at the Dutch Consulate in São Paulo. Completely in line with the whole process, picking up the docs was not something that went along an smooth path. What happened yesterday in São Paulo, I don't know, but it was busy down there. The metro was out of order. Busses were running, but taking a lot more time to cover their routes than usually. And on top of that, it also appeared that all Paulistos were on the road at the exact moment that San's Sis had to leave her house to go to the consulate. 180 km of traffic jams in the city alone. It was impossible to use the roads, even by taxi. Waiting till the next opening day of the Consulate was maybe an option, but then we had to wait until Monday. And we waited enough already. So we called upon Sis' creativity. And, she managed. By calling around and making use of other people's lunch break, she found opportunities to pick up the documents.

Ha! I'm really glad that networking works.

The legalized documents are now on their way to Macedonia by express, registered and insured mail.

Getting married - Oops, this document is new

In order to get married in both NL or Macedonia, a document stating your residence is necessary. This document is not hard to get for me: the NL Embassy brings the solution. However, there's no embassy or consular service of Brazil in Macedonia. And for San it is here in Macedonia where we need to get her residence document. Calling around learned that this document is something that we can start making ourselves. Here's the way:

1. When we moved into our new house in Skopje last October, we got ourselves registered at the police (necessary for that: [1] a work registration form, [2] a notary approved/stamped rental contract, [3] statement from Ministry of Interior approving our stay, [4] visa in our passports). All this results in one card: the certificate of residence.
2. This certificate of residence shows where we live and that it is approved by the police - unlike Brazil and Netherlands, it is the police who keeps these registrations and not any other community service. A copy of this certificate needs to be legalized by the public notary, together with, again, copies of the the passport pages with photos, signatures and visa.
3. These notary documents need to be legalized by the Ministry of Justice: at the primary court of Skopje (Skopje eden) by putting the Apostille stamp on it.
4. With this legalized document, we can officially state that San's living in the given address in Skopje. Nema problem.
   

Piece of cake? So, that's what we thought. And we started looking for these certificates of residence of ours. In the 8 months that we're living here in Skopje, these certificates got burried a little deep in our administration. After one hour of archaeologically disciplined excavation in our archives, we found them. Ha! Suprise! Our certificates were somewhat new forms. These forms did not reserve space for our living address. And as to expect, the address of residence was not written on it.

Sigh!

We had to get new ones! Luckily, the police was quite nice and cooperative in helping us out in this. However, it took yet another afternoon to get it done!

Next stop: registration of marriage plans. But where?

Getting married - translation of documents

After San's Sis received the certificates of her birth and civil status from Brasilia, we had them ready for the next step: translation. It's not just anybody who can translate these docs for use in the Netherlands. Nooo, it needs to be done by a translator sworn in in the Netherlands. Luckily the Consulate in São Paulo has a list of these translators on their website. We picked one from Holambra (small city 200 km north from São Paulo city, full of dutch combining living in Holland, America and Brasil - hence the name of the city). Figuring that contacting the translator prior to sending her the documents would be wise, I called Therezinha through Skype. The whole translation work appeared to be an easy move for her - she's doing this on a daily basis. We just had to get the documents (originals) send to her, she'd do the translation, calculate the costs (based on translation per character) and send us the document back. We would be able to have documents back in 2 or 3 days time. Great. All we had to do is pay and wait for the envelop to return.
So, San's Sis send Therezinha the certificates while I had sent a mail to Therezinha, giving her the return address and my prefered way of payment (through banktransfer in NL). Therezinha received the documents on a Friday and immediately got to work. It's a relatively easy job, so she said. And indeed, as later appeared she finished her translation and stamping that same evening. Wonderful! If only the communication channels were left noise-free. Sigh. Somewhere along the line my mails were not replied. Information about payment was not sent, phonecalls that should have been made, were not made and those calls that were not necessary were carried out with too much enthousiasm. To keep a long story short, it took 8 days before the documents were returned to São Paulo. Next move: getting them legalized at the NL consulate.

