My friend Natalie is just going to laugh at me for writing this, but here goes.

As readers and viewers of my photos know, I’m not a particularly untraveled person.  However, I’m setting off in a new direction this summer to Brazil, and it is time for me to start considering making preparations to go through the process of acquiring a Brazilian visa.

This is new to me.  The most problematic visa I’ve ever needed was one for Saudi Arabia, but it was, in many ways, also the easiest to get: someone in the country has to sponsor you for a visa, fill out all the paperwork, and all I had to do was send off my passport to the people organizing the trip on this end and hope that she didn’t lose it.  Next time I saw my passport, there, on page 20, was my entry visa to the Kingdom.  The Indian visa was the same way because I was with a group and it was all handled for me.

For countries like Turkey and Egypt, you’re not getting an entry visa so much as paying an entry tax.  You go up to a window at the airport when you land, hand over your money, and they put a sticker in your passport.  In fact, until just a couple of years ago, the Egyptian visa consisted of two stamps — not stamps in your passport, postage-sized stamps that, it’s entirely possible, could have been affixed to an envelope and used to mail something somewhere.  At this point I have so many Egyptian stamps in my passport that it could probably be mailed just by dropping it in any mailbox in the country (if I ever actually found a public mailbox in Egypt).  Sure, you can get one at the consulate in Houston, but why?  It’s actually more expensive and takes far longer.

This Brazilian thing is a whole new creature to me.  The Web site of the Consulate General of Brazil in Houston is ridiculously complicated — and they’re pretty clear that the reason for the hoopla is that it’s just as complicated for Brazilians to apply for visas to the United States (apparently Americans are both photographed and fingerprinted on arrival in Brazil for the same reason).

The visa form–once you click through 17 links–is on a server in Brasilia, and can only be filled out electronically.  I’m staying in several places on my trip, but I only put the name of the hotel where I’m staying when I arrive, and I hope that’s enough.

Fortunately, they don’t ask ridiculous questions.  When I applied for my Indian visa, the form asked me to list everyone “known to me in India.”  Depending on how you interpret that question, there could be a lot of people known to me in India — the form doesn’t specify that they have to be known to the applicant personally.

I was a little afraid of a question like: “What is your opinion of Carmen Miranda?”  (This is a trick question: she wasn’t terribly popular in Brazil.  Does one insult a Brazilian or go with the prevailing public opinion?  Oh, the dilemma!)

Then there’s the other bureaucratic stuff.  The Consulate is at pains to explicitly point out that the visa is free, however, Americans have to pay a “reciprocity fee” equal to the amount that Brazilians have to pay for American visas. They’re not alone on this, but most of the countries that I’m likely to travel to that tried to do the same thing–Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey–have since backed down.

Where it gets weird is the Consulate’s insistence that visa applications can only be submitted–and picked up–in person.  If you live in Houston this is merely an annoyance (especially if you live on the other side of town), but for those in Austin it’s a harder decision: do I take two days off from work so that I can drive to Houston, take a personal appointment to drop of my passport, then go back to get it?  Or do I pay an agency in Austin to do it for me–which adds $20 to the “reciprocity fee,” never mind what the agency will charge for the service, a fee which is described on their Web site as “low” but isn’t actually delineated in terms of a dollar amount. What shall I assume it’s low in relationship to?  The cost of gas for two round trips to Houston?  Or the cost of the average emergency room visit without insurance?

All of this is new to me, but exciting at the same time.  I’ve discovered a Portuguese PodClass that I’m listening to in the hopes that when I’m speaking in my rapid-fire European-accented Spanish that I might be able to understand the responses I get, although so far the only phrase I can really remember is É você a garota de Ipanema? (“Are you the girl from Ipanema?”), which isn’t likely to get me very far.

Ah well.  As I’m fond of saying: there are no bad experiences.  Just good blog posts