A riddle: What has four walls, can’t move, but be in three different countries?
A house in Chernivtsi.
Half of my partner’s family is from Chernivtsi. Her grandmother’s home was part of Romania, The Soviet Union, and Ukraine, which gave her the right to request Romanian citizenship. Even though there is crippling racism towards Romanians in Spain and throughout Europe, it was still a better option for my partner to try and obtain her Romanian passport than to live with her Ukrainian one.
All she had to do was: Learn Romanian, pay for four lawyers (two from Romania, one from Ukraine, and one from Ukraine who became Romanian), fly to Bucharest and the consulate in Ukraine two times, and spend five years emailing back and forth with Romanian bureaucrats in Spain.
The original checklist included an official translation of her birth certificate, Spanish residency, and an invitation letter for the Romanian oath. However, they didn’t like the official translation (exact reasons still unknown), and by the time they told her they didn’t like the translation, several months had passed, and her residency card had expired. So, she had to start the whole process over again. But this was nothing compared to her mother, who, after going through a similar process, had her citizenship certificate ripped in front of her and everyone else there to give their oath. It turned out the bureaucrat didn’t find her dialect Romanian enough.
When faced with needing to decide whether a bureaucrat is venal or merely an idiot, the safest bet is always the latter. However, there is sometimes a third variant where they go from idiot to Idi Amin at light speed. (There is a rumour that Idi wanted to rename Uganda after himself until some brave lackey reminded the committee that people from Cyprus are called Cypriots.)
Also, before bureaucrats are vested as minor deities, they must take a holy and sacred vow to never do anything for the first time.
Thanks Nolan, you made me famousish. And here, after all these years of thinking it was just me pushing my cart sideways through life and trying to hold two watermelons in one hand (thanks to my staff in Baku for those two descriptions of our in-house KGB informer), you are telling me the Vogons really did takeover earth’s bureaucracies?
Over at Switter’s World, I did a three part series on a few of the times I innocently, mostly, became an illegal immigrant. I also describe the time at Schipol airport when I decided to sit until the queue at departure gate security cleared. When I finally presented myself, an official asked why I was the last person in line. “Because it is the nature of a queue to have a beginning and end. I am that end person in the queue,” and thus began a Kafkaesque discussion of geometry that expanded to include a suspicious review of my itinerary to Amsterdam via Khartoum>Cairo>Damascus>Larnica. Why should that arouse any suspicion? They finally eased up when I lied and told them my mother-in-law chose my itinerary. I assumed that their sympathy arose out of personal experience. I don’t know; are Dutch mothers-in-law that bad? I did make my flight, but was existentially befuddled.
Or the Plumtree border crossing from Zimbabwe to Botswana where a banner behind the immigration counter advised “Do not insult the crocodile until you have crossed the river.” Good advice, and free.
Once, after head-wagging assurances from a Syrian embassy official in some God-forsaken backwater that yes, it was indeed possible to get a visa at the Damascus airport, when I arrived at the Damascus airport, I was told I could only get a visa in town at immigration headquarters, but since I didn’t have a visa, I couldn’t get a visa. Everyone was surprisingly sympathetic and one kindhearted immigration officer said he would secure my visa for me, so off he went with my passport. Apparently there is a predictable lull in afternoon flights, so the immigration guys plopped themselves down on benches for naps and invited me to join them. When the kindhearted guy arrived three or four hours later, I felt unexpectedly refreshed and relaxed. For some reason, the universe almost always throws in with me.
I could go on, but it’s best not to get me started. I do have one final pro tip: if you need to get through Managua quickly, slip in behind a presidente motorcade. I can’t guarantee it will always work, but it did that one time.
There is so much to unpack in these five paragraphs! What is the three-part series name?
“When the kindhearted guy arrived three or four hours later, I felt unexpectedly refreshed and relaxed. For some reason, the universe almost always throws in with me.”
— I’ve had experiences like this in Vietnam. Where you do things you learn not to like, give your passport to a guy who works in a clothing store so he can drive it 500 KM south and get the stamp for the extension period. That works. But in Spain, the processes have ever changing ambiguous steps that makes me think “man plans, universe laughs.”
In coming weeks, I’ll share stories about immigrating to Norway without a visa, becoming an alien with extended protection from deportation, immigrating to Denmark and the Catch 22 of banks, being deceived by your employer about tax rates, and immigrating to Belgium the easy way.
I promise the posts will be entertaining although I won’t recommend others follow in my footsteps. Mostly because my footsteps often led me to deep water. I found myself treading and sinking rather than walking on it...
