Not Every System Here is Broken

While I'm still trying to figure out how to conclude my naturalization process (which now involves my parents' passports, even though people in this country have told me that it is not a sufficient proof of citizenship...I was told that I need a letter or document from the US government to prove that my parents are US citizens...I'm sorry, but considering that you need proof of US citizenship to get a US passport and a US passport can only be issued by the US government, why is it such a document unacceptable?), I have been doing some other paper pushing here in Cuenca.  And it took less than 45 minutes!

Some of you may know that back in September, after months of looking at houses and apartments to buy, Carlos and I bought some land instead.  It's in a quiet development that is about a 10 minute drive from the center of town, near the one of the rivers.  And it's across the street from one sibling and one house away from another.

Anyway, even though we bought the land months ago, we never got around to changing the name of the owner of the property (notice that it says "owner" not "owners" the land can apparently only be registered in one person's name).  In order to start designing the house we need a design permit, and to get a design permit we need the property in one of our names.  So we gathered up all the documents and went to the office where the property owners are changed.

We only had to wait about 10 minutes to be seen.  After showing all of our documents we were told that we needed to have paid the taxes 2011, not just 2010.  But we thought we could pay the taxes if the land wasn't in our name.  It turns out, that not only you can, but you must.  Fortunately, the office to pay was in the same building that we were in.  As we entered to pay, we saw that the line was about 30 people long.  But the line for parents carrying infants and pregnant women was only three deep.  And I'm already showing.

It took only a few minutes to pay the taxes and make copies.  I then returned to the office and waited another 10 minutes to be seen again.  We had all the forms in order and the process was completed right then and there.  How easy was that?

The next step in the process is to get a design permit.  We need a few more documents for that, like a plat of the property and an estimate of the total area of the finished house (which seems to be a catch-22, you need to have a design to get the permit for the design).  Hopefully that process will go as smoothly as this one did.