Almost A Portuguese Wedding, part I

Do you make plans and then have the events turn out completely different?  Or is it just me?

The week leading up to the wedding turned out to be  the week from hell and forced our plans to change the event dramatically…but we did end up with a beautiful day, a memorable day, one that we embraced it with all of our hearts.

I don’t know where to start and for that reason I’ll recap how we ended up where we did.

Bikerboy and I were suppose to be married five years ago, the dress & tiara, colour scheme, flowers, deposit for caterers were all organised, but  months before the wedding we had to cancel it because Bikerboy’s mother was having treatment for cancer.  Looking back we’ve always regretted the decision, had we gone ahead we would have her presence.

Two years ago we started to make plans for wedding ‘Take 2′, we chose the venue, right on the border of the village I was born and grew up until the age of 10, a lovely old farm house that has been converted into a wedding venue.  The grounds as you can see from the photos are gorgeous and extensive and plenty of areas to chill out and wonder.  We then as you do forgot about the whole thing until the end of last year when we had to decide whether to carry on with the event or postpone it because of the economy….new year began and we decided to discuss it at end of January.

Shortly into the month of January our world turned upside down again with the diagnosis of Cerebral Palsy of the youngest child.  We were shocked, though I knew her lack of walking and her leg movement wasn’t normal or right I wasn’t expecting this diagnosis, and the biggest problem for us was how best to proceed with her treatment.  We then spent all of our time searching, visiting, consulting with different experts for their advise, often contradicting advice.  Looking back now I think unknowingly I went from post-natal depression into depression with the diagnosis of Liliana.  All of this meant that we didn’t decide until April to send out save the date cards.  A lot of our friends and some family members had already booked their summer holidays and were unable to come, sad but understandable.  Then the saga of my papers starts with the Portuguese consulate in London, a saga which never lets up until 11 am the day before the wedding.

The Registrar In Portugal, August 2009
The disaster with the papers all started last summer when in Portugal I visited the local registrar office to find out what we needed to do to get married there.  My Portuguese is terrible, though I can speak fluently, I have the vocabulary and understanding of the 10 year old I was when I left Portugal, for this reason my dad came along with me.  The registrar looked up my records noted that I hadn’t registered my divorce there and therefore according to records still married.  Her instructions were to register my divorce in the Portuguese consulate in London and they would notify the Portuguese local office, and to bring the groom’s birth certificate translated and stamped by the foreign office.  It seemed simple enough.

Registering my Divorce Becomes a Mammoth Task, April 2010
This April went to pick copy of my absolute decree, and yes I should have done it sooner, much sooner but my excuse would be suffering from the worst depression I’ve had I was barely functioning properly with the everyday, and wedding stuff just didn’t seem important at the time.  I paid my first visit to the family courts in High Holborn.  By the way in all of this awful dealings with paperwork the one place that was so efficient and quick and quite pleasant to deal with were the family courts, the guy there, who kept seeing me was cheerful, efficient and seemed to deal with everything at running speed, the antithesis of the Portuguese consulate.  I have written about the event of the Portuguese consulate and my papers on this post but to recap.

Portuguese consulate in London is very under staffed, always crowded and you wait the whole day just to get one answer to something, you wait an hour to pay for documents.  You’re not allowed to phone them nor just turn up so initial contact is only via e-mail.  You wait for days for response or an appointment to be allocated, which seems pointless because when you enter the building you are given a number to wait in line anyway.  I took my decree absolute , but after hours was told I needed a different paper signed by the divorce courts, back to High Holborn, then back to consulate, paid the consulate to translate them and then to send them to Portugal for divorce to be registered over there.  Arranged for Bikerboy’s birth certificate to be translated in London and then stamped in foreign office in Milton Keynes.  All done.

Just When You Think Everything Is Done
Two weeks before leaving Portugal to get married, we asked my dad in Portugal to go and check if my divorce had been registered and it hadn’t.  I went back to consulate with receipt in hand to find out what happen to the papers.  Hours later received the news the only person that could deal with my case was on holiday until the following week.

