After yesterdays relatively painless experiences at the the Tax Office and the Foreign Ministry, bureaucracy caught up with us today at the Immigration Office where we were hoping to apply for my (Christian's) temporary residency permit.
The queue in front of us was about 50 strangers long, so we had little choice but to wait and subject ourselves to the crap spilling out of two wall mounted TV screens in the waiting area. Something to do with transforming
an insecure, depressed, overweight and poorly dressed woman into... well, something pretty similar but now with an ugly hair cut and weird cloths. All of this interrupted by commercials which advocated humungous fake breasts, air disinfectant(?!) and other futile things.
When it was our turn we got to speak to a helpful lady, who unfortunately couldn't process our application as we had to send it in by mail instead (... which explained why it said 'mail application' on the form). It was still good to have spoken to her as we weren't quite sure about whether our UK document needed translating first and a couple of other things. She also suggested that we should get another certified copy (ie copy of copy) of our notarised and legalised document from a local public notary and send that one in instead.
A public notary was just around the corner, in a little side alley. Time in there must have stood still for a few decades, with about half a dozen ladies hiding behind big old type writers and other obsolete looking machinery. It took another 45 minutes to get the 10 or so pages worth of document copied, each page stamped, sent off to the boss and signed, fee paid, etc.
Today it felt we are in some kind of real life treasure hunt game. We vaguely know what we need to do and as we go along we get more clues, some of them are little detours or unexpected turns. But overall we are making progress, sometime more and sometimes less. Tomorrow the residency application will go to the post office first thing in the morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment