Half way in the system

A successful day :o)

Christian has a RUT number - it took 10mins and the guy there was very helpful and said to us that he loved German rock bands!?

In addition, all the required documents for our visa have been legalised (this does not mean by any stretch of the imagination that we have a Visa yet! - Though we are legal for the next 3 months)


For those not familiar with the bureaucracy in Chile, by default, all documents that come from another country are not recognised as valid and they need to be legalised (and often also translated).
Example: your university degree. You need to:

1. photocopy it
2. get a solicitor to certify this as a true copy of the original
3. send it to the foreign and common wealth office (in the UK in this case) to get a stamp saying your solicitor is a real guy not a fraud (and pay a fee per document and hope they don't lose it in transit as it happened with one of ours)
4. Send it to the Chile consulate of the country the document was issued in. They put another stamp on top of the stamp you got in step 3 (hope they don't lose it in transit again).
5. Go to Chile - attend the Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores and get a 3rd stamp and a signature on top of the previous stamps...

Then you are done. Well, we managed it! ;o) (not really sure how!)

We also managed to find a vegetarian store... though I am afraid, Santiago is in SERIOUS need of a Wild Oats, Harvest, Earthbound or similar kind of shop. All veggie/organic shops (that we have seen so far) are very little and very expensive. They might push us to make our own soy yoghurt and oat milk :op

Tomorrow we might try our luck with Christian's visa... we anticipate it may not be such a smooth run! More on this tomorrow.