Desastre com a Polícia Federal

I'd like to begin this post by asking you to think back to a time not so very long away when I declared my love for "Brazilian time," which is often not much like any defined system of time at all and is generally based around the following ideas and sentiments:
-It doesn't matter when something gets done as long as it gets done.
-Even if it doesn't get done, that doesn't really matter much either.
-(One hour later...) I tried my best to be on time, isn't that good enough?
-Don't rush me
-But I'm enjoying the scenery...
-But I LIKE walking really, really, really slowly!
As I mentioned before, there are aspects of this philosophy that I appreciate and identify with a great deal. However, as I found out today, it can also be somewhat frustrating, especially for someone not accustomed to a culture so largely based on leisure.

Any foreigner staying in Brazil for more than 30 days is legally required to register with the Federal Police Department. Registering is a very serious and important affair, and failure to do so results in costly fines for each day the foreigner fails to register after the 30 day deadline. Every foreign exchange student in my program was given strict instructions to treat the officials at the Police Department with respect and not to engage in any funny business, because, after all, these are the people who ultimately decide whether or not we get to stay in the country. Judging from the rigidity of these rules, it would seem that this would be a bureaucracy well accustomed to efficiency, would it not? Well...

Our group of twelve left at 7 a.m. from our school this morning expecting to wait in line for an hour or so before getting our papers promptly stamped and collected so that we could be back to PUC in time to catch the second half of our language-intensive classes. As it turned out, we arrived at the Federal Police Department, located in Rio's GIG airport, took our numbers, and sat down for an ample 8 hours. What the officers were actually doing with the 40 minutes they spent on each applicant when the actual process took less than 10 was something of a mystery to me until my number was finally called and I walked into my little booth only to be ignored for about 15 minutes while my interviewer chatted with his friends, called his significant other to ask her to bring him a hamburger, chatted some more when she came to deliver the burger, then asked her to please get him some fries from the airport food court, and finally got down to business, if you can call it that. After answering some questions about my reasons for coming to Brazil and signing a few documents, I thought we were through, but then he started discussing the difficulties of Portuguese language acquisition and I kind of went braindead for a few minutes.

After I was through, the line started moving a little more quickly, and everyone's mood began to improve, wanting to believe that after four hours of waiting we would soon be free, but then the calling number remained at 976 for about two hours and as our stomachs growled and our minds turned to mush we really began to lose it. In retrospect, I definitely got to know everyone in our group a lot better as we sunk slowly to insanity together and plotted ways to steal the bananas that sat so alluringly on the front desk, but at the time we were too frustrated to fully appreciate the bonding time. Despite this irritation, I'm glad that I can look back on our the situation with humor; if nothing else, it was an interesting glimpse of bureaucracy done the Brazilian way.