5 Critical Mistakes I Made When Trying to Get my Spanish ID Card

Trust no one, especially not crosswalk clowns.

If you want to stay in Spain for longer than three months, you have to first get a visa, which might be another post another day, because getting that visa is a real pain. You finally get it, and it’s beautiful, and amazing, and… it’s only technically good for three months. This feels like a ripoff, because Americans are allowed to stay in Schengen countries for 90 days anyway, with no visa.

But the thing about the visa is that it makes it possible for you to get something called a TIE (Tarjeta de Identidad de Extranjero), essentially a foreigner’s ID card. Getting a TIE requires booking another hard-to-get appointment and gathering a pile of documents from different places to accompany your application. It’s like you’re a little video game character going around gathering items, but all the items are in a foreign language, and you get a lot of practice being on the verge of tears. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the things I did wrong in the process of getting my TIE.

1. Made the wrong appointment.

Once you get to Spain, you have to log on to a website at a very specific time and request an appointment to go apply for your TIE. The appointment slots go so fast. There are web forums and WhatsApp groups and Facebook posts centered around topics like: “How do I get an appointment? I log in every Friday at 9 a.m., on multiple devices, I click through all the buttons as fast as I can, sell my soul to whoever wants it, and I still cannot get an appointment? Should I give up?? Should I hire a lawyer??? How do I get my soul back????”

Some people do actually hire third parties to do it for them, but I thought I was above this. So, I filled out the website forms as quickly as I could, snagged an appointment and was feeling pretty good about myself. Until two weeks later, when I realized I’d made an appointment to pick up my ID card, which I obviously would not exist and be available for pickup if I never applied for it. I managed to get a new, correct, appointment, so it all worked out.¹

2. Believed anything anyone said.

Spain is known for having a laid-back culture, which is great when you’re taking a siesta, but not great when you’re trying to file time-sensitive paperwork. So many of the forums I’ve read have warned that you will often get different answers about procedures from different people at the same company/office. Sometimes the same person will give you a different answer depending on the day, or their mood, or, like, the position of the moon.

When I called our town hall to ask what the procedure was for getting a document called a padron, (which basically proves that we live at our address), a woman said I just needed to bring my passport in to the town hall and that was it. I repeated this back to her twice, explaining I was a foreigner and wanted to make absolutely sure I understood correctly. Yes! Just bring in your passport! Thank God, something easy.

Nah. When I went down to the town hall, they gave me some paperwork to fill out, which needed our landlord’s signature, and said getting a padron required an appointment. The next one was in three weeks.

Three weeks later, we went back and bumbled our way through an appointment at which a nice man took our information and had to call our landlord. At the end, he pointed at my passport, smiling, and tried to tell me something I didn’t understand. It was important enough to him that he typed it out into Google Translate and turned his computer monitor to face me. “People born in December are Sagittarius. I was born on the first,” the screen said, and he beamed at me. “Casi gemelos,” I stuttered. Almost twins.

I hope that man is doing well.

3. Printed out the wrong sized pictures.

I had my visa photo taken at the end of a really long day at a desert Walmart. It is not a good photo.

So, when I learned there is an option to upload your own photo and get it printed somewhere, I had a great idea! I’d have those taken in the U.S. and bring them with me to Spain so I could have a pretty photo for my TIE. Planning ahead! I did my hair, put on lipstick and carefully arranged my face into a gentle smile. Took 27 photos until I got one I didn’t hate, uploaded the photo, then picked them up.

Of course, passport photos in the U.S. have ever-so-slightly different dimensions from the required ID photo dimensions in Spain, so I couldn’t use those. Once in Spain, we looked up nearby places to get ID photos taken, but Google Maps in our city is notoriously unreliable, so we basically just went walking around looking.

By the time we made it to a musical instrument store that for some reason also took ID photos, I was overheated and disheveled. The photographer kept telling me I was sweaty and handing me tissues to dab my forehead. This made me nervous and caused my forehead to sweat more. Somehow, probably with some retouching on his end, the photo came out kind of okay.

4. Missed the bus on the way to pick up my card.

Classic. I just waited for the next bus, no big deal. Hoping that I will learn how to properly read a bus schedule in the near future.

5. Let a clown woo me.

The paperwork was filed. I survived my application appointment. About a month later, my TIE was ready to pick up. The sun was shining, and it was a beautiful day. Once I managed to get on a bus into Alicante, where my TIE was waiting for me, step one was to cross a street. Simple!

As I was crossing, I saw a clown, who was sitting on the sidewalk with a bunch of clown supplies move into the crosswalk too. He started juggling for the cars. I was fascinated. Was this like busking? How would people in the cars give him money? Was he just doing it for the love of juggling? Why in the crosswalk?

I was so gripped by this clown’s performance that I ran directly into a woman, then frantically apologized and ran across the street, dropping my phone along the way. My phone turned off. Fortunately, it restarted, but every time I restart my phone, which has a Spanish SIM card, I have to enter a PIN number. In all the hustle and bustle and fluster of the enticing clown, I couldn’t for the life of me remember my PIN number.

I had to wander around until I found a phone store where they could help me. Thank God I remembered my Spanish phone number, because I probably can only remember it about 50% of the time. Otherwise, I don’t think there would be anything they could do for me.

---

Question of the Week: What do you think is more important in relationships? Love or respect?

Recommendation of the Week: We ended up with way too many black beans in our fridge this week (long story), so, in an effort to do something novel with the beans, I made black bean brownies. They sound very bad, yes, but they were actually good and somehow did not taste like beans. I would recommend them if you also have too many beans in your fridge, or if you want to try a healthier brownie recipe, or if you just want to have a wild Friday night of brownie baking.

Self-Serving Recommendation of the Week: I wrote an article for Buzzfeed News about space burial, or the practice of sending your ashes into space after you die (it’s cheaper than you probably think it is).

Thanks for reading!

1. Side note: I met one girl who made the same mistake and did not realize it in time. She took a bus to a different city to pick up her card, only to be told she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then she missed her bus home and had to wait in the rain.