People from Finland, and I'm assuming at least EU, people who want to stay in the country for longer than 90 days, have to get a visa. That I obviously had already when I got here. They also have to go register with the Federal Police within 90 days of arriving in the country.
I'm not entirely sure what that registration is for, though. The visa is valid for a year, and actually says I am allowed to stay in the country for seven months during that year. Seven months because when I applied for the visa, I already had to know when I'll be arriving and when I'll be leaving South-America if not Brazil itself, and those dates fall within seven months of each other. Anyway, if I wanted to stay longer than that year or that seven months, I would need to renew the visa and something.
So, if I'm here only temporarily, for a short amount of time, I don't know exactly why they want me to register. I'll be out of the country soon enough anyway, and I already have a visa that says it's ok for me to stay for that time. If I wanted to stay longer, then I'd have to go through the whole process and get the visa renewed and register, which makes sense, because if I want to stay longer than was originally said is ok, then I should ask for more time.
The logical answer would be that the registration is needed to keep track of who is in the country, but that's already checked when coming into the country. So I guess this is somehow to prevent people from staying here longer than they're supposed to, but I don't see how it would actually make a difference in that. People who will stay in the country longer than they're supposed to will stay longer than they're supposed to with or without the registration, I'd imagine. The only difference is now they become illegal immigrants after 90 days if they don't register, instead of when their visa expires.
My point is, I understand why they want to have permanent or long-time (~ over a year) foreign residents of Brazil in a registry, but I don't understand why they also want everyone who's here for just a few months in there, because like I said, we'll be out of the country soon enough to not be a bother.
If someone know why this is, let me know. Also if other countries have these. (I'm sure someone's going to pop up now like "yeah, actually it's the same thing in Finland, and you just don't know about it because you've never had to do it, because you're a citizen".)
Anyway. So I've spent the last two months trying to get this registration done. At first the problem was that I didn't have any Portuguese-speaker to go with me. because they don't speak English at the office where they deal with foreigners. Because why would they.
Then I finally got things sorted out a bit and had someone to go with me, and then suddenly the instructions on the police website completely changed, by which I mean a long list of documents appeared on the website that foreign students have to have with them when going to register. Because apparently there was a new law or something about immigration that came into effect from the beginning of March. The new instructions were kind of good, because the instructions before that were practically non-existent, but it was annoying to be making plans to go to the police the following morning just to notice that there are half a dozen papers I should take with me that I didn't know I had to take with me and that I don't have.
So, it took me another couple of weeks to get my hands on all those papers I hadn't known I needed to take with me.
And then I went to the police. I was told, that if I want to get anything done there, I need to be there at seven in the morning, waiting in line, because it's first come first served, and they only serve a forty people a day. So you need to be early to wait in line. So I got up before six and headed out to the police. (And this was the time I happened to have the worst uber-driver ever. He was like two minutes out, and then suddenly turned around and took another almost 15 minutes to get to me. And then we got stuck in the traffic. Which was not his fault, but I was supposed to go pick up my local to go with me, so I had told uber I need to first drive to that place, and then from there to the police, because you can have multiple stops in uber. And he completely missed the fact that I needed to go somewhere else first, and just drove me directly to the police.)
So that day at the police I got into line, and after a while they handed me a ticket that told my number so I could stop standing and sit waiting instead. Ten minutes later they came back and told me that yeah, actually I can't do the registration by waiting in line, and I had to book a time, and that the available times pop up unpredictably every now and then, and maybe for one day at a time, and that one day might be a month and a half away. So basically I needed to check if there are any available times a few times a day not to miss out on, because unsurprisingly, I was not the only person trying to book a time. So I left, pissed at not getting anything done despite being there, and having woken up before six to be there.
Luckily, some available times opened just that very day (I kept checking them once an hour or something), and I was able to book a time for today. This was three weeks ago.
So this morning, instead of going on a field trip to go see some white-sand amazonian ecosystems, I went back to the police. This time it was quite easy. You just handed them all the papers, and then sat for an hour watching them do something on the computer and comparing that I'd given the same information in all the papers and stuff like that. And then I signed some papers and they took all my fingerprints, and put a stamp in my passport to show I'd registered. And that was it. Took about an hour and a quarter. Wouldn't have made it without my local, though. Because they (honestly) didn't speak English, and I don't speak enough Portuguese to take care of official business.
