The Romanian Visa Paradox - XII

PART XII – The Spanish Assumption

This one is fresh. Just happened a few hours ago.

I applied for my latest visa by the end of October 2010 and it was approved and I was asked to come receive the ID card in 10 days, which meant the first week of November.

Now, from experience I knew that 10 days was closer to someone’s gluteal anatomical region than to an accurate date to receive the ID. Everybody knows that. For the past 6 years, whenever they said 10 days it invariably took 3 months. Their excuse being that the ID cards are printed in Germany. Which I always thought it was kinda preposterous. After all, it would be ridiculous for a country to have immigrant registration cards printed in another country, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, they said 10 days. So I decided to be a little optimistic this time. You know, half full glass bullshit and all. I waited 15 days and went there to see whether maybe, in an act of pure quantum fluctuation chance, a holographic ID printer machine suddenly materialized in the immigration office building.

Well, of course it didn’t. This is Romania, after all. 

And they say that “maybe in January” it will be ready. Three months, as usual.

You know, I never understood why they do this. They know the cards won’t be ready in 10 days. WE ALL know. Everybody knows. So why bother say that it will be ready in 10 days when obviously it won’t?

I tried to hypothesize that maybe they believe that if they say that the cards will be ready in 3 months the applicants will be angry and they may get a situation in their hands. 

But then again, do they REALLY believe that the applicants will be less angry if they tell them to come back there, waste at least half a day of work, stay in queue and then be told that they have to come back in 3 months and in this meantime they will be unable to even movement their bank accounts because they won’t have an ID card?

And if they want to leave the country to go back to see their families over the holidays they will have to write a detailed request for a declaration from the immigration office that their papers are in transit but they have the right to leave and return to Romanian territory, then stay in a queue for hours to be able to apply the request and then wait 10 days to receive the declaration?

It boggles my mind that someone may have the slight inclination to have the hunch that logic like this can possibly stand a minimal chance to work.

Anyway, as we entered January I decided that no more half full glass bullshit will be granted anymore. So I waited 2 more weeks to go back there to retrieve my ID card. And that was today.

I arrived there at 8:45 and surprisingly enough, there were no queues. Actually I was the only one there. I presented the receipt to the man behind the counter and he made me sign a list and gave me my ID.

As I check the date in the ID I noticed this: 

Nationality: Brazilian

Place of birth: Spain

So I pointed it to the man behind the counter and he dismissed it nonchalantly: Oh, it doesn’t matter. What counts is the Nationality and that is correct.

I told him that it DOES matter and it is NOT correct because whenever I try to movement my bank account they check even the most ridiculously irrelevant data in my ID and that stupid mistake would prevent me from using my own bank account.

His first reaction was a typical Romanian instinctive one: He immediately adds: “Pai, nu e vina mea!” (It’s not my fault!)

I tell him, it’s not mine either. But that’s not the point. The point is that this problem has to be solved.

So then he says I will have to apply for another ID card and it will take 10 days for me to get it. And I told him that I don’t want to wait 3 more months for yet another ID card. As compounded with the 3 months that I already waited it will mean that I will spend HALF of my visa period WITHOUT the visa.

He got angry and started yelling: "WHO said 3 months??? I said 10 days!! 3 months means 90 days, not 10!! I said 10!!!”

So I tried to explain to him that whenever I apply for a visa they say 10 days but it actually mean 3 months because I receive the visa 3 months later, not 10 days later. And I showed to him that I was supposed to receive this very ID card in November, not January.

And he says this was an exceptional case because there were problems while printing the cards… And I added: yes, I know… They are printed in Germany after all… And then he goes indignant: "WHAT?? Absolutely NOT! These cards are printed IN ROMANIA!!”

Well, so much for the standard “you have to understand, these cards are printed in Germany…” excuse that I’ve been receiving for the past several years…

Anyway, he finally calls someone else to dump this problem on.

A lady comes and I have to explain the problem all over again. She then says I have two alternatives: 

1 – She can give me an official declaration from the immigration office that the data in the ID card is mistaken and what the correct data should be. But I will have to keep the declaration and the ID together at all times.

2 – I can apply for a new ID card, for a fee.

I asked her how long do they take and she says the declaration can be made immediately and the ID card will take at least one month.