I’ll dedicate the coming five Sundays to my contribution to your immigration and bureaucracy series.
In this column I briefly touch on our experience with the US Embassy in Bangkok and their stubborn refusal to give Thai Immigration a document they required to transfer our visa from our old passport to our new ones. (The visa doesn't actually gets transferred, but that's what it amounts to.)
But I don't think it's bureaucracy at play here as it is some kind of weird American arrogance and dick-swinging...
It's baffling that the U.S. Embassy flatly refused to give you the letter you needed... Then again, maybe it's not so surprising. Sometimes bureaucracy IS arrogance and dick-swinging to me. Maybe that's one of the solutions, to become a bureaucrat in the immigration sector -- they have to go through a series of tests to prove they don't have a power complex.
You left out an important resource for readers: Portugal Living Magazine (www.facebook.com/PortugalLivingMagazine), the daily online magazine for people everywhere with Portugal on their minds: those considering relocation to Portugal from wherever ... newcomers to Portugal, struggling to comply with its bureaucratic systems--some antiquated, others not ... and long-time residents sharing their stories about people and places, language and culture, history and events.
My beauracratic immigration story was much recent, so last year I applied to do an exchange trip to Sweden. So I first had to wait from the university in Sweden whether they were going to accept me or not around November of last year two months before I was supposed to head out on exchange. Then came applying for a residency permit which was the most gruelling part, as the immigration agency changed a rule that rather than doing a passport check at your consulate, you had to head to the embassy. For context, I live in the western part of Canada, and the embassy was in Ottawa in the eastern part of the country. My visa didn’t get approve until December 28th and then I had to travel to Ottawa on January 2nd, a week before I had to fly out to Sweden. Luckily I was able to do my exchange but overall I just hated the experience.
That’s insane that they made you go to the embassy instead of allowing it to go through the consulate. Doesn’t surprise me, though. My family and I had the choice to renew our Belgian passports in Toronto or wait for the consulate to come to Vancouver after several months. We waited. And the Belgian consulate’s temporary office was in the back of a chocolate factory haha.
Addendum 2: I told you not to get me started. A few more pro tips. Don’t wear a Bob Marley t-shirt when you enter Canada through the border post at Moyie River in northern Idaho. The Canadians will thoroughly search your car for blunts and will not accept that the shirt was a gift from your daughter. When entering Kenya at Kenyatta International Airport and collect your baggage, check for a chalk mark “x.” That moistened towelette you saved from the flight will save you a lot of time unpacking and repacking at the customs counter. Also, don’t get drunk and vomit on your seat mates when flying to Kenya. You’ll spend the rest of your 12 hour visit to the country in a drunk tank until your return flight home.
Finally, an Igloo cooler filled with chicken parts floating in swill is dutiable by Haiti customs. I followed an old woman with three such coolers through customs and I guess the duty free limit on chicken guts is limited to one cooler, because she had to pay for the other two.
I haven't really left my desk for the past eight hours. The research was easy, since I already read work from everyone I mentioned. Plus, your comment and Elle Griffen's research got me motivated to write something with community in mind.
Addendum: I have a Georgian friend (not the peach kind of Georgian) who arrived at New York JFK. The black immigration officer asked where she was arriving from. She said Georgia. He asked why she was at international arrivals instead of domestic and she said she was from the Caucasian Georgia. He snapped, “Lady, I can see that, but why are you here in international arrivals?”
A riddle: What has four walls, can’t move, but be in three different countries?
A house in Chernivtsi.
Half of my partner’s family is from Chernivtsi. Her grandmother’s home was part of Romania, The Soviet Union, and Ukraine, which gave her the right to request Romanian citizenship. Even though there is crippling racism towards Romanians in Spain and throughout Europe, it was still a better option for my partner to try and obtain her Romanian passport than to live with her Ukrainian one.
All she had to do was: Learn Romanian, pay for four lawyers (two from Romania, one from Ukraine, and one from Ukraine who became Romanian), fly to Bucharest and the consulate in Ukraine two times, and spend five years emailing back and forth with Romanian bureaucrats in Spain.
The original checklist included an official translation of her birth certificate, Spanish residency, and an invitation letter for the Romanian oath. However, they didn’t like the official translation (exact reasons still unknown), and by the time they told her they didn’t like the translation, several months had passed, and her residency card had expired. So, she had to start the whole process over again. But this was nothing compared to her mother, who, after going through a similar process, had her citizenship certificate ripped in front of her and everyone else there to give their oath. It turned out the bureaucrat didn’t find her dialect Romanian enough.
