Getting Married in Mexico

Getting married in Mexico is not easy. Worse if you are a foreigner. Want to hear about what I'm having to do? Okay! Well, first we went to Registro Civil to find out what the requirements are. They gave me a paper with four things that I needed. 1. Get my birth certificate apostilled and translated to Spanish. 2. Have a marriage search done, apostilled, and translated. 3. Have my I.D. translated. 4. Get permission from Immigration to marry. In the words of my childhood heartthrob Magnum P.I., "I know what you're thinking". What in the world is apostilled. Apostille is a French word which means a certification. It is commonly used in English to refer to the legalization of a document for international use. So I got numbers 1 & 2 done in Fresno and that cost me about $70. Then I went to get a tourist visa since I do not have citizenship here. There I met an English speaking Mexican who has the teeny tiniest little office. He is in the business of helping English speaking foreigners get various legal documents. He gave me three options. I could do everything myself, have him tell me what to do, or have him do it all. All three options are exspensive. I chose for him to tell me what I needed to do and paid him the $20 fee for that. Him telling what to do was not the exspensive part. So he started doing that. Then he asked me what David did for a living. I told him that he worked for the ministry. So he figured that David did not earn much money and said that he would do the paperwork for me for free. What a blessing!

So he did my paperwork and I paid him for the copies. Then I bought a visa, went to the bank and paid $240 for one permission and $60 for something else. Only the Mexican government knows what that was for. Anyway, David and I went and got our blood tests done and then took the results to a doctor. There they took our weight and blood pressure and signed a paper saying that they talked to us about ALL kinds of things. They actually didn't talk to us about ANYTHING. So that was almost $50 for the blood work and doctor visit. Next I turned in my paperwork to Immigration and they said that the permission should be ready by April 7th. Then we went back to Registro Civil and and bought an application and found out that we would have to get married in 14 days or do the blood tests and doctor visit again. Why you ask? Because the blood tests are only good for 15 days. We had them done the day before. I wouldn't get the permission until one day before the blood work expired. Also I still hadn't completed number 3 of the requirements which was to get my I.D. translated. So now one option was to go back to Immigration and ask them if they could rush my permission and then request an urgent ceremony for which we would have to pay extra, of course. And the other option was to wait until the 7th to get my permission and then do the blood work and doctor visit again. Which of course we would have to pay again. It came out to be just about the same price. So we decided to go and cry to Immigration and see if they could speed up my permission. Well, of course the person that does the permissions was on vacation, but they said that they would have it by March 31st. Praise God! As for my I.D. I was told that if I use my passport I don't need to have it translated because it's already in three languages with Spanish being one. So I'll see if they accept that. Last night we had to attend a two hour pre-marital class. Yet another requirement. Actually, they said that it wasn't required, but David said that we needed to play it safe and not let our non-attendance be a reason to deny us our civil ceremony. So we went. It wasn't bad. We also had to ask them to rush the proof that we attended. Tomorrow I will be a busy little beaver. Collecting all of our papers from different places and turning them in at Registro Civil and paying for our ceremony and for them to rush it. Another $130. Oh yeah, we have to have four witnesses. FOUR!