To which I add: your colleague here said 10 days. You say 1 month. But we all know it will take at least 3 months, right?

She laughed and says: “I see you know Romania very well.”

I tell her that I won’t pay for any more IDs and spend half of my visa period without the visa so give me the declaration.

As she leaves I turn to the guy behind the counter, who was present during the whole conversation and asked him: “See? Why do you say 10 days when we all know it takes 3 months?” And his response was a typical Romanian one: “Pai, asa e” (Well, that’s it.)

I waited for 40 minutes and the lady comes back with a folder and a smile. The folder was the one containing my dossier. She then holds it 20Cm from my face, with her finger pointing to a specific point in the copy of my passport and she says triumphantly: “LOOK HERE!! See here? Can you read what is written here??”

As she was holding the folder right on my nose, I had to pull my head back a little and read: Place of birth: Piedade – SP, BRAZIL

And she smiles with that “AHAAAAAAAAA!!!” expression and adds: “See? Piedade – SPANIA!!!! And it was NOT ME who wrote this because this is your passport!!” (Again, the typical “It’s not my fault” attitude).

All that was missing was the “nyah, nyah, nyah!” because she was indeed taunting me.

So I have to gather all the patience that I do not have, especially at this point, and explain to her like one explains to a 5 years old kid.

A mentally challenged 5 years old kid.

A lobotomized mentally challenged 5 years old kid:

Look: “Place of birth: Piedade – SP, BRAZIL”

“Piedade” is the name of the city.

“SP” is the name of the state, the state of São Paulo.

“BRAZIL” is the name of the country.

If Brazil is the country, it can NOT be Spain because Spain and Brazil are different countries.

And more: IF Piedade was in Spain then it would be written: Piedade – ES because in Spanish, Spain is written España and in Portuguese it is Espanha.

You see, when you read “Ploiesti – PH, Romania” you don’t assume that it means “Ploiesti – Philippines, Romania”, do you?

She finally says ok and asks me to wait while she makes the declaration. I asked her how long it will take and she says: “Half an hour because the director has to sign it and he haven’t arrived yet.”

I don’t know why she said half an hour when we all know that it is impossible…

Three hours later and I finally receive the declaration. No “sorry for the inconvenience” whatsoever.

Now I have to keep this half A4 piece of paper with my ID card at all times. And I mean half A4, not A5. It is written on an A4 sheet and the unused part thorn off with a ruler so badly that she cut ¼ of the official stamp off.

I really, really hope this is going to be the last time I will need a Romanian visa.

The Romanian Visa Paradox - XI

PART XI – The Shaken, Not Stirred Apparition

 

As I arrived in Sofia there was a girl from the Bulgarian offices of my company waiting for me. I wasn’t able to determinate whether she was happy or annoyed to skip a day of work to accompany a Brazilian-Japanese from Romania in his quest for a visa.

After doing some currency exchange, we took a cab to the Romanian Embassy, which by the way, is located on Mihai Eminescu avenue… I wonder how much spaga changed hands for that. 

We enter the embassy and ask for our inside string and are informed that he’s out for the moment but will be back in an hour.  There’s a café behind the embassy so we decided to go there for a coffee while we wait.

We took a table and ordered coffee and I noticed that in the table in front of ours was a man in his 50s, mostly bald with grey moustache and goatee and wearing an olive green military style jacket. 

I was wondering whether he was a retired general when the front door opens and in comes a tall man, black hair, sharp black suit. I almost could hear the James Bond theme playing in the background. And I couldn’t believe when he shook hands with the retired general and sat down at the same table and started to talk to him.

I was in disbelief. I didn’t know if I should laugh or just let my jaw drop. I was trying to decide when the ex-general reaches down, grabs a briefcase, opens it extracts a brown envelop with a logo on it (SPECTRE, perhaps?) and handles it to the Bond-like man. 

I decided to let my jaw drop while wondering if that was maybe an on-location film set and started looking around for a camera crew filming the latest Bond movie or perhaps one of those hidden camera programs playing a prank on unsuspecting people.

Nope, no camera crew around.

Is this some sort of show they put on for tourists? Nah. That was just a small café in a back corner of Sofia… Not many tourists here.

