Argentine Bureaucracy

During Stephen's interview process for the job in Buenos Aires and again in a leaflet sent out by the school about the reality of trading a comfortable and familiar British life for that of an expat, more than one warning was given about Argentinian Bureaucracy.  Stephen and I laughed about this and and were just so excited about the whole idea of an adventure that this warning pretty much went unheeded!  Both of us are quite easy-going which is a good thing as there, indeed, has been lots of strange requests we have had to deal with en-route to living here.

The first step in our process to legally work at St George's seemed straightforward enough.  Scan all of our passports, birth certificates and marriage license and send them to admin at the school so they could then begin the mammoth task of applying for a work visa on our behalf from the DNM, otherwise known as the Direccion Nacional de Migraciones.  That didn't seem so difficult until we learned that we then had to get all our documents ( birth certs, marriage cert, university degrees, teaching diplomas, etc, etc ) all apostilled.  


Apostilled you ask?  Well, the apostille is a seal affixed to a document which shows that it has been authenticated by the government. The gist of it is that any country who signs up to the Hague Convention then recognises any document which has been apostillised in its country of origin.  This was okay for our British Documents as all we had to do to get them done was take them up to Milton Keynes and pay for them to be stamped.  Our Kiwi documents were a bit trickier as we had to take them to the NZ Embassy in London to be notarised by a Kiwi notary and then FedExed to Wellington to be apostillised, but this was still manageable and relatively easy.  The Canadian documents however, were a different story!


As Canada did not sign the Hague Convention, all Canadian documents must be authenticated by the Canadian Government and then legalised by the Consulate of the country you are sending the documents to.  Apparently if you post your documents to the Canadian government it will take them 35 working days to sort out and post back to you.  However, if you take the documents to them in person they will do it for free in 15 min while you wait!  I was going to have to fly to Canada to get this done but my wonderful parents decided that they would spend their 36th wedding anniversary driving my documents 6 hours to Ottawa to be authenticated, then another 5 hours to Toronto to be legalised by the Argentine Consulate (as the Argentine Embassy in Ottawa won't do it!).  They then FedExed the documents back to me just in time for me to scan them and send off to the school in Argentina and for them to send on to the DMN who then send them back to the Argentine Consulate in London!


I think we must have the best travelled documents in the world!


I am sure that as time goes on we will have many other examples of how Argentine Bureaucracy works...  Watch this space!