In all of our traveling (independently before we met and together after we met), there is one thing we’ve never needed to do. That is… visit a US Embassy. I have been escorted into a U.S. Embassy with a group once to be thanked for our service to a local community but it was quick and we entered through a side door.
Thankfully, neither Jeff nor I has ever needed to replace passports or deal with any visa issues, legal issues, etc… while overseas. Until this trip. Those who know us well, know that Jeff and I don’t like to leave the country (for months at a time) without being in the middle of some sort of large financial transaction like buying, selling, or refinancing a house. Typically, however, things go smoothly and the whole “power of attorney” thing works out. Until this trip.
As some of you may know, the main reason we are doing this whole **move out of our house 4 weeks after having a new baby, ripping our oldest 2 children from their home and friends and community and missing major life events for people we love** is because we needed to refinance our house. Let me re-phrase… we HAD to refinance our house and pay down the adjustable-interest-HELOC that we used to get it in the first place. We knew it wouldn’t be easy for any of us but we had to make it happen. Though we wanted to head out of the country at the start, there were a few things that made that impossible so we headed to San Diego initially where we knew we could go into Mexico as much as we wanted. Then we made our plans to head further into Central America come February. And here we are. In Costa Rica.
The process of trying to refinance our house has been quite a story (in no way correlated with being out of the country) but after figuring all that out (like he always does), Jeff signed over power of attorney to his dad before we left and assumed things would go as smoothly as usual. Not so lucky this time. Incompetence in the mortgage business prevailed and we were forced to schedule a visit to the US Embassy to obtain the most expensive notary services we’ve ever had to obtain ($50 per page sealed). Still, despite the expense, we needed the refinance to go through as soon as possible and we also thought it might be a fun adventure to head off to the US Embassy. The day of our appointment just so happened to be the day we were supposed to mark our hands with red X’s in solidarity with abolitionists all over the world who are committed to ending slavery. So, I put giant red X’s on all of our hands with a red sharpie. Keep that in your the back of your head till we get to the whole entering the embassy part later.
We got ourselves ready that morning, headed out to the bus, and on our way to San Jose. The bus that we get on at our condo goes all the way to downtown San Jose so we settled in for a fairly long ride (typically more than an hour because of traffic). Traffic is pretty bad in Costa Rica at certain times a day. Well… most times a day. There’s a lot of people driving and the roads have not evolved with the increasing numbers of drivers using them. We got to our stop and still had to take a taxi to get to the embassy since it wasn’t really walkable. Perhaps my biggest complaint about Costa Rica, particularly in the urban areas is the lack of cross walks. You literally just have to grab your kids by the hand (or carry the ones that you can and be ready to drag the ones you can’t), say a little prayer, and channel your best inner-frogger to get across the streets. The most interesting thing is that the drivers aren’t bothered by you standing the middle of the street. They will honk, wave excitedly, and holler’ “ohh que lindos” about our children as they whizz past us standing in the middle of the road. I am not kidding.
So we got in a taxi.
Off to the US Embassy. For the first time, we got in a taxi with a driver that was definitely under the age of 25, maybe even under the age of 21. He was wearing headphones AND blasting his Tico- pop music over the speakers through his iphone. A Tico iphone, mind you…. very expensive. It was a white one. It seemed like he would MUCH rather being doing ANYTHING else but driving us around. We also weren’t really convinced that he knew where he was going. But we did get to the embassy and he was nice enough.
So there we stood. In front of the embassy. It was a really old, ugly building with ugly tinted glass doors and a guard standing out front who wasn’t entertained by our girls prancing/dancing around in front of the windows, looking at themselves. He asked if we had an appointment and then asked to see our passports. He kept looking at the kids like we weren’t supposed to bring them or something but he opened the door and let us go in. As we stepped across the threshold, our civil rights were stripped away. The brothers of the TSA were standing there with their white latex gloves on, xray machines, and a metal detector, and wands, ready to pounce on our stuff and whatever semblance of liberties we thought we had left once the front door closed behind us.
Oh my goodness.
They went through everything. EVERYTHING. They were just digging through our bags, pulling everything out of ever pocket, every crevice, EVERYTHING, asking me what things were as if I was on trial for carrying a diaper bag. He pulls out Sophie the Giraffe, squeezes it a few times, looks at me (with a baby in my arms and 2 children by my side) and demands, “What es este?” _ What is this? Seriously. SERIOUSLY??!?!?! I honestly had no idea what to say. I explained, nonetheless, that it was for the baby. A similar conversation was repeated for each kid toy and then we moved onto the cell phone lenses, 5 pairs of white ear bud-headphones, portable microphone, jump drive, sewing scissors, and hundreds of other random but necessary things I carry in my diaper bag. I was also really irritated about the way they were doing things so fast and carelessly that my responses probably did not put him at ease. Keep in mind, however, that we did have giant red X’s on our hands. I can only imagine what they were thinking. Yet, no one asked what it was about until the notary asked us. The Tico TSA brother pulled everything out of my bag, jeff’s diaper bag, and all the contents had to go through the scanner separately. They inspected the kids food bags and made us drink out of our water bottles. Then we had to go through the metal detectors and whatever couldn’t go with us into the embassy was stuffed in a pouch for which we were given a key. Honestly, they were nice but it felt awful. There were no pat downs and nothing was taken away. But it sucked. I don’t know why I expected it to be different. After all, we are a paranoid country.
We got inside and found our way to where the notary was going to meet with us. It felt eerily familiar inside… like the DMV with a little Social Security Office thrown in. But without air conditioning. After we checked in, and paid the exorbitant fees for the notary, we were told to sit down and wait to be called. We sat in the wrong seats because we were shortly kicked out of those seats and told to sit in different chairs that were 2 feet away. Are you kidding me?!?! I can’t even choose where to sit in this place. It seemed like it took forever to get called. Most of the people who worked there seemed like locals/native Spanish speakers. Except this one white girl whose Spanish was literally painful to listen to. She was fluent enough – even more than me – BUT her accent was awful. In fact, it sounded more like incoherent English than bad Spanish. We got our signing done and headed on our way pretty quickly. We got all our stuff back from the pouch. Instead of taking a taxi, we decided to take a bus to the center of town and ride the bus that would take us all the way to our condo. In the end, everything went pretty smoothly. The kids were great. And the refinance would be back on track once the documents were shipped, which ALSO cost a fortune.
For me… it was definitely long enough on American soil in Costa Rica.
Faber est suae quisque fortunae 