Maybe a prank by the people of the company? I look at the girl who’s accompanying me. She was sipping her cappuccino and looking out through the window. No. No one in the company has that kind of imagination and wit… 

As I was immerse in these thoughts the men stand up, shake hands and the Bond-like man leaves.

I wanted to follow him to see if he drives away in an Aston Martin but I was half afraid of looking ridiculous for doing so and half afraid of being shot by henchmen. So I just continued to sip my coffee, smiling and shaking my head in disbelief.

After an hour we went back to the embassy.

I met our inside man, gave him my passport and all the papers. He flicked through them and put a stamp in my passport for a work permit visa and that was it. And I wondered why this time I didn’t have to go back to Romania and come back here after a month to receive the visa. But I didn’t ask, in case he had just forgotten and gave me the visa by mistake. So that was it.

The company girl took me to the railway station and I invited her for lunch, which she accepted. We had lunch while I told her the joys of traveling in cryogenic trains and other adventures in my quests for Romanian visas and she tried to convince me quite hard that what we’ve seen is not the nicest parts of Sofia and she begged me not to judge Sofia from what I’ve seen.

After lunch I told her that she doesn’t have to stay with me until my departure, which would be in the evening, and told her she can go do whatever she had to do. I hope she didn’t go back to work and just took the rest of the day off. And I hope she found carrying this unusual geek around Sofia less unpleasant than her average day at work. 

She missed the whole Bond episode though.

The rest of the trip was relatively uneventful.

I had my visa and I was going home.

I decided to get a ticket in a sleeping car. At least, if there’s no heat I will have a blanket.

There was heat though. Too much, actually. 

As usual, on CFR trains the heaters are binary. They are either on at maximum or completely off.  1 or 0. 

But I preferred lightly cooked than totally frozen this time.

The Romanian Visa Paradox - X

PART X – The Railway Thermal Deficiency

            Due to events that started with the armored panties Cristina incident and compounded with my wife’s extreme devotion to the Romanian corrupted authorities’ ways, her insistence that I conform with the filthiness of this system and other minor and major circumstances, by 2005 I was single again.

            My residence visa was based on me being married to a Romanian citizen and that was not the case anymore. Therefore, I had to request a change of visa status to a work permit based residence. And guess what? I had to go out of the country to request this visa in a Romanian consulate abroad.

            As my company has offices in Bulgaria they also have lots of pull-able strings within the Romanian Embassy so the company arranged for me to obtain my visa there.

            I was in the middle of my winter vacation when I got a phone call from my company at 16:30, telling me that the string inside the Romanian consulate in Bulgaria became available for pulling and the window of opportunity for the string pulling was very limited, therefore I had to be in Sofia by the next morning, which meant I had to board the train in a couple of hours. 

It was very fortunate that as I don’t like to travel alone, I was spending my vacation at home. On the other hand, I had to travel alone to Sofia.

Anyway, I scrambled to get all my documents together and rushed to the train station and there I was again chasing after a visa in the middle of the Eastern European winter.

After all the rush to get to the train station in time, as I arrived at the station there was an announcement that the train to Sofia, which was coming from Moscow, is going to be delayed for 1:30 hours due to the snow.     

While I waited for the train I noticed a group of four or five girls nearby talking in a language that I couldn’t identify. 

A few minutes later and I noticed that one of the girls was staring at me and my experienced instinct prepared me for the possible mockery that could follow.

To my surprise, the girl detached from the group, approached me and asked me if I was Japanese, in Japanese!

We talked for a while and she told me that they were from Macedonia and studying at Bucharest University. She loves languages, especially Japanese and her dream is to go to Japan one day.

The delay stretched to 2 hours and we finally boarded the train. As the train was coming from Moscow, half of the cars were Russian and half Romanian and as the train crosses the border with Bulgaria it would be joined by a couple of Bulgarian cars as well.

As I board my car I noticed that the Macedonian girls boarded a different one, so well, I guess I’ll be travelling alone.

I finally settled in my compartment and I notice that the car is cold but I, optimistically (or stupidly) assumed that they would start the heating as the train leaves the station.

Well, so much for the half full glass bullshit. The train leaves and there’s no heating coming. I had to keep my heavy winter jacket on.

