Expat Community > Colombia

elpdiver
Joined 2019
Posts: 1454

Mil Gracias

1 year ago

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions and directions for making my M visa application online. Gathering all of the document in preparation took about a month; but could have been a few weeks or less if I have to repeat due to some omission or lapsed date of documents.

Some notable highlights are:
I was able to have a person pick up my migrations records by sending
a poder that I had notarized in the Consulate in Houston. This poder was scanned and emailed to Colombia and printed on a high resolution printer and was accepted. Once the certificate was picked up I was then sent an electronic copy and printed. No need for any expensive mail options.

The next bump in the road was making the file sizes smaller. The real problem was the marriage certificate. It had been copied from a binder without taking it from the binder and the edge was less than perfect (imagine making a copy from a book and the parts near the spline are distorted. Scanning in color and high resolution made a file of 32 MB. The online compression apps got it down to 3.5 MB. Finally I found that I could make a scan in Gray Scale and compress it sucessfully. Of course I had to combine the front and back page scans first.

Similarly the Migratory Certificated had to be scanned front and back and combined and then my wife's and mine had to be combined.

All in all this took about four hours, mostly due to my locating and learning to use the free combine and compression apps. If I had to redo it now it would take about two weeks to gather the data and an hour to scan and apply.

Two weeks of the delay was getting the appointments for the Houston Consulate. They only make appointments Friday morning at nine a.m. and in my experience they are fully booked two minutes later. Particularly frustrating is it seems that multiple people can be trying to get the same appointment at the same time and the fasted keyboarder wins and then you have to start over again. You only get about two attempts and then they are all booked.

Thanks to Blenheim, Elexpatriado, fecherklyn, MTBE, smkiat, and Vikingo for your information.

Now it is wait and see.

lpd

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Expat Community > Colombia

Mil Gracias

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