Reciprocity in Bureaucracy

It came to my attention around the beginning of the visa application process that, in fact, students never used to need to even bother with the visa process as recently as give or take five years ago and that this policy has been enacted by many (most?) member states of the EU/Schengen Area on a policy of reciprocity. This means that because the United States makes everyone else, even in Western, closely allied countries, fill out endless paperwork and jump through stringent hoops, well, so too are Americans going to have to do exactly the same if they want in those countries for longer than 90 days. This renders the visa process a little bit less serious, as evidenced by the terribly translated and proofread visa application form (among other documents), and a lot more tedious. I'm not saying I don't get it, but thanks for that one, America, all of us going to these countries are so terribly grateful.

Upon learning that a girl going on the program to Germany doesn't need the same kind of visa and can just show up and register herself, I threw in a joke about how this is really just Europe's geopolitical South's revenge for all of their duress. I'm not so sure that needs to be a joke.

I am still waiting for my background check to come back from the FBI so that I can submit all of my visa materials. Six weeks and counting.

The timeline for visa approval is apparently three to six weeks, but often shorter because the process isn't actually that strict for American citizens provided you aren't, say, a felon. That's great, at least in theory, except that there is ambiguity over whether or not we send in our passports from the get-go and then it's approved and mailed back to us, or whether we send in a copy, get the visa approved, and then send in our passports. In typical Latin style, no one really knows except for the contacts at the consulate that only our study abroad office seems to have contact with. You could otherwise be waiting approximately forever for clarification. This becomes problematic only when the lack of start and end dates for the semester in Lisbon is factored in, because Católica doesn't feel like it's necessary to let that information out except in officially signed and sealed documents. Add to that the necessity of this information for filling out the visa application form itself and being able to book travel, for which must be accounted as part of the documentation, and you have a nice, big clusterfuck mess that doesn't get any better when you realize that the days and weeks are melting away, leaving the deadlines significantly tighter for getting the visa and getting the hell out of this country.

Our documentation from Católica, semester dates and all, came in finally, so we happily (joy!) no longer need to worry about that.

In related news, all of my hyperventilation over the course of this process over housing and the fact that I don't want to end up living in a suitcase on cobblestone sidewalks by a river because I can't afford housing and no one bothered to lend a helping hand in finding lodging arrangements and I'm going to starve because everything is expensive and what if the airline loses my luggage and I have no clothes, then I'll be really screwed and then what if ... where was I? Oh, right. So we had an orientation meeting to go over the various bureaucratic processes that getting there entails, from the university to the government and everything in between, and we also met with one of the students on exchange here from the same program. I can now rest assured that Portugal is nowhere near as expensive as Alpine France (or Paris, for that matter), I will not have to worry about living in a hovel 2 kilometers from a transit stop an hour and a half away from anything of interest, and plenty of other information that will no doubt come in handy. This is the point where normally I would be excited, but I can't get the background check out of my head, and so all of the elves and faeries shitting themselves joy will have to sit contained until I mail off my visa application, at which point I'm sure I will spend all of my time learning as much about Lisbon and Portugal (and Portuguese) as possible in my impatience to leave.

At least even the Germans had a difficult process with their visas.

Continue Dreaming, or Verification that I Am Not Completely Insane

When I wrote about returning to Europe, the only caveat to the post was that while the probability was strong enough not to leave any room for doubt, it hadn't been officially confirmed that I would be going, getting the grant, and studying at Católica. Happily, within the past week, that has been verified and accepted, and I will be going with one other student from CU who applied in a similar timeframe as I did. There is apparently one other prospective person, but that is not at all set in stone, and more unlikely than not at this point. I imagine the scrambling to get all of the documentation, how it takes so long, for the visa alone would be enough to nullify it. Basically, this means that all of the work that I've put into this process has paid off in an official capacity, and so I can breathe with slightly less anxiety than before. I don't have to worry that this whole thing was some kind of cruel, sick joke played on me in some kind of elaborate dream, from which I will wake up in a cold sweat of terror at 5 AM on some night where it is not only snowing, but also wherein my every means of leaving the house are broken and useless. With small children crying and country music playing just a little bit too loudly in the background. I am working for something tangible after all.