Now being the last week before we drove to Portugal, I went back to consulate taking Bikerboy this time, it’s easier with two of you when dealing with authorities.  Took the whole day to find out the papers were sent to Portugal in June but lost.  Fortunately, we had taken upon ourselves in the meantime to get another copy of my divorce papers, had them translated and stamped by foreign office in Milton Keynes.  Because of this the consulate clerk could do the process again that day.  I only  needed to go back to the High Holborn court to have a particular consulate paper signed, again.  I think I might have lost you by now but as you can see, I got to know the High Holborn court clerk well!  Paper signed and returned to consulate.  At 5pm I walked away with what I though was everything I need to get married in Portugal the following week.  Wrong!

On Our Way To Portugal, Sunday.
Bikerboy had worked incredibly hard for months to finish jobs in time for us to drive to Portugal to be wed, working every weekend.  While I was having my torment with the Portuguese consulate he was having difficulties with work going wrong and deadlines but finally managed to have everything in working function by the Saturday.  He rang from work on the Saturday morning saying, “Yehhh…it’s working…I don’t have to fly back next week to resolve it!”  We drove off the following morning to catch the 20 hour ferry to Northern Spain.

I think out of our whole wedding experience that particular boat ferry was the most we ever got to relax and look forward to the wedding and after what seemed years of no time, we felt we had time to enjoy each other’s company.  I think the fact no one could get hold of us, gave us a little paradise of peace.

Peace is Always Short Lived in My Experience, Monday.
Yes well, within an hour of driving on the Spanish motorways Bikerboy started to be bombarded with phone calls from work.  He was driving, his temper was rising as it was appearing the problem wasn’t going to be resolved over the phone.  The builders that morning had done something to his system which meant it wasn’t working now and the deadline was Friday.  I remember shouting at him to stop the car so that I could drive instead and he could deal with the phone calls.  I wasn’t enjoying watching him frustrated and upset talking to other contractors while driving at full on speed on Spanish motorways.  While I drove the rest of the way he then booked tickets to get back to London on a 6 o’clock flight the next morning, with two different flights back in case he missed the first.  I faced the Portuguese authorities with the help of my brother without Bikerboy, in the morning.

It All Starts To Unravel, Tuesday am.
Bikerboy is back in London making his way to the job by the time I walk with my brother into the local registrar office carrying my pile of papers.  The registrar’s office there is nothing like the more quiet tranquil registrar offices I’ve encountered here, it’s part of other administrative services, meaning you’ll walk into a small reception room full of people already queuing to deal with anything from renewal ID cards to settlements in wills.  I was feeling right back at home in the consulate.

We saw the registrar who was in fact booked to marry us on Saturday, she, having seen my father a couple of times over the last two weeks was expecting us.  When I mean ‘us’, she was expecting Bikerboy and I, when she found out Bikerboy had to go back to London, the look of panic struck her face, “what do you mean he’s not here? He has to be here to sign papers!” she said putting one hand to her chest.  We re-assured her that he was coming back Wednesday evening or Thursday morning..but she didn’t look very re-assured, saying there wouldn’t be enough time to sort papers out.  My brother convinced her some more.  My brother was a gem.

When I presented her the papers she very quickly says,”…but where’s the papers ready for you to get married?”
and I said, “this is it…these are the papers I was told to arrange by the offices here last summer!”
She looks at my brother and says, “Your father came to me and said the ‘Procuração’ was being done in the consulate in London, but it’s not here?”

Now, I don’t know what the translation is of ‘Procuração’ or what it means.  It wasn’t something I had come across before and I can’t even now translate it into English, but basically I found out the hard way that week it meant a ‘procedure’ you have to do, a set of steps to make sure you have everything you need to get married in Portugal.  I’m guessing like a set of rules of all the documents/papers you need.  Not something anyone had explained or said before now or even had shown me a piece of paper with details of what this ‘procedure’ entailed.

The registrar then says, “…since you don’t have your papers in order to get married someone with legal knowledge has to look at these papers and the clerk that deals with this is on holiday until Monday!”  OK, regardless how much screaming I wanted to do right now I held it in.  My brother talked to her some more and she said she could phone her colleague in the next county to see if she could look through the documents to see if everything was in order.  Arranged for us to see her colleague after lunch….everything closes in Portugal for lunch.

