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.



 

The Romanian Visa Paradox - VI

PART VI – The Romanian Money Machine Paradigm

As I had bought a two way ticket in Ploiesti, I had just the ticket to board the train but I didn’t have the ticket for a seat so in Arad I had to go to the ticket vendors and request one, which cost me around 20.000 Lei (2 Ron) at the time.

While I was at the platform waiting for the train a gypsy couple arrived at the platform carrying 2 huge bags each. The lady stayed at the platform and the man went back and forth inside the station and out and brought several more huge bags, probably full of Hungarian products to be sold at the open market in Romania. 

As the train stopped I realized they were going to board the same car as I was supposed to board. The lady run to one of the car entrances and yelled at her husband to run to the other one and the two of them proceeded to load their cargo in the car, preventing other people from boarding. The lady kept screaming in Roma language to her husband at the other extremity of the car all the time. I was trying to board the car and she kept pushing me aside with her big bags. I finally snapped at her “What the fuck, lady! Let other people board the train!” She looked at me with her wild eyes. Then she started screaming at me in Roma language and reapeating “Ei waddafack! Ei waddafack!”

            When I finally boarded there was a French girl in the compartment where I had my seat. She said she was travelling from Paris to Bucharest. 

            A few minutes after the train left Arad the conductor came in to check the tickets. He checked mine and everything was in order. He checked hers and explained to her that she had to buy the ticket for the seat as she had only the ticket to board the train. She asked him how much and he typed some numbers in his pocket calculator and showed it to her and whispered: “In Euro”.

            After he left I asked her how much did he charge her and she said 50 euro.

            That’s 108 times what I paid for exactly the same ticket. Don’t you just love the Romanian money machine?

            I finally got home and in the next day I called the Consul in Budapest. He picked the phone and asked me “why didn’t you come? I was expecting you!”

            I told him I ended up going to Szeged, to which he said sarcastically: “Ahaaaa… You went to Szeged, eh? And tell me, did you get your visa?”

            When I told him that I didn’t, he said: “I knew you wouldn’t get it because I know the consul from Szeged. He thinks that Romanian immigration laws are the same as US laws and he has to protect Romanian borders from the “Mexicans” trying to enter the country.”

            I told him about the consul’s definition of minimum salary per economy and he laughed saying “He’s crazy…”

            Anyway, he told me to go over to Budapest next week and he will give me the visa.

The Romanian Visa Paradox - IV

PART IV - The Romanian Salary Indeterminacy

        So we got the list of documents necessary for the damn visa and it included a warrant from her company that she has a salary equivalent of 2 minimum salaries per economy according to the Romanian law. As her salary was way above that, it wasn't going to be a problem at all. Right? Yeah, right.

        I took the train to Hungary. 12 gruesome  hours until Arad. Then I had to wait for the train to Curtici, at the border and a couple more hours until Békéscsaba, change trains again and then a few more until Szeged.

        After all these months in Ploiesti, I was already getting used to people assuming that I am Chinese. So I almost choked laughing when at the border, the Hungarian immigration officer asked me if I am Mongol :-)

        I told him I'm Brazilian and gave him my passport. He said: "Ah! Brazil! Ronaldo! Football!" and started to check my passport. He then asks me where is the Hungarian visa.  Ooooo... that's what I was afraid of. The Brazil-Hungary agreement was so recent (only a couple of weeks ago) that the immigration officers didn't even know about it.

        I explained to him about it and he had to call his superior. Which didn't also know about it and had to call someone else in the office, who had to make a phone call to someone else.

        After an agonizing half-hour he came back with my passport and stamped the visa on it. Whew!

        I left Ploiesti at 19:00 and arrived in Szeged by 10:00 in the next morning. No Hungarian in the train station, shops, currency exchange offices, taxis or shops speak English so I had to keep my Hungarian Phrase Book handy (I will not buy this record, it is scratched! - For those who know Monty Python :-) And as no one besides Hungarians can pronounce Hungarian, I had to show it to them, not read from it.

        Anyway, despite all the problems, I finally arrived at the Romanian Consulate in Szeged and met the consul himself. I introduced myself and told him I expect that Cristina has already talked to him and he probably knows what it is about. He said yes and asked me to give him the papers. He checked them and when he got to that salary warrant, he told me that this paper was irregular. I asked him what does he mean and he said that according to the law, my wife's salary is not enough to support me.  I told him that as I understand, the law says 2 minimum salaries per economy. He then argues that what the law really means is 2 minimum salaries per economy PER PERSON. 

        As my wife's salary was still way above 4 minimum salaries per economy I pointed it to him that it was still within the limits. And then he says: No, because I am calculating 4 minimum ROMANIAN salaries. As I am requesting the visa in Hungary, I have to prove that my wife has 4 minimum HUNGARIAN salaries, which btw, was 1200 American dollars. In that period not many people had this kind of salary in Romania and I am not convinced that there were many people with this kind of salary in Hungary either.

        I told him that it is absurd because I am requesting a residence visa for ROMANIA, not for HUNGARY. And that my wife should be able to support me in ROMANIA, not in HUNGARY, and that the immigration law we are talking about is ROMANIAN not HUNGARIAN, therefore the salaries should be obviously ROMANIAN.

        He used the traditional Romanian catchphrase: "Hey, YOU need ME, I don't need YOU. YOU do what I tell you." and literally threw all the documents on my face.  I picked all the papers from the floor and put them back in my briefcase and picked my phone, to which the consul says: "What now? Are you going to call Cristina? Go ahead, go cry to Cristina! You can call Cristina all you want, it won't change anything!"

        Well, well, it looks like this Cristina was wearing armored panties when Mr. consul tried to tap her.

       

        But no, I wasn't going to call any armored panties Cristina. I was just going to call my wife to inform her that she will never, ever be forgiven for this. For as I see it, I had the visa in my hands and she yanked it from me because some armored panties bimbo thought she's so hot that the consul would do anything for her.

            And in the end, to demonstrate his infinite generosity,  the consul gave me a one month (instead of three months) tourist visa for me to go back to Romania.