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| Rio de Janeiro, Brazil |  Review on March 25, 2012: |
Journeyer
Rating:  | Review Topic: IR-1/CR-1 Visa
Our interview was scheduled for 7:15am on March 9, 2012, and we arrived at the consulate around 7am. I would advise arriving earlier than this as the line outside the consulate was already very long when we arrived.
When you are approaching the line there are some consulate workers who will come around and ask you if you have any electronic devices with you, which are not allowed. So don't take your cell phone or tablet, you can't get in the consulate with them.
Then while you are waiting in line, some other workers will come around, look to see if you have your passport and passport photos with you, and give you another form to fill out. Not sure what is on that form as my wife filled it out and I was way past tired of forms at this point. But I think it was just address and contact info.
Once you make it in the door, you have to go through a security check and then you basically have no idea where you are going, although there are some signs pointing to things if you are paying close attention. We wound up asking someone and they pointed us upstairs to an area where they were doing the CR-1 interviews. Once you are up there, you will get herded into some rows of chairs on the far side of the room so you can start waiting for what happens next. It's a lot like waiting at the DMV. There is a person at a desk at the back of the room and you will get called there first so that they can do an initial document check to see if you have all of your documents and in the right order.
The document requirement is something that I was very confused about at first, even though I had pretty much figured it out before we arrived. If you filed your petition in the US and submitted all of your original documents to NVC, you DO NOT have to produce those documents again at the consulate and you will not receive a packet 4 from the consulate. The packet 4 is an email from NVC confirming the completeness of the documents that you submitted to them and advising you of your interview date. If this is the case, the only thing you will need at the interview is the passport of the person immigrating and the sealed medical exam envelope. If you did not submit ALL of your original documents to NVC, you have to take the ones that you did not submit, including the 2 passport photos. Since we did submit everything already, we only needed my wife's passport and the sealed medical envelope. I hope that might help someone who was as confused about this as I was.
So after the original document check at the little desk in the room where you are waiting, you will get called to a door where someone will be waiting behind glass to do the real document check. The person who we got did not smile at all or act friendly in any way at all, it was quite chilly in there. Apparently there was some type of issue with the entries we had made on one of the forms concerning the dates that my wife had been in the US. She asked me how many times my wife had been in the US, and I told her 5 times. I still have not figured out what that was all about because I was very thorough with this information. Anyway, the person gave my wife another form and she had to write down 2 of the times that she was in the US on that form that apparently were not on the other form. Then our original documents were given back to us. After that, we were instructed to go downstairs and pay for shipping of the Visa to my wife's residence in Brazil, even though we had not received a visa yet...
After going downstairs and paying for shipping a visa that we had not been granted yet, we went back upstairs to wait again for the actual interview. By this time, we had been there for almost 5 hours.
Finally we were called to another little room with a person behind glass. Our interview was done by a blonde lady with glasses. I think she was American but she spoke good Portuguese. My wife said she was sure she was American because of her accent.
The lady started off by asking me where we met. I told her online but then after that we met in person in the US and gave her dates. Then she asked my wife what the name of the site was where we met.
She spoke to me in English and to my wife in Portuguese, without asking us anything about language preference. Both of us understood eveything she said in either language, so no issue there.
I tried to make a joke about the webiste that we met on and then the lady actually smiled and laughed a little. Even though she was not unfriendly at first, just totally neutral. Wow, finally broke the ice a little! I was feeling mighty chilly after that first document interrogation.
Then I think we were asked a trick question, but not sure, because the lady asked my wife where we lived here and she told her near Baltimore. Then she said to my wife that she didn't know much about Tenneseee. My wife appeared confused for just a second, but then she said 'No, Maryland, not Tennessee!', Then the lady looked at me and said, I thought you lived in Tennessee, and I said, 'No, we were married in Tennessee, we live in Maryland.' She asked me why we got married in TN, and I told her. Then she smiled and told us congratulations, I am going to approve your visa! Whooohoooo!, after 8 months, finally this is over! My wife cried a little. I started thinking about cerveja and caipirinhas over at Copacabana where we were staying.
The actual interview lasted 5 minutes, or less. The entire time spent at the consulate was 5+ hours.
My advice: Get there very early, probably 6am would not be a bad idea. Double and Triple check that you have all of your documents. The interview itself will be very easy if you are a real couple and actually know each other like a real couple would, you will not have any problems.
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Consulate / USCIS Member Review #9385