Another angle to the translation story is this one: Last year we also tried to get married in Brazil. It was a mere hypothetical situation, but we thought it was worth a shot. For getting married in Brazil it would be my documents that need legalization. One part of this legalization process is the translation of the documents: again it's the birth certificate and the document stating my civil status that I'm talking about. These documents can be obtained in NL in an international format: all the information is there on the document in about 12 languages - all languages of the EU. Ha! Interesting, as Portugal is part of the EU, the translation of the document would be a piece of cake. Indeed, it would be a piece of cake, but not for us. After consultation of the Brazilian consulate in Rotterdam we found out that the certificates of birth and civil status need translation first. In other words: they need to be translated from portuguese to portuguese! This feels like it's very similar to having a dutch document translated from NL dutch to Belgian dutch. Dunno if I'm far off the truth, but I found the bureaucratic way of translation for Brazil a little odd at the least, hahaha.

Getting married - documents for Brasilia

Unfortunately there is no such thing as a speedy legalization of documents between Brazil and the Netherlands. This could for example be possible if Brazil had signed this treaty about Apostille. In short, this would mean that if a document needs to be legalized, one stamp with 'apostille' somewhere on it would be enough for the document to be accepted abroad. Like I said, unfortunately there is no such commitment from the Brazilian side. This means that for our documents to be able to use in the Netherlands, we have to follow the whole path of visiting places, getting translations, legalizing stamps, registration of documents, etc.

One of the stops along this long path is Brasilia: the main city of bureaucratic Brazil. It is here that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has to look at the documents and put a stamp on it. The quickest way of obtaining this stamp is simply by going to the capital yourself, knock on the right door with the documents in your hand, get the stamp, pay, and leave back home. Nema problem! Should take you maximally one day. This option, however, was not available for us. We were in Macedonia and San's Sis had to stay in SP with her family.

Time for Plan B! Plan B also looks simple. At least on paper. Send the docs to Brasilia, say a prayer and hope they will arrive at the right desk, pay, and wait until the stamped documents return. And here's exactly the downside of option two: you never know how long you have to wait. It can take up to 2 months and honestly, this is the time we did not have available in our case.

So, we had to go for option 3, which is basically a combination of the first two options with the addition of 'good ole networking'. We learned about a friend of a friend of San, who works in Brasilia. If we could send our docs to her, she would be taking an afternoon off to collect the stamps and get the docs back to São Paulo. All this worked. Though still, it took us the better part of a month before we saw the documents back in San's house in São Paulo again.

Next stop: translation!

Getting married: obtaining San's birth certificate

We had already just arrived back in Macedonia when San's sister was knocking the doors of the public notary (cartorio) where San's birth certificate could be retrieved. Armed with the authorization (the procuração - again a document so colourful with all the stamps, seals, signatures, official Brazilian green ink and silvery shiny anti-counterfeiting strips that only the looks of it could leave the impression that you'd better not do any harm to this little paper) stating that she legally would be able represent San in her absence, San's sister got in front of the lady behind the counter. After asking the question "Can I have a birth certificate for my sister?", the procuração was studied briefly. It was given back with the simple answer: "Não!" And there you are. :( Now what? Asking for the one in charge? So it was done. The man in charge of this section of the cartorio was on holiday, or so I remember. Whatever it was, it was not possible to speak to him. If we wanted to speak to him we had to wait. "But", so the cartorio's girl continued, "it will not be possible to get the birth certificatate with the authorization you are having. For the birth certificate San has to come herself in person to obtain it!" And that was it.

Some weeks and many stressing phone calls later it appeared that, indeed, the girl at the cartorio was wrong. That with the authorization it is possible to get the birth certificate. That we just got ourselves another 4 weeks delay in a precious timeframe of 6 months validity of the necessary documents (the in February 2007 obtained statement of civil status being the starting point of these 6 months).

In the end, San's sister got the birth certificate and we could move on to the next step in the process: legalization of the documents by the ministry of foreign affairs in the far away capital Brasilia.

