Dork Reports

Once I booked my ticket, I started checking out travel books from the li-barry. I picked up books about Peru, Chile, Brazil, and South America on a Budget, and then let them sit unread because the idea of doing any planning kind of made me wanna die. Even though I knew I wasn´t going to crack them open, I kept lugging them between my place and Abe´s, and after enough procrastination, I finally opened one up and started reading.

That´s when I discovered I needed a visa for Brazil. Because I had been planning on going to Chile for so many years, and not Brazil, I only knew that to fly into Santiago I would only need to pay a reciprocity fee – no visa required. Alas, such was not the case with Brazil, and my procrastination came back to bite me in the ass in the form of hefty fees. Because the Brazilian Consulate likes to be complicated and lazy, they enabled some new rules in November that limited the number of appointments per day. In addition to their “absolutely no rushed visas” policy and 10-business day minimum for paperwork, I discovered that with Veteran´s Day and Thanksgiving, I would be severly lacking in business days with my regular appointment. So, that meant I had to find a private company to file my paperwork for me, since these visa companies have basically monopolized all the appointments the Brazilian Consulate has available. This meant me having to shell out an extra $109 (I saved a meager $10 by mentioning a Yelp ad) on top of the $130 visa fee, without the guarantee that I would even have my visa approved. Yikes. Way to go with the procrastination! Already I was starting to dread Brazil.