You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had! I just got back from Chile yesterday and had to plunge right into two, count ’em, two tangles with bureaucracy.

My Boxes

The first, which I’ve been wrangling with for several weeks, is getting access to the two bins of personal and household stuff I shipped from Canada before I left. Apparently I got it all wrong from the start, and putting it right has proved to be nightmarish. I won’t bore you with all the many email exchanges and phone calls, but today I think we are getting close. Thank goodness for Cecilia coming with me — I can never repay her for all the help she has given me and I can’t even imagine doing this without her.

Anyway, this morning we showed up at one of the customs offices, where we had been told to go, to find that of course it was the wrong place. We had to get a taxi to another building a couple of miles away. To let you understand, these offices are all in the port area, which right now is undergoing massive infrastructure work and when you tell a taxi driver where you’re going he groans and rolls his eyes. “Muy complicado!” is the cry.

Anyway, here we lucked out, as the woman who served us had visited Canada and loved it — couldn’t understand why I would leave it to come here — and she seemed inclined to help us. I had painstakingly made up from memory a list of the box contents (because the idiot freight people in Toronto told me I didn’t need it), but of course it was in English. So I would need to translate it to Spanish and bring it back, and also get copies of many double-sided documents. We are to present ourselves there tomorrow, and if everything is approved, we will then go to the location (miles away) where the boxes are actually languishing. Will we get them? Who knows.

Residency

The other situation is to do with my residency application. I carefully gathered all the documents for that before I left Canada, thinking that dealing with the Canadian government while on the spot would be best. At one point, I dropped everything and flew off to Ottawa to get documents authenticated by Global Affairs Canada. The day cost me $700 — and they did it wrong! So now my criminal record clearance from the RCMP is useless and I have to get a new one one. The agent who is handling this sent me the instructions from the Canadian consulate but, being government instructions, they were totally incomprehensible. So tomorrow morning I’m going there to get instructions in plain English. This will hold up my residency, which will probably push back the timing of my getting my own apartment etc. etc. etc.

But as someone told me, in Argentina nothing is easy, but everything is possible. I’m clinging to that last bit. Stay tuned.

By the way, about Chile. I didn’t take my computer with me, and using my phone to post to the blog was just too finicky. So I have a ton of photos to sort out and then I can do a series of posts covering the trip. Hopefully I’ll get this done over the weekend. I did enjoy Chile though. As I’ve said to several people, a week isn’t very long, but it’s easier to come home when home is Buenos Aires!