Bureaucracy Brazil Style

One of the outcomes of our trip to FGV on Monday was that we were given a bunch of forms to take to the Policias Federal (PF), in order to register ourselves as foreign nationals studying in Brazil. In all, there were seven items that the police required, including paying a moderately large sum of money to Citibank (purpose for that is still unknown because the form was in Portuguese) and getting photocopies of our entire passports (i.e., all pages!) notarized.

Sounds easy, but the pace of the bureaucrats that we dealt with (see photo of beetle from our later walk in the park), our own lack of proficiency in Portuguese and the time it takes to actually walk between so many different locations, ultimately defeated us on Wednesday. By around 1pm we had all the required forms and were left with the choice of taking a 30 minute cab fare out to the PF and hoping to get everything processed before their 2pm closing time, or doing some relaxing tourist stuff near our apartment for the afternoon. Discretion (and laziness) being the better part of valour, we put off our visit to the police until Thursday.

Wednesday afternoon was thus spent in walking around a local park, then venturing down to get more familiar with the center of the city. I've uploaded a couple of photos here.

So Thursday morning bright and early we finally headed to the PF. The taxi driver had no idea where to go, but after asking directions from a few of his buddies we were off, and he got us to the right place within about 25 minutes.

After making our way to the front of the line at the PF we were suddenly made aware of the existence of something called a 'CEP Code'. This is apparently the local equivalent of a post code, but was not something that we had ever encountered before at either our apartment building or at the university. It turns out that CEP codes do exist, but nobody except the federal government ever really uses them and most people have no idea what their CEP code even is!

So after realising that we were missing a vital piece of information - the CEP codes for both our apartment building and for FGV - the sequence of events went something like this:

- exit line;
- exit PF building;
- look for somebody who speaks English (not easy);
- ask them to explain what a CEP code is;
- realise that you need to call your apartment building and FGV to find out their CEP code;
- try and find a place that sells phone cards in weird industrial area (also not easy);
- find a public phone (ok this is easy, they are everywhere);
- call apartment and FGV and attempt to explain that you need to know their CEP code (to somebody whose command of English is fairly basic);
- re-enter PF building;
- re-enter line (now much longer);

Eventually we got it all figured out, then after submitting the forms and waiting for 45 minutes we were taken into a room to get our fingerprints done, given our foreign national form and we were free!!! It was really good to have that out of the way.