Residency Card Experience

This is the strange story of how I sort-of got my Spanish residency card (it still isn’t ready to be picked up).

When I went to go apply for my residency card, all my papers were good but the passport-style pictures we had taken at Walgreens in the US were apparently unacceptable. When my mom and brother went through the same process a couple weeks before, (it took a long time to get an appointment for me) the employee who approved them was baffled by the size of their photos. After much struggle, they just cut off the sides to make it smaller (they were very dramatic about it). The same thing happened to my dad. I, which I thought was lucky, had two photos that were taken on different occasions, one is in my current passport and the other is a backup. Because I had two that were pretty similar, we cut off the size of one of the photos to match it to the size my dad’s photo which had been cut down.

When we went to the appointment, the size of the photo was not the issue, it was the background color. I do not speak spanish so all I heard the employee say to my mom was blanco (white). I assumed that it was because the background of my photo was too white. For one of my two photos I thought there was no way to argue that the background wasn’t white, because it definitely is. For the other photo I thought there was a little brown so we might be able to use it as a non white background, even though I would still qualify it as a white. Turns out, he was flustered that the photo (according to him) did not have a white enough background. So he made us leave and go across the street to get a new photo. I was not ready at all because I had no idea that I was going to have my picture taken for a government document that day. We walked in, I sat down in front of the white screen, the lady there picked up her camera, I took off my mask for no more than five seconds, she took my picture, I put on my mask, and four copies of my picture were printed out (because they only come in four packs, obviously). We went back across the street and it all worked out, but it was still an aggravating process. Since you are given your picture back, because apparently only a scanned version of your is needed, I now have four copies of a really medicare picture of myself. Because I don’t have in person school this year, I thought it would be funny to send them to family members back in the U.S. as my school picture for this year. So, if you receive a copy in the mail, enjoy! You can totally frame it, though it is only about 1×1 inches big.