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.