Getting married: leaving carnaval

Going back to Brazil with was something we looked very much forward to. It would be great to see everybody go happy and crazy again with the 2007 version of carnaval. However, before we were able to through ourselves into that party, we had some work to do. Paperwork! Getting all these papers in order, and with that going to all the official governmental and/or legal bodies to get the paperwork done, took quite a bit of time. In fact, it was consuming so much of all our energy that we figured in the end that carnaval would be celebrated best this year from in front of the television. So we did. And it was good :)

Like mentioned in the previous message, we weren't able to get through all the paperwork in Brazil last February. So, we focussed on one thing only: making it possible that somebody else would take care of the paperwork. Better said: making it possible that San's sister would be able to show up on San's behalf, putting signatures on San's behalf, informing about state of affairs on San's behalf, asking for documents on San's behalf. To make this legally possible, we had to go through one more officila and bureaucratic procedure: back to another cartorio (public notary). Luckily, for these kinds of 'procuracoes' we had to go to a cartorio which was only a few blocks away. It took one morning and before the temperatures were hitting the 30 degrees meter, we were already back out in the streets. With a feeling of relief we arrived back home. From now on, even though we personally were not able to retrieve all the necessary documents, we could still continue the process.

If only all authorities would accept this legal authorization...

Getting married - the legal ways for documents

It's about time to drop a few lines about the documents which are necessary to get married in NL. The list is quite short:

• birth certificates of us both, and;
  
• official documents stating our civil status.

Next, the prerequisite for both documents is quite simple: they need to be originals.

Now, this seems to be easy to do. But it appeared that there's a lot more work involved than just collecting them and get it over with. Here's another list of ways the documents have to go through:

1. For use of the documents in the Netherlands, they need to be legalized by the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
   
2. The documents are written in Portuguese only. This is not an official accepted language in the Netherlands (those are German, English and French, besides our own Dutch, of course). So, the documents need to be translated by an official sworn in translator (fyi: this is the step that we just finished).
3. The documents will have to be legalized by the Dutch consulate for use in the Netherlands (this is a step that we're about to enter - we hope to offer the documents in Sao Paulo soon).
   
4. All of the above road is paved because Brazil did not sign the "Apostille Treaty". This, in short, means that official Brazilian documents cannot be legalized by one stamp, which for example is possible for documents made up in Macedonia and us in Holland.

The above mentioned roads can lead to many things of which I can say that 'patience' appeared to be the most important.

Getting married, part one - annex

Forgot to mentioned the interesting part of getting a certificate in Brazil stating that San is single/not married and that she's Brazilian. Once we got it, I saw that's a wonderful looking document. Full of stamps, signatures, shiny silver strips, lot's of official looking Brazilian Green inkings, watermarks... In short: the works! However, before we were able to get it, we had to do some phone calls. For the document can be issued by the cartorio (public notary), it is necessary to have two witnesses who are willing to state for your case that you're single and are willing to sign for it. In Sao Paulo family members cannot be such witness, thus leaving an easy group of people out of our business. Moving onwards to friends is a second source to be milked. Remember, it was mid carnaval, so some were not in Sao Paulo. There appeared to be two more hurdles we had to take in the selection of friends as witnesses. The first is work. This one's quite simple to explain: the opening hours of the notary resemble a lot those of the working hours of friends. This meant that a few weren't able to make it to sign for our case. The second hurdle is validity of registration. In short it came to this: we found one friend who had not renewed his registration at the cartorio in time. Therefore his signature would not be accepted on San's certificate. Sigh! We had to come back later and see if we could get someone else. At that time, our stay is Brazil was already coming to an end: we had only 3 more days left.

At the end of our stay, we managed to find Virginia and Marcus who both were willing to take an extra long break from their work to sign for our case. This paper we got. "One more to go", we thought. And we left home! How naive we were, haha.

Getting married, part one

A mere 18 months after I went for San on my knees, asking her the "little question" in Mercadão, downtown São Paulo, lots of things have happened. None of these have so far led to the answering of the big question with a "Yes!" Not that we wanted to. To the contrary! We started a round of getting papers in order for a wedding in either NL or Brazil almost immediately after the "little question" was out in the open. However, due to one tiny little uncertainty we couldn't get that round completed. The little uncertainty was the start of the work in Macedonia: "When does it start?" The process of answering that is a complete different story, but it interfered our wedding plans in all possible ways.

Now, we're in the middle of round two, which more or less started February this year. In the middle of carnaval-crazy Brazil. The document obtained at that time was the required certificate of civil status. More about that one in later blog-entries.