Because Everyone Needs a Girl Friday
After years of being in Mexico on tourist visas, flitting in and out every six months as the government requires, we finally broke down and applied for our FM2s.
Until now, living off tourist visas has not been a problem. Friends would invite us to their wedding or a special birthday celebration would demand that we leave the country.
In a sign that we have been in Mexico for a while now, such invitations are drying up. Our next enforced departure was supposed to be this October, but for the first time we had nowhere to go.
Committed to becoming legit, we called Yesenia, a.k.a. Girl Friday Merida, to handle the job. After handing over our passports, tourist visas, some bank statements, and a bit of cash, she gave us a receipt and said all would be taken care of within two weeks.
True to her word, two weeks later we were at the immigration office collecting our shiny new FM2 visas. No filling in forms. No lines. No fuss. The most arduous bit of the whole process was waiting 10 minutes to collect our passport photos at Walmart.
Things have gone so well with Girl Friday that we’re now hiring her to manage a bunch of tasks that we can’t seem to find the time to do - like calling around for material pricing for our build (where we hope to get non-gringo prices) and securing us a kilo of vanilla beans. Having someone local do these things for us is a godsend.