The Registrar Who’s Middle Name was Pedantic, Tuesday pm.
The knots in my stomach were beginning as we headed to Maia’s registry office, a district next to Porto, about half an hour drive from my parents home.  Same scene, small hot reception room with lots of people looking as if they’ve been there since the day before.  By now my brother has this little trick of pressing lots of different buttons on the queueing system machine.  You get allocated a number in different queues depending what you’re dealing with, marriages, deaths, births, contesting wills, so on, and out of the four or five tickets, the first number to be called out we would explain to the clerk on reception how we need to speak to their colleague!

The registrar we need to deal with in Maia must have been planted there by the gods who were not in favour of our marriage.  She had been briefed by the other registrar in Vila, looked through what I had and started her hole picking.  First, the translations we had paid £150.00 a piece back in London done by a respected notary were wrong, a notary I might add, recommended by a clerk at the Portuguese consulate in London.  From what I could gather, given my poor language skills here was, the translation was not done to the correct format for European Union documents according to whatever regulation.  Technically it was translated correct, as in, there was nothing wrong with the translation…per se, but it just wasn’t done in the new regulations, paragraph blah…reference blah blah….get the picture?

My baby brother to my right…who was my rock during this week giving up his holiday to help me with the Portuguese authorities.

Still with The Dragon In Maia, and still Tuesday pm.
My  baby brother putting his ‘no nonsense hat’ on and said to her, “…well ok, we can resolve the translations because I have a lawyer friend who’s on holiday and I can ask to do the translations in the right format tonight..”, but there’s more.  There’s a problem with my absolute decree because it’s only one page.  She was expecting a 30 page long documentation of my divorce.  Urmmm…well, no, that’s not what you get in the UK, when you go to the courts for a copy of your absolute decree, you receive the one page with the details on it.  She wasn’t happy that on the absolute decree it says if the proceedings are not contested the divorce becomes absolute in six weeks, the document according to her wasn’t absolute, it said in six weeks it would be….oh my god…can I please have permission to bash my head on the counter?

I just kept trying to explain, this is it, it’s what the courts give you, it has been stamped by the court and signed by the judge of the day, dated, signed and stamp, what else could I do?  We moved on to the other problem she uncovers.  My Portuguese passport name, yes that’s right, my own name is wrong! It still have my maiden & ex-husband’s name and does not match the Portuguese papers from the registrar office in Vila, where I’m registered to marry, they only have my maiden name.  In Portugal even when you’re married as a woman you still keep your maiden name.  For whatever reason the consulate in London they use the UK version of your name, adapting your husband’s name.

She asked for my ID card, as all Portuguese have to have one over there.  I explained we don’t need them in the UK where I live so there was no need for me to organise one.  ”Well…” she says, “…what name are you going to sign on the registrar on Saturday?”, I said, “mmm…my old name?” sort of taking a stab in the dark here.  She wasn’t happy about that at all, “NO…you can’t sign your….” this conversation then deteriorates into long winded back and forth up a blind alleyway discussion of what the UK residence are allowed to do with their names and what the Portuguese authorities don’t allow you to do.  I have never been so glad of living in the liberal UK with the wide freedom of calling yourself what you will.

And then bottom falls out of the sky…she says, “..where’s the certificate of no impediment?“

What Cerificate of No Impediment?
Yes, that was my question too.  Never heard of it, no one ever utter the phrase, in Portugal or at the consulate, I had no idea what it was…I know now!  The registrar in Maia said you have to have a certificate of No Impediment or a letter from the authorities of the country saying they have no such certificate, this is a requirement for those who are foreigners and want to be wed.  Certificate or letter, either,  you can not get married without it.  About now you can picture a big and very long water well…yes…with me falling in…

We came away agreeing that I was going to look into this certificate or letter and return to her.  My brother phones the British consulate in Porto to see if they can issue this certificate but no, since Bikerboy is not a resident in Portugal it has to be done by the UK registrars.  Bikerboy spends all of the Wednesday morning trying to find out what he can do.  We realised by then this certificate of no impediment requires notice of 21 days.  I’ve always been rubbish at maths at school but know that you can’t fit 21 days into 3 days.