By dating a Ukrainian, I saw how systemic racism not only oppresses people of colour but those born in the “wrong” country as well. As a Ukrainian without a solid income, she’s been living a bureaucratic nightmare for the past five years. The Spanish funcionario’s work schedule—or lack of one—definitely played a role, but not as much as her birthplace... Continue reading https://open.substack.com/pub/bornwithoutborders/p/a-country-funded-by-an-insurance?r=1qf7m9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
When faced with needing to decide whether a bureaucrat is venal or merely an idiot, the safest bet is always the latter. However, there is sometimes a third variant where they go from idiot to Idi Amin at light speed. (There is a rumour that Idi wanted to rename Uganda after himself until some brave lackey reminded the committee that people from Cyprus are called Cypriots.)
Also, before bureaucrats are vested as minor deities, they must take a holy and sacred vow to never do anything for the first time.
Thanks Nolan, you made me famousish. And here, after all these years of thinking it was just me pushing my cart sideways through life and trying to hold two watermelons in one hand (thanks to my staff in Baku for those two descriptions of our in-house KGB informer), you are telling me the Vogons really did takeover earth’s bureaucracies?
Over at Switter’s World, I did a three part series on a few of the times I innocently, mostly, became an illegal immigrant. I also describe the time at Schipol airport when I decided to sit until the queue at departure gate security cleared. When I finally presented myself, an official asked why I was the last person in line. “Because it is the nature of a queue to have a beginning and end. I am that end person in the queue,” and thus began a Kafkaesque discussion of geometry that expanded to include a suspicious review of my itinerary to Amsterdam via Khartoum>Cairo>Damascus>Larnica. Why should that arouse any suspicion? They finally eased up when I lied and told them my mother-in-law chose my itinerary. I assumed that their sympathy arose out of personal experience. I don’t know; are Dutch mothers-in-law that bad? I did make my flight, but was existentially befuddled.
Or the Plumtree border crossing from Zimbabwe to Botswana where a banner behind the immigration counter advised “Do not insult the crocodile until you have crossed the river.” Good advice, and free.
Once, after head-wagging assurances from a Syrian embassy official in some God-forsaken backwater that yes, it was indeed possible to get a visa at the Damascus airport, when I arrived at the Damascus airport, I was told I could only get a visa in town at immigration headquarters, but since I didn’t have a visa, I couldn’t get a visa. Everyone was surprisingly sympathetic and one kindhearted immigration officer said he would secure my visa for me, so off he went with my passport. Apparently there is a predictable lull in afternoon flights, so the immigration guys plopped themselves down on benches for naps and invited me to join them. When the kindhearted guy arrived three or four hours later, I felt unexpectedly refreshed and relaxed. For some reason, the universe almost always throws in with me.
I could go on, but it’s best not to get me started. I do have one final pro tip: if you need to get through Managua quickly, slip in behind a presidente motorcade. I can’t guarantee it will always work, but it did that one time.
There is so much to unpack in these five paragraphs! What is the three-part series name?
“When the kindhearted guy arrived three or four hours later, I felt unexpectedly refreshed and relaxed. For some reason, the universe almost always throws in with me.”
— I’ve had experiences like this in Vietnam. Where you do things you learn not to like, give your passport to a guy who works in a clothing store so he can drive it 500 KM south and get the stamp for the extension period. That works. But in Spain, the processes have ever changing ambiguous steps that makes me think “man plans, universe laughs.”
The series is Switter: An Undocumented Immigrant.
Thanks for tagging me, Nolan. Count me in. I touched on one of my brushes with bureaucracy in this post:
https://alwayscare.substack.com/p/the-taxman-cometh
In coming weeks, I’ll share stories about immigrating to Norway without a visa, becoming an alien with extended protection from deportation, immigrating to Denmark and the Catch 22 of banks, being deceived by your employer about tax rates, and immigrating to Belgium the easy way.
I promise the posts will be entertaining although I won’t recommend others follow in my footsteps. Mostly because my footsteps often led me to deep water. I found myself treading and sinking rather than walking on it...
I’ll dedicate the coming five Sundays to my contribution to your immigration and bureaucracy series.
Oh thanks for the mention. Happy to be here thinking it all through with you!
In this column I briefly touch on our experience with the US Embassy in Bangkok and their stubborn refusal to give Thai Immigration a document they required to transfer our visa from our old passport to our new ones. (The visa doesn't actually gets transferred, but that's what it amounts to.)
