My brothers birthday today. Hope you have a good one Boris!
A major bit of excitement today. I was having further thoughts about my visa and how long it was taking to get organised and all that sort of stuff, when I looked at my original tourist visa I got when I came to Chile in April. It had a validity of 90 days, which I well knew, but had in my head that it would last until August. Hmmm, a quick bit of mental maths made me realise that three months from 10 April is about 10 July. That'd be tomorrow. Crap. I need to leave the country, urgently. Looks like that weekend in Argentina that I'd mentioned (jokingly) a few times might become a reality within the next 24 hours. What to wear?
I headed to the local airline office with Lizette to book my tickets etc. Our friendly sales rep Emiliana looked up her calendar and counted out the number of days since 10 April and worked out that the 90 days actually expired yesterday. I have officially overstayed my visa. Crap, crap, crap. This means that I couldn't front up at the airport because as soon as I was to go through emigration, they'd pick up on that and at the least, issue me with a fine, which was not what I wanted. I also didn't want to highlight that I've overstayed given my work visa stuff is in process. Not a good look.
We were then directed towards a local government official who might be able to help out with what to do next. Before too long (only two referrals to someone else), we found a gentleman who looked disapprovingly at the gringo in front of him, listened patiently to Lizette's story about it all, looked very disapprovingly at my passport and the tourist visa and tourist card, before finally announcing that we didn't need to be too concerned about the tourist visa thing, that the tourist card was the important one. This one was dated 30 May and 90 days from then was the important thing. I therefore had until the end of August to get things sorted out, so don't panic at all. Of far more concern to him was the mention that I was working here, given I was here on a tourist visa. He didn't want any further mention of that made in his office!
So, panic subsided, we headed back to the office. I sent a message to our lawyers in Santiago explaining the situation and asking them to confirm the advice we had been given locally. Uh oh, it seems that advice doesn't match with their knowledge of the situation. Yep, I've definitely overstayed my tourist visa. I need to get my documents to Santiago ASAP and get an extension to the visa.
Given that my passport is my primary source of identification here, I was pretty nervous about being separated from it for the week (all going well), especially given my travel plans to Santiago on the bus next weekend, so it looks like I'll be making a quick trip to Santiago on Tuesday and Wednesday to sort things out.
Ah, chaos and mayhem. My job here is done!
A
No comments:
Post a Comment