The Horse Ain’t Dead Yet, Wednesday am.
Do you realise just how useless the certificate of no impediment is?  It’s basically a notice that your local registrar office puts up on the board for 21 days in case someone happens to see the notice and says, ‘hey, I know that person can’t get married’.   And maybe this sort of thing worked when we all lived in villages, didn’t travel much, everyone knew everyone else.  Try and explain how this notice works in today’s world of families, tribes dispersed all over the country, world.  How someone from the South Coast of England is going to walk into Hertfordshire’s registrar office to look at their notices to see who’s going to get married, just in case they know them?  It’s a bizarre rule that does not serve the purpose I’m guessing it was intended for.  Even with the crazy Portuguese rules I was encountering it appears that the Portuguese themselves have modernised this and can issue a certificate of no impediment in 24hrs for residences.  Great!

Wednesday morning there is very little I can do until I hear back from Bikerboy if he’s found a way around this certificate and I decided to take the morning off take the girls to the beach.  We met up with Rosa, a friend of my mother, who’s company we enjoyed and while chatting about wedding problems the phone rings and it’s Bikerboy with some good news.  We can’t get the certificate because of the 21 days but we can get hold of a letter issued by the general registrar office stating they have carried out a search.  This letter is called a Letter of No Trace.  This search is done right back to when Bikerboy was 16 until the system was last updated, 18 months ago, to see if he is eligible to get married.  You don’t get this with the certificate of no impediment, there’s no search.  Now to a common sense person doesn’t a search of  records sound more thorough than a notice in a little registrar’s office board?  Yep it does.  We just had to convince the Portuguese of the same…ok I know it’s far fetched but we were now desperate.

In the Meantime the Show Has To Go On, Wednesday pm.
While all of this was going on, the final planning had to proceed, menus finalised with caterers, meeting with venue owner, who on hearing the problems I was having was of great support to me, along with my childhood friend, Lina, the hairdresser.  I had hair rehearsal, girls hair cuts, nails.  Visit the bakers 15 miles away to choose wedding cake.  My poor brother was roped into helping choose the wedding cake and he was as much help as Bikerboy would have been, bless him.  I was also spending evening visiting relatives that were coming to the wedding but I hadn’t seen forever, getting their childrens’ names for the table settings.  I was on a hamster wheel.

My gran on the right and her childhood friend, Tia Lina.  Tia means auntie, auntie Lina, you’re called an auntie out of respect.

Need to Take a Little Pause Here…
Must tell you when writing up this event I came to this point last night and had to take a break after spending most of the day on it.  As well as coming to a natural break, I was, and am, dreading telling the rest of it, and have been delaying for the last two hours my very precious alone time to get stuck in.  You see, it’s not the end of the story that I have a problem with.  As you can see from the photos things look as if they went swimmingly and they did.  We ended up having exactly what we would have chosen, should have chosen, had we had an indication of how difficult it was going to be.  Weeks later we are still saying it was a beautiful day, I wish we had planned it so from the beginning, not gone through all the stress, and able to enjoy the days leading up to it.

Why do I have such a problem telling you about Thursday and Friday?  You see as you write detail, you’re half putting yourself back in that place and time, so your emotions of then surf again somewhat.  If I talk to Bikerboy or friends today about the wedding saga, we discuss generalities and have a laugh about how ridiculous it all got.  When you are writing detail you’re remembering exactly how it occurred, how you were feeling and reacting to things.  That’s my procrastination, not wanting to remember, and actually rather forget about how I felt.  This wasn’t the worst thing I’ve had to dealt with nor was I thinking it at the time.  I’ve had really awful things happen to make me appreciate what’s not so terrible in the grand scheme of things.  As we went through it what made this week seem so terrible was the cascade of events, we were sinking and we couldn’t see any lifeboats.

To make matters worse most of the week I couldn’t put my arms around Bikerboy’s and squeeze him tightly as I do when things turn difficult.  I missed him so much that week.  I felt completely on my own dealing with this.  Bikerboy was not there, the one person who would be feeling exactly the same as me, there’s definitely comfort in empathy.  My brother was so great with his help throughout the whole week. I couldn’t have done it without him, but he was no emotional replacement for my Better Half.  I was wound up like a coil, stress levels to the max, surviving on water and air and little nourishment, my appetite vanished. I was running around like a loon between Portuguese authorities and wedding prepping without really knowing if there was going to be a wedding.  Thinking all the time we have no idea, no control on how the story is going to end.