This should be exciting, right? Except that I've been dealing with sinuses that have been trying their absolute best to explode inside of my skull and eject themselves forcibly out. I was more excited about eating the pho soup that I was having for dinner the night that I got the email that my application status had changed than I was for the fact that, well, it's set and I'm going in January. That soup was divine. I really couldn't think of anything better than consuming that soup in solitude in that moment.

Not to say that it isn't exciting, but I think it hasn't hit me because of the haze I've been in courtesy of my sinuses. Other people are far more congratulatory and excited than I am, which can be attested by 28 "likes" to this very news being reported on Facebook, something I have never gotten and didn't really expect. My opinions on Facebook and how I would prefer to be using social media aside, the fact that 28 people on the internet, people with whom I am somehow acquainted, thought it worthy enough to click their approval of what I posted is still pretty nifty. I felt certainly more excited about it after seeing that, and then I went to sleep, because I am exhausted all the time.

As each day goes on and I feel a little better, because each semester the same pattern occurs and I spend one to two weeks feeling abnormal, I realize the gravity of things getting put in motion in a formal, bureaucratic way, and how there are really only a few months left until departure. My excitement is still dampened, though, because there is an endless amount of somewhat mindless work to be done for the procuration of the long-stay student visa. There are 12 time-sensitive things to be gathered together and shipped off to San Francisco, where they will sit for approximately three weeks before the granting (well, with sensible and good luck) of the visa, after which my actual passport will have to get mailed along with an envelope that is prepaid and trackable. Some of these documents are straightforward, others are ambiguous and I am not really sure what exactly they're asking for, and so I'm going to meet with people at CU to clarify it all before I start dreaming about paperwork and bureaucracy. On top of that, we still have to sort out our housing options, which means I have to figure out what exactly the options are actually going to be and all of the various information that goes with that, oh, and classes. I have to figure out which classes of the list provided by the program are going to be offered, are compatible with the certificate, and applicable to my major. I was planning on doing all of this in November, but November is on Tuesday, so that means I don't really have time to be excited about being formally accepted.

But hey, there are 89 days or less until I leave! (Not that I have a countdown...)

The Saga of the Run-on Sentences

We take a brief break here to describe a fictional account of routine life as a college student, based on a collective experience familiar to many. The run-on sentences are deliberate. It came about during a Skype chat with M one evening.

...I think the periods of greatest stress are when you overdo the coffee and then even the last refuge is gone and you must simply plug through whatever mindless crap you were working on or scheduled to work on anyway. This is done knowing that your sleep schedule will never right itself and that the semester will literally ingest you and then spit you out, as you run off to tests haggardly and hoping not to fail, extra-shot Americano in hand (because they took pity on you that morning and you're such a regular that they just throw it in for free sometimes), shaking.

You arrive at your tests, and the competency required falls short of your expectations, causing dissonance, which causes greater stress, which causes you to feel as though you're actually going to have a stroke, because you have four shots of espresso coursing through your veins, your digits are shaking, and you have eaten only a small portion of an insufficiently large morsel that morning. You then pause, contemplating briefly the four and a half hours of sleep you got, convincing yourself that it was in fact an accomplishment and a victory that you peeled yourself off of your bed that morning and schlepped yourself to class, facing the world, only to have everything crash down as you realize that everyone around you doesn't actually care because they expect you to be as you normally are because the extent of your physical dolor is invisible to the world, the weight of social expectations suddenly is put into perspective, and you close your bag and exit the test.

As you exit your test, suddenly the pangs of hunger hit your cognitive functioning and you attempt to kick a blonde girl in the shins as you walk unnecessarily quickly toward your next class, biding time until lunch and sustenance arrives, unprepared for the class because you had no time to do the reading because you had to study for the test you had taken. You arrive at your class, inadvertently glaring at all who enter the room after you. The professor comes in and inquires to your well-being. Are you feeling all right, sick perhaps? No, you want to scream, no, I am fine, but I might hurl the sharpest of the pencils in my possesion at your eye if you continue to ask me further. Your class continues on and boredom sinks in, masked by the insatiable vitriol and irrational thought provoked, seemingly, by the only person in the room who dares to open their mouth and get participation credit that day.