A few minutes after ticket check I hear a commotion down the corridor of the car. Apparently the Macedonian girls boarded the wrong car and the conductor was relocating them to the same car as I was on.

As they were settling down in their compartment the girl who speaks Japanese noticed me in the corridor and invited me to come over to talk. I went over there and we talked for a while, mainly about Japan and the cold in the train. After a while I went back to my own compartment.

Sometime later the door to my compartment opens and the girl who speaks Japanese says: “She wants to talk to you.”  She then swiftly pushes one of her friends inside, steps out and closes the door after her.

As I related in Part VII, I had already lost an opportunity to meet a nice girl due to my shy geekness. I learned the lesson so this time I put on a friendly face and invited her to take a seat.

Apparently the girl, though very pretty, was even shier and geekier than me. 

She timidly says: “Hi, I’m sorry, I don’t speak Japanese…” I tell her that English or Romanian would do just fine. She smiles and relaxes a little and tells me her name is Vanya and that she’s studying medicine at the University of Bucharest. I was curious as to why do they come from Macedonia to Romania to study and she tells me that the conditions in Macedonia are very bad so they can’t afford to study in a Western European country but it is so bad that even Romania is much better than Macedonia so they come here. And I had difficulties imagining that any other European country could be worse than Romania…

Then while we were talking we crossed the border into Bulgaria and the board officers came on the train for passport check. The girl excused herself and went to her compartment to get her passport but as she was coming back the officers tell her to remain in her own compartment.

As they finished checking my passport, I tried to go over to the girls’ compartment but the officers were checking their passports and asked me to remain where I was. While I waited at my compartment’s door the Japanese speaking girl peeked out of their compartment and I signaled her that I still wanted to talk to Vanya and she whispered: Don’t worry, she will come back. 

So I went back into the compartment and waited. As the train started moving I went over there and the compartment was empty. I looked through the window and the girls had disembarked and the Japanese speaking girl was trying to say something to me. I opened the window and she said: “Sorry! It was too cold in that train. We decided to get off here and take a bus to Skopje!”

Vanya was a few meters behind her, with the other girls, waving goodbye rather reluctantly.

So I went back to my solitary and cold compartment.

As the night progressed the car became even colder and I started to shiver and the condensation on the windows started turning to ice.

As I was pacing up and down the corridor I met a guy in the next compartment. He was from Portugal so I had the opportunity to polish my rather rusty Portuguese with him.

Apparently he was even less tolerant to the cold than me and he couldn’t stay still and continued pacing the corridor and I went back to my compartment to sit down. A few minutes later he came back and called me to accompany him to the next car. 

It was the Russian half of the train. The door at the entrance of the corridor was closed but the heater was right in that area that separates the corridor to the end of the car so we just stayed there, leaning against the heater.

A few minutes later the conductor of the Russian car saw us standing there and came over to check.

It was a woman. Well, sort of. She was huge. The incarnation of Mother Russia itself.

She mumbled something in Russian and pointed the direction back to our car. I tried to tell her that there was no heating in our car and we were cold, showing to her that we were shivering. She says, rather vehemently and in an almost masculine voice: “Nyet! Go bieck!” while pointing out firmly with her big finger.

We reluctantly left and she locked the passage behind us.

We went back to my compartment and continued the trip in silence as our shivering and teeth clattering prevented us from talking.

A few hours later, a lady dressed in railway uniform passed in the corridor and saw us shivering there. Apparently she took pity on us, said something in Bulgarian (that’s when we realized she was the conductor of the Bulgarian part of the train) and motioned us to follow her.

She took us to the Bulgarian car. The HEATED Bulgarian car.  She pointed to some empty seats and let us stay there.

Slowly I felt all my muscles relax, like my blood was slowly thawing and starting to flow again. It was like life itself was infiltrating my body again.

So that’s how it feels to be cryogenically frozen and waking up in the future… Wait a second! I grabbed my mobile phone and checked the calendar: 2005. Ok. So that’s how it feels to be cryogenically frozen and then thawed after several hours… 

I was exhausted after a long cold night shivering and pacing around to keep myself warm. I fell asleep instantly.

I woke up with the sun on my face. The warm, life giving sun on my face.