But I don't think it's bureaucracy at play here as it is some kind of weird American arrogance and dick-swinging...
https://www.brentandmichaelaregoingplaces.com/p/the-travel-lunatic-a-floating-village
It's baffling that the U.S. Embassy flatly refused to give you the letter you needed... Then again, maybe it's not so surprising. Sometimes bureaucracy IS arrogance and dick-swinging to me. Maybe that's one of the solutions, to become a bureaucrat in the immigration sector -- they have to go through a series of tests to prove they don't have a power complex.
I've blabbed about my bureaucratic run-ins with German immigration in two parts. (Here's part one: https://withoutapath.substack.com/p/next-stop-immigration-)
I wish German bureaucracy on all enemies of immigration. Fortunately, I'm now on the path to citizenship.
Just read both! Commented on the second piece.
Past issues and our Summer 2023 one in PDF format are available, free, on our website:
https://portugallivingmagazine.com
You left out an important resource for readers: Portugal Living Magazine (www.facebook.com/PortugalLivingMagazine), the daily online magazine for people everywhere with Portugal on their minds: those considering relocation to Portugal from wherever ... newcomers to Portugal, struggling to comply with its bureaucratic systems--some antiquated, others not ... and long-time residents sharing their stories about people and places, language and culture, history and events.
Thank you! I only included Substackers, but what you describe seems really helpful. I don't have Facebook anymore, though.
My beauracratic immigration story was much recent, so last year I applied to do an exchange trip to Sweden. So I first had to wait from the university in Sweden whether they were going to accept me or not around November of last year two months before I was supposed to head out on exchange. Then came applying for a residency permit which was the most gruelling part, as the immigration agency changed a rule that rather than doing a passport check at your consulate, you had to head to the embassy. For context, I live in the western part of Canada, and the embassy was in Ottawa in the eastern part of the country. My visa didn’t get approve until December 28th and then I had to travel to Ottawa on January 2nd, a week before I had to fly out to Sweden. Luckily I was able to do my exchange but overall I just hated the experience.
That’s insane that they made you go to the embassy instead of allowing it to go through the consulate. Doesn’t surprise me, though. My family and I had the choice to renew our Belgian passports in Toronto or wait for the consulate to come to Vancouver after several months. We waited. And the Belgian consulate’s temporary office was in the back of a chocolate factory haha.
Addendum 2: I told you not to get me started. A few more pro tips. Don’t wear a Bob Marley t-shirt when you enter Canada through the border post at Moyie River in northern Idaho. The Canadians will thoroughly search your car for blunts and will not accept that the shirt was a gift from your daughter. When entering Kenya at Kenyatta International Airport and collect your baggage, check for a chalk mark “x.” That moistened towelette you saved from the flight will save you a lot of time unpacking and repacking at the customs counter. Also, don’t get drunk and vomit on your seat mates when flying to Kenya. You’ll spend the rest of your 12 hour visit to the country in a drunk tank until your return flight home.
Finally, an Igloo cooler filled with chicken parts floating in swill is dutiable by Haiti customs. I followed an old woman with three such coolers through customs and I guess the duty free limit on chicken guts is limited to one cooler, because she had to pay for the other two.
Haha, I had a feeling your list of bureaucracy and immigration stories would be endless. But you can enjoy all the blunts you want in Canada now.
Maybe he was bummed because he didn’t have a sweet Bob Marley shirt. Bitterness always corrodes the vessel that contains it.
How did you turn this around so fast?!
I haven't really left my desk for the past eight hours. The research was easy, since I already read work from everyone I mentioned. Plus, your comment and Elle Griffen's research got me motivated to write something with community in mind.
I’m in awe! Great post and thanks so much for the shout out. You are too kind!
Some of the podcast episodes on immigration and cultural psychology I'm most proud of: 1. https://open.substack.com/pub/bornwithoutborders/p/identity-psychedelics-genetic-essentialism?r=1qf7m9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web, 2. https://open.substack.com/pub/bornwithoutborders/p/how-culture-affects-health-with-paul?r=1qf7m9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web, 3. https://open.substack.com/pub/bornwithoutborders/p/belgians-vs-the-dutch-becoming-irish-7c2?r=1qf7m9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
For some interesting ideas about open borders: https://www.elysian.press/p/open-borders-could-solve-climate-change and https://globalnatives.substack.com/archive.
Addendum: I have a Georgian friend (not the peach kind of Georgian) who arrived at New York JFK. The black immigration officer asked where she was arriving from. She said Georgia. He asked why she was at international arrivals instead of domestic and she said she was from the Caucasian Georgia. He snapped, “Lady, I can see that, but why are you here in international arrivals?”
Geography is hard.
I can forgive someone working with domestic travelers not being aware there is another Georgia. But an immigration officer? Sheesh...
We’re Americans; we don’t need no geography.