You leave, shuffling as quickly as possible out of the class toward the end destination: lunch. This is inhibited by the lolling pace of the hundreds of other students walking between their classes, conveniently scheduled at the same time as yours, each and every one of them in your way, deliberately, as though they derive great pleasure in inhibiting you on your way to the end destination. A bicyclist passes, you contemplate taking a book and pushing him off of his wheels, or perhaps breaking a branch from the tree adjacent to jam the tires, thinking about the great joy and satisfaction you would get out of watching someone on one of those wretched sets of wheels suffer.

It's always them, the bicyclists trying to ride through the crowd at a thousand miles per hour, treating the pedestrians like an obstacle course, laughing at their feebleness when they have no clue where to move so as not to get maimed by the wheels racing toward them. Or maybe it's the skateboarders and longboarders, you dislike them just as much, possibly more still because they have even less of an excuse to have mounted their means of transportation through the wandering, schlepping sea of students in the first place. You wonder why other people always seem to pick up their feet but never move their legs, rendering the physical act of walking completely, utterly useless. You could walk twice as fast, easily, and god dammit, you're going to show them just exactly how you will, walking off of the pathway and onto the grass for a moment, allowing some dew to spray gently on their shoes, realizing that a useless metal rail is coming quickly upon you and not finding any opening in the sluggish mass to allow you to continue along to the next building.

Your hands shake, and your fury at the way the wind blows gently to the south and the sun glares in your eyes at just that particular moment grows.

You grab the handle of the door to the building you are entering and recoil as it slips slightly, slick from the sweat of a thousand other students before you that day. The lack of sanitation alerts you to the hand sanitizer situated in the bottom of your bag, underneath all of the books, papers, and the computer you schlep but seldom use outside of the house anyway, causing undue stress as you try desperately to think of how you might most efficiently retrieve it without contaminating your other belongings. Something drops out of your bag as you attempt to do what you have just thought of, followed by a pen you forgot you had, an assignment handed back to you in class, mindlessly stuffed in your bag as quickly as possible, and your keys.

Suddenly, you feel something in your pocket. You think to yourself, what the FUCK is that, I don't have anything there, not that I can remember, I put my phone in my bag for class, of this I am sure, it is silent right now, and there's nothing else that produces that. You grasp at your pocket and it is indeed empty, souring your mood further, your hands shaking as you march on, not spotting a table and observing a line of a dozen people all waiting to heat their food in the same filthy microwave that you were intending to.

Your mother calls, producing a real vibration in your other pocket, irritating you further because your initial assumption that your phone was stowed safely away was wrong. "What are you doing, are you busy?" she asks, oblivious to your schedule and unaware that anyone could be doing anything during the day. "I just wanted to see if you locked the door. I was just thinking about it, and I worry. A thief could break into the house and steal everything, and then we wouldn't even get insurance money to rebuild! Oh, but your father is home, I suppose. Did he go to work today? What time are you going to be home? What do you mean you don't know, what are you doing that I ought not know about? Whatever. Listen, I've got to go, there's a meeting." The banality of her conversation inspires the act of slamming your phone at the brick wall to your side, but you know that ultimately, she will talk to you, brick wall or not. Your mother will talk to you when you are dead, right when you least expect it, when the coffin is lowered into the ground, and she will whisper "Why don't you call your mother?" directly in your ear, and you will roll in your grave before it has even been filled back in, stricken with the guilt that comes from not having called your mother because you died.

At last, your food is heated! You grasp at your food, peering into the microwave, encrusted with food exploded inside of it for many months prior, never touched by the janitors, who recoil at the thought of touching it possibly more than the bathrooms of the building, and you heard once that a girl got a life-threatening disease from that one on the obscure floor upstairs that only the most socially outcast ever bother to visit. You studied there once, but it put you to sleep, and so you resumed your studying at the library, like everyone else on the campus, wondering why you ended up there and why it smells so peculiarly different each time you visit. You burn your finger on one of the corners of the container, swearing quietly at yourself under your breath, wondering why it is that we need fingers in the first place, and where the hell are the napkins in this god-forsaken building, anyway?

Upon realizing that the napkins are directly adjacent the microwave, you take seven, six for the sake of grabbing your container and one for eating, because the environment be damned, you are not bringing pot holders to class. No one does that. You exit the building with restored clarity, thinking about theories you heard about in class and whether you should get another coffee before going home. There's a test to study for.