After all the delays and the sleep, I had no idea where we were. I tried to look at the name of the stations as we passed them but they were all written in Cyrillic, with no subtitles. Then I realized I had no way of knowing when we arrive at Sofia because I simply have no idea how Sofia is written in Cyrillic!

I tried to ask the conductor but she didn’t understand English nor Romanian. So I took my notebook and drew a clock face showing the time now and wrote below it: Sofia? She then took the paper and pen and drew a clock face showing 9:30 and wrote below it: София.

Ok, so I had to keep an eye for a station named COONR.

The Romanian Visa Paradox - IX

PART IX – The Belarusian Capacitance

So a month later and I was going back to Budapest again.

By a strange coincidence every time I took the train to Hungary I was giving exactly the same seat in the same car. 

I boarded the train in Ploiesti and when I entered the compartment where my seat was supposed to be, there was a young man seated on it. I excused myself and pointed to him that he was on my seat and he apologized and told me that he wasn’t supposed to be in that car anyway. I asked him what happened and he explained:

He’s Austrian and is traveling from Bucharest to Vienna. He had a sleeping car ticket but when the conductor came to check his ticket he was called by the next car’s conductor and when he came back the conductor had lost his ticket so he told the young man to move to the non-sleeping car and take any seat that is not occupied.

Well, that in itself is disturbing but then I asked him why is he in the train to Budapest as there is a Bucharest – Vienna train? And he explained that when he went to buy the ticket at Bucharest station he asked for a ticket to Vienna but the ticket vendor wasn’t sure if there was a direct train to Vienna and she couldn’t check if there was one because the computer network was down at the station. So she suggested he takes the train to Budapest and then take another train to Vienna from there.

Really, now I’ve been living in Romania for 8 years and I still find it hard to believe that it is possible for these things to happen.

As the train left Ploiesti we talked about traveling and visas and he told me that when he was a student, he and a friend used to go to Cuba, buy cigars and then sell them in the US for a pretty good profit as Austrians could get Cuban visas easier than Americans. And he told me that the last time he did that, on the way to board the plane to US they were delayed at passport control and by the time they were released the boarding gate had already been closed. Airport officials were trying to find a way to get them into the plane and finally they decided to use a forklift to lift the guys into the airplane through the galley compartment of the plane. Mind you, the galley compartment access is a trapdoor in the cargo bay of the plane where the galley boxes containing the flight’s meals are loaded directly into the food shelves in the plane’s galley. So from the flight attendant’s point of view, these two guys simply popped into the plane from the food cupboard. Which caused quite a commotion in the plane and more delays. And considering that Cuba is quite a paranoiac communist country it was surprising that it didn’t cause an international incident.

When the train stopped in Brasov, another passenger came into our compartment and started talking to us. 

            He asked me where am I from and as I told him Brazil, he told me that he has been in Brazil and Peru. I asked him if he’s been there for business or pleasure and his answer was: “I was there in a… Well… Let’s say it is a sort of business” so I asked him what line of business he’s and his answer was: “I work for God”. To which I asked: “So are you some kind of priest or missionary?” And he answers: “Mmm…. Yeah… I suppose we could say that I am a kind of priest…” 

            He was obviously trying too hard to create an aura of mystery around himself so I immediately lost any interest in talking to him and just let him talk to the Austrian. I put on my earphones and started to listen to some music in my mp3 player and ended up dozing off.

            When I woke up the two of them were apparently engaged in an animated conversation. The Austrian was saying: So I met this beautiful girl online, she’s from Belarus… And I immediately thought: Uh oh… This sounds like the beginning of a very interesting story with a very bad ending. So I started paying attention.

            And he was telling about this beautiful blonde Belarusian girl and how he met her in a web site, how they started talking every day, how he started feeling that there was a connection between them, how he realized they were in love… And at every line he said, the “priest” was saying “Oh, I am sure you two are very happy now”. 

            So he continued:

            “We decided to get married and that she should move with me in Austria.”

            “Oh… I’m sure you two are very happy now!”

            “So I wanted to give her the wedding of her dreams…”

            “Oh, this is so beautiful! I’m sure you two are very happy now!”

            “And I arranged for us to get married in this beautiful chapel in the mountains with only my close friends as guests…”

            “Oh, this is so perfect! I’m sure you two are very happy now!”

