Well, I am planning to come home for thanksgiving but I had a little bit of a problem with that. Since I am staying here for a year I am here on a visa and I am in the process of getting an identity card for foreigners. My problem is that my visa is only good until Nov 15th and There is a 45 delay gap between when I applied for my identity card and when I will actually receive it. I made an appointment to apply for my identity card in the middle of September. The earliest appointment I could get to apply for the id card was Nov. 4th. I went Nov 4th to apply and they told me that I will receive my id card 45 days from that date. So then I realized that I had a problem bc I want to travel back to the US n.Nov 20th and return Nov 28th and my visa expires the 15th of Nov and I don't get my ID card till the middle of December. There is no doubt that I can leave Spain but I was told I wouldn't be allowed back in with an expired visa. I thought that was strange bc I have always been told that Americans can enter and leave the country freely ever 60 or 90 days or so.
So, to be on the safe side, I went to an office on campus to see if they could help me. They said that it is possible that they will let me back in and not check my visa, but it is more possible that they will give me problems when I try to reenter. So, the people at the Asoex Office helped me get everything taken care of so I could reenter Spain with an expired visa. My first step was to fill out a form requesting reentry into Spain. The second step was to make an appointment online. The problem with this is that the office is so backed up you have to make an appointment about a month in advance. My appointment was scheduled for the 21st of December but that obviously wouldn't work because I want to leave and reenter in November. So luckily the people at the Asoex Office at UAM have a friend who works at the place where I had to go request the certificate of reentry. They called her, told her my situation and she said that I could come down ASAP to get the Certificate of reentry, all I had to do was tell the security guard at the entrance of the building that she was waiting for me. So the Asoex office printed out the forms I needed and told me that I had to bring copied of my visa, passport, and the stub I received from when I applied for my ID card. They also gave me a carbon copied sheet of paper and told me to bring that with me as well.
So yesterday I took all my stuff I was told to bring and headed to the office of extranjería and told them that a woman in the department of "regreso" was waiting for me. So they let me cut a huge line. But I had to stand in another line and wait an hour to see the person I was there to see. When I was waiting on line I started talking to the person behind me and he realized that I had not payed the fee I needed to pay inorder to receive my certificate of reentry. He knew this because I had not filled out the carbon copied piece of paper that the Asoex office gave me and it didn't have a stamp on it from the bank. No one told me I had to pay in advance, I thought that I was going to pay at the desk when I received the certificate. There was also another girl who in the same line a little bit behind me who didn't pay in advance as well so we both went to the bank together. It was about a mile away from the office we were in and both the bank and the office of extranjeria closed at 2pm, so we ran the whole way because by this time it was like 12:30pm....
We got to the bank and paid and returned to the office of extranjeria again. When we got there the security guard let us cut another line return to the line we were in when we realized that we hadn't paid yet. So I got the certificate and everything is ok now :) here is the certificate:
No comments:
Post a Comment