Czech home remedies tend to center around two things: alcohol and sweat. The first time I got a cold and asked my students if they had any suggestions as to what medication I should try (Nyquil being sadly unavailable in Czech pharmacies), I was quite taken aback to hear a universal recommendation of "slivovice."
If you're not familiar with slivovice, it's a type of liqueur made from plums. It is often homemade by families in the countryside and its alcohol content ranges from 40% all the way up to about 80%, depending on who's making it. You can buy it in supermarkets (the brand Jelinek is generally considered the best), but to really do it right, you need to find a home-brewed batch (and hope you don't go blind).
At first, I thought the locals were simply messing around with the foreigner, but as I continued to ask around, I discovered that this truly is the most common advice. Also on the list of "effective treatments" were Becherovka, another type of strong alcohol produced in Karlovy Vary which can best be described as tasting like Christmas, and Fernet, a similar Czech spirit which tastes more directly of pine needles and bark.
So what is the justification for the consumption of strong alcohol when you're sick? Firstly, the high alcohol content is presumed to kill bacteria. For this reason, slivovice is taken along on trips to countries where water quality is poor, or on long hikes where treated water may be unavailable. Czechs will have a shot of the liqueur each day and any water-borne pathogens are poisoned before they can cause any trouble. For the same reason, it also acts as a surprisingly effective treatment for food poisoning. While the thought of doing shots when you can't stop expelling everything you've consumed for the past month might be unappealing, I can personally vouch for the fact that one shot is actually enough to stop the illness in its tracks - and if you've ever suffered from food poisoning, you'll know what a miracle that is.
Slivovice is also used to treat cough and sore throat. Essentially, the alcohol numbs the throat and stops the pain instantly. (If you've ever had one too many drinks and woken up the next day with a mysterious bruise or two that you don't remember obtaining, you'll know how true this can be.) There is a downside to this particular treatment, however: the effect only lasts for a few minutes before your body recovers and starts to be able to feel pain again. It is not recommended that you do what I did the first time I tried slivovice as medicine and take a tiny sip each time the effect wears off, or the next time you get out of bed to use the toilet you'll likely be reminded just how high the alcohol content is. It is a mistake to be made only once!
The final justification for doing shots when you're ill is that it combats fever by making you sweat. This particular claim warrants closer inspection, as it is founded on the general local belief that sweat is the best cure for fever and flu, and to that end, any and all measures should be taken to force yourself to sweat when you are running a high temperature. This includes wrapping yourself in blankets (especially while you sleep), drinking huge amounts of tea just below the boiling point, and using hot water bottles and heating pads whenever possible.
Now, I'm no doctor, but I think it should be pointed out here that this belief is not directly based in modern medical science. First of all, a fever is not an illness, but a symptom, and part of your body's natural defense system to combat illnesses. Curing a fever will in no way cure the illness that caused it, and it might even cause the illness to persist for longer, since you're partially stopping your body from fighting it. If you do want to cure a fever, you have to lower your body's temperature. You can do so by taking a cold bath or shower, putting a cool damp cloth on your head, or taking an anti-fever medication such as ibuprofen or acetaminophen, or if you wait long enough, your body will often do it naturally by sweating.
Sweating, in general, is your body's way of cooling itself down. So it's true that sweating will reduce a fever. On the other hand, if you really want to bring your body's temperature down, wrapping yourself in electric blankets and hot water bottles hardly seems like the most effective method.
Finally, one cannot address the topic of Czech health without mentioning tissues. As any foreigner who has been in the country more than five minutes will have noticed, Czechs love to blow their noses. In fact, it is apparently considered somewhat rude to sniffle, while interrupting a conversation (or lesson) by loudly blowing a gallon of mess into a ragged, slightly dirty old piece of fabric and then shoving it back into your pocket to be used again a few minutes later is perfectly polite.
I've asked a few people about the justification for this little cultural tidbit, and the general local theory seems to be that your body is trying to expel germs (especially if you're sick) by gathering them from all through your body, all your blood vessels and organs and everything, wrapping them in mucus, and transferring them all to your nose, at which point you must quickly blow them out, otherwise you will either get sick immediately or make your illness much worse if you're sick already.
I'm still just a bit skeptical on that front.
If anyone has any further information or opinions on these matters, feel free to start a discussion! The comments button is right down there and I'm perfectly open to being wrong, as long a you can prove it.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Czech Bureaucracy: Obtaining a Long-Stay Residence Permit (Part 3)
You and your friend both get up early and catch the 8:30 bus to Kladno. On the way, you show him all of your paperwork and the list of information the foreigner police had given over the phone, explaining everything so that he can answer any questions necessary later on. Then you try to chat about other things, but it’s hard to keep your mind off the situation. If things don’t go well today, there’s hardly any time left to fix it.
The first stop in Kladno is the social office. You walk into the office, your friend says who you are and what you need, and the woman grabs a document from a bin