adventures in brazilian bureaucracy

Today I registered with the Federal Police, an assurance that bureaucracy is universal. When you arrive in Brazil and are staying for a longer period of time, you must register with the police within 30 days of your arrival, basically so they know you are where you say you are. Luckily, the school organizes groups of students to go each day, and drives us 30 minutes to the International Airport on the other side of the city where the office is located. Apparently, they only see 60 “estrangeiros” per day (a term they use for foreigners, which sounds more like “alien” to me). They begin handing out numbers at 7am and the office opens at 8am. If you don’t get there before 6:30am, you are likely out of luck (which happened to us yesterday☹). Therefore, we met at 6am for a sleepy bus ride to the airport, waited in line till 7:30am when they finally decided to start handing out numbers, and then proceeded to wait in a waiting room until 1pm when we were finished being processed.

Anywhere else, 6 hours in a waiting room would seem like eternity, but I found it rather interesting. Between reading, chatting with other students, and going on coffee breaks, I studied the others in the waiting room. People from all over the world waited patiently for an attendant to examine their documents and fingerprint them. They all seemed prepared for the wait and no one seemed rushed to get out. Unlike in the US, people were not complaining, talking loudly on cell phones, or diligently working from a laptop or smart phone. In fact, they seemed rather relaxed.

We chatted with an Egyptian cage fighter who is training in Brazil for 6 months, and joked around with the fingerprint guy who told us “his wife would be upset if he knew he got to hold hands with all these pretty girls in one day.” Besides the expected one cranky, overweight, hating-his-life guy who yelled at us to stop being so happy and stop lounging like it was our own house (never mind we had been waiting for 6 hours), everyone seemed very laidback. When I finally got to see an official around noon, she was chatting lightly with her co-worker, cracking jokes, and deciding where she wanted to go to lunch. No wonder we had to wait so long.

It’s going to take me some time to fully understand and maybe even adapt the mentality here. I’ve already cut down my amount of “sticky notes” on my desktop from 4+ to one lonely note listing fun stuff I to do each week. My “to do” list has become more like a “maybe I’ll do these things if I feel like it.. sometime.. maybe” then a strict checklist. Maybe you should try it. You might be surprised by how much you like it ☺