Originally Posted by
Doc Savage
Why the kabuki theater of interviews, etc?
Brazil seems to me a very bureaucratic country.
I once had the imprudence of going to a bank to exchange currency (US dollars to Brazilian reals). In my country, exchanging currency in a bank is not the quickest thing: the cashier fills in some form which you sign and which takes some 3 minutes, and we complain about bureaucracy.
But in Brazil the clerk typed on her computer so much that you could think it was she who wrote 'War and Peace' and 'In Search of Lost Time'. Besides, I was required to fill a form myself, and she also made a photocopy of my passport (or rather of my US visa - because for some reason all the clerks in Brazil who wanted to see my passport opened it on the page where my - by then expired - US visa was affixed and copied my particulars from it instead of my passport's title page; they also always marked my nationality as 'EUA'). All in all the operation took 25 minutes.