            “And I bought this nice apartment in Vienna and we moved there…”

            “Oh… I’m sure you two are very happy living there!”

            “And everything was going so well…”

            “Ah see? I knew you two are very happy!”

            “And one day I got home and there was an ashtray in the living room, but she doesn’t smoke”

            The “priest” pauses.

            “I asked who has been there and she said it was a girlfriend of hers…”

            “Ah, see? It was nothing after all…”

            “And another day there was two glasses of wine in the bedroom…” 

            Silence…

            “And I asked her why there were wine glasses in the bedroom and she said her girlfriend came and they drank wine and she wanted to clean the place before I come home and started gathering the things and when I arrived she had the glasses on her hand and went to the bedroom to arrange her hair and forgot the glasses there…”

            Silence…

            “And another day I got home early and she was in bed and I asked what’s going on and she got angry and we had a fight…”

            Silence…

            “And I found out that it wasn’t any girlfriend visiting her. It was some of my friends and every time I confronted her about this we would fight and she would beat me…”

            Silence… And you could hear the “priest’s” jaw drop.

            “Then she started saying that she can’t live like this, with me controlling her all the time so she said we have to divorce and she called her father…”

            Silence…

            “Her father and brother came to fight with me and demand that we divorce. So we divorced, she took all my money, I had to sell the apartment… Now I live alone.”

            The compartment was very silent until we reached Budapest.

            It may sound anti-climatic but the rest of the trip was uneventful.

            I simply arrived at the consulate, waited for a while in the cold street, got called inside, had my passport stamped with the visa, walked around Budapest, boarded the train home and that was it.

            No pretty girls staring at Japanese geeks, no megalomaniac consulate officers, no eccentric bag ladies in train stations, no greedy train conductors.

            All’s well that ends well but this whole visa business left me an indelible bitter taste in my mouth. The impression that I am a castaway, marooned in an alternate universe where things do not make sense, where laws are created to protect criminals and punish innocents, where being wrong is the only way to be right, where no good deeds go unpunished.

            Stop this universe, I want to get off.

The Romanian Visa Paradox - VIII

PART VIII – The Harassment Instability

            After the consulate business I still had to wait until evening for the train back to Romania. I didn’t want to stray much in that seedy area of the city to I spent most of the time walking around the consulate area and the banks of the Danube.

            I boarded the train without incidents and in the same compartment was a Romanian girl. We started talking and she told me that her sister was married to a Hungarian man and had just given birth so she has spent the past three months helping her sister with the house chores. And in this period, she also went visit some friends in Amsterdam. 

            We crossed the border into Romania without incidents with the Hungarian immigration authorities.

            She was showing me her photo album with photos of her stay in Hungary and the trip to Holland when we stopped for the check by the Romanian immigration authorities.

            The officer checked my passport and my visa and stamped it without problems.

            When it was the girl’s turn however, the officer turned nasty. He checks her passport and sees that she’s been in Hungary for 3 months and start asking what was she doing there? Why did she have to come to Hungary? Why did she stay so long? Couldn’t her sister hire someone to help her? 

            He noticed the Dutch visa in her passport and started a new batch of questions: Why did she go to Holland? How long did she stay there? What were she doing there?

            Then he demands that she opens her luggage. As she does so he sees the photo album and asks her what is it. She says it’s just a photo album. He grabs it from inside her suitcase and starts flipping through the photos. I stand up and asked him if that was really necessary. He holds a hand up to me and tells me to stay out of it, with the typical Romanian “Aici eu sunt cel mai tare si mai mare” attitude.

            During her visit to Holland, the girl’s friends had taken her to visit the famous Amsterdam Sex Museum. While flipping through the album the bully sees a photo of a statue of a man with a huge erection taken at the museum and starts asking her: What is this? Is this what you went to Amsterdam for? Is this what you like?

            The SOB turned from harassment to abuse.

            Clearly the bully assumed that the girl could only be a prostitute and was trying to force her into admitting it. 

So that’s what is in his mind. If a Romanian woman goes abroad, the only possible reason is prostitution. 

And this was a Romanian border officer checking on a Romanian citizen!

I wonder if he has ever checked whether his mommy has been abroad.