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!