The Bureaucratic Hell-Hole That Is Madrid

Being an Immigrant Isn’t Always Fun

Before jumping into this essay, I am excited to announce the recent publication of my short story collection (a long time coming), AMERICAN FREAKS. Please do me a huge favor and buy, read and review the book.

BUY AMERICAN FREAKS HERE

Read the book here on my Stack.

Brief description of the book:

In the vein of Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, Jack Kerouac and Ottessa Moshfegh, Michael Mohr offers 21 gritty, raw, honest stories covering his drinking years (mostly) in the form of (mostly) autobiographical fiction which cover everything from hitchhiking across America to a clash with Hell’s Angels to being kidnapped during an alcoholic blackout in Mexico to shooting guns while high on LSD. Always searching for the deeper meaning in these sordid adventures, Mohr keeps you entertained, astonished and, often, shocked.

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*Update: Finally, on 5/30/25, we went back with our special paper and finished the TIE process. We still have to return in 30 days, however, and get in another long, slow line in the blistering heat to COLLECT the card.

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*Originally Written 5/22/25

Until a few days ago we hadn’t really had any “bad” experiences in Spain. The people—minus our irritated, mumbling taxi driver from the airport who basically hurled our poor cats terrified in their crates into the back of his van when we first arrived in Madrid on April 3^rd (a thousand years ago, aka 7 weeks back)—have generally been very kind, open, friendly.

Which is why our experience at the BBVA Bank a quarter mile from our apartment a few days back was unexpected.

Here’s the pertinent info. Everyone who emigrates to Spain has to, within the first three months of moving to the country, get their TIE card. TIE stands for “Tarjeta de Identidad del Extranjero,” aka the Foreigner’s Identification Card. It makes you official for the first year in Spain. We’d been dreading it because 1. We’d already made a herculean effort to GET to Spain in the first place (read earlier accounts of this Kafkian Hell); 2. Doing more paperwork sounded exhausting and superfluous; 3. Everyone I’d spoken to about the TIE process (Americans and Brits in AA meetings here, mostly) had told me that it was a bureaucratic nightmare.

But, nevertheless, getting the TIE is necessary.

The first thing we had to do—before even gathering our mass of new paperwork; I could have produced a thick novel with the mountain of paper at this point—was go to our new Spanish bank, the BBVA on Gran Via a quarter mile away, which we’d already gone to once before to open a Spanish bank account and order debit cards. (To get the TIE we had to have a Spanish bank account; we needed this for other things, too, like internet.) When we went into this bank the first time, weeks ago, it was a younger man in his twenties and an older woman, both very friendly. The older woman had helped us and she spent a long time with us, holding our hands and helping is through the process even though she spoke very little English and we very little Spanish. She even—ludicrously, we thought—apologized for not speaking better English. English, she said, is the language of the globe. True…but we’re foreigners in Spain. We should know better Spanish.

Anyway. The point is: Our first bank visit was a good experience. We left that day tired but smiling and grateful.

This experience was very, very different.

Already we were annoyed because, as our immigration agent told us (we paid for a guy to help us through all of this), we had to go first thing when they opened, around 8:30am, which cut right into our sacred morning routines; my writing and Britney’s yoga/working out etc. But whatever: Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. The classic, sad story of adulthood is it not?

When we walked in the place was empty. It was the same two employees. Our goal: Deposit a couple hundred dollars into our account. Aka: Put cash into our BBVA account. This was a requirement for the TIE, which was the following day at 3pm. (More on that soon.) We spoke with the younger man this time. He was friendly at first and told us to sit down. We explained that we needed our debit cards first—we still hadn’t received them in the mail—and he handled that, going into the back room and returning with our cards. There was some back and forth sending a text with a new code for the pin, etc etc. But we got that part done.

But when we explained about having to deposit our cash and that we needed an official “stamp” for the TIE card, the guy became confused. We used our phones to translate. He said there was no “stamp.” We reread our instructions. It clearly said we needed a stamp from the bank. He repeated that there was no stamp. He told us we needed to do it all ourselves at the ATM. We translated our TIE/bank instructions into Spanish and showed him and he shook his head, clearly annoyed now, and said once more that we had to do it ourselves at the ATM.

So, frustrated—it’s early, we’ve barely had any caffeine and haven’t eaten yet—we walked to the ATM. The problem was: When we pressed “English” as the language, it didn’t work; it stayed in Spanish. I didn’t have the Google Translate app on my phone. Britney did, but she wasn’t getting service at first. By now people were also starting to walk into the bank, happy people with smiling faces, ignorant of our dumb plight.