This one is a bit serious, you won’t be the first one to (try) and get married here but let me tell you, it’s not easy. I’m not going to say anything about in-laws and such, this is just the bureaucracy meant here. It’s based on personal experience and if you think it sounds bad you are wrong, we got of easy, invite a mixed couple over for a drink and you will hear some real good stories.
This little piece is not a ‘how to’ manual, there are too many different combinations possible of nationalities; I just want to tell you the obvious.
Start early: This is going to take you a lot of time, also stock-up on a load of patience. Quite often it turns out that the civil servant / embassy personnel is very helpful but has no experience with your particular combination of nationalities, that the rules have just changed, that you need some obscure piece of paper notarised and countersigned by your ministry of foreign affairs, or those of both parties or that they misunderstood you in the first place. To arrange immigration papers back home I started by saying we were not yet married but would be by the time we got there and after filling in a telephone book worth of forms they finally realised what I said and I had to fill out another.
Don’t trust only one answer: Because people may not be familiar with your combination of nationalities, the rules …. Well see above. No matter how certain the sound of the answers to your questions at the embassy, ministry or wherever don’t trust a single answer! Make sure you ask at least 2, possibly 3 different people in as many departments and you’ll be lucky if the answers have a reasonable overlap. I have absolutely no doubt about the good intentions of all the civil servants we spoke to but on hindsight not one had the ‘whole story’.
If it seems straightforward … it probably isn’t. Don’t assume that just because something seems logical to do it is what was intended. We had a whole load of documents requested and chopped and signed by all manner of parties because the embassies ‘list’ stated them as required. We were given the list in Singapore and assumed that everything on the list thus had to come out of Singapore, not so. I arranged a bunch of paperwork for a visa all at the immigration in Holland only to learn (while she was literally packing her bags) that the actual visa had to be picked up in Singapore, not at immigration in Holland. They seemed to think that that was logical and had not bothered to highlight it.
I could go on but won’t, just wanted to warn you not to think of it too easily. And did I mention patience ??
Chops required to certify that an original legal Singapore document was in fact original and legal.
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