And then they told me that I'll get a card that shows I've registered, so I can carry that around with me to show that I'm legally here. It will be ready in three months. And I was like yeaaah, three months from now I'll probably be on a ship on the river on my way to Peru (or at least getting ready to leave, if not on the actual boat yet), so it's great that you can get me that card then.
Like I said, us temporary residents, out of the country soon enough to not be a bother.
This whole thing has been constantly nagging me for two months now, because it's a thing that needs to be done, preferably sooner than later, and it's not getting done, and there's nothing I can do to make it happen faster.
(Also, I didn't even need all those papers that were on the list. They never asked for the ones that took the longest to get. So great.)
Ooookay. That's enough of that. Now I can stop thinking about it forever. Unless I come back to live in Brazil some day.
Something completely different now.
Since I got here, I've had two songs playing in my head. Seriously. The same two songs, for two months.
One of them is a capoeira song, one of the really basic ones. You can listen to (one version of) it here. It's a song about a sailor. He's from São Salvador, in Bahia, and he learned to swim when his boat sank, so he had to swim the sea. Or maybe he drowned. I'm not sure what's happening in that last verse. It says he comes somewhere all in white. So maybe he drowned. Also, capoeira songs don't necessarily tell any kind of a coherent story, so.
Anyway, I think that's been playing in my head, because the lead parts to it basically start with eu não sou daqui, I'm not from here. So yeah. Não sou daqui. Although it does go on with eu não tenho amor / sou da Bahia / de São Salvador, so he's from São Salvador, Bahia, like I said. At least that's in Brazil. Finland is a bit farther away. (The first bit there means "I have no love", which, well, yeah. I was actually told that one way of greatly improving my Portuguese would be to get a boyfriend who only speaks Portuguese, and I was like, yeah, you think I haven't realised that myself? That would be absolutely great for my Portuguese skills. The problem is realising this is not quite enough, that's actually the easy part.)
Ok, moving on.
The other song that's been playing in my head is a Finnish song, Jos sä tahdot niin, which you can listen to here (with English subtitles, I figured there's probably someone reading this who doesn't speak Finnish). The song basically says that the singer will do literally anything to keep who ever they're sining to. Everything from believing what ever lies, or moving to Andorra, or staying as a guard dog at their door. "Because without you I drown in addled nights, and without you I'm already half way to hell."
And from here I get to Twilight. Because that's a series that keeps being criticized for giving completely unrealistic expectations for romantic love, and confusing obsession with love, and giving the kind of image that a person can't be whole without this one person that they have decided to attach themselves to or what ever. It describes love as a situation where you will do literally anything to be with someone in particular. But the thing is, this song does the exact same thing. And it's not the only one. That kind of idea of love is everywhere, but especially in the music. I mean, people keep listening to Every breath you take as a super-romantic love song, until you point out to them that it's not super-romantic, it's super-creepy. Just listen to the lyrics, people.
My point is that Twilight is definitely not alone in promoting that kind of idea of love. And I find it interesting, that Twilight gets criticized for it, but the hundreds of love songs don't. I'm not necessarily saying we shouldn't criticize Twilight for it, I'm saying if we do, then maybe we should also criticize all the other things that present love in a similar way.
Just an observation I've made while having a Finnish love song stuck in my head for two months. With this one, though, I have to say I have absolutely no idea why it's been playing in my head. It's not even a song that I listen to. I mean, if it comes up somewhere I'll just think ok, that song, but it's not a song I especially seek out to listen to.
Also, sidenote: it's annoying that the word twilight is now a little ruined by being the name of the series, because I think it's a really beautiful word. In meaning, phonetics and the way it looks. So yeah, probably one of my favorite words in the English language.
So that's my thoughts today.
And now, so I won't end on quite so serious a note, here's another monkey for you:
(I did not feed this one banana. It did, however, come to us when we got to that place clearly having learned people means food. It also had three or four friends with it.)
Ok, that's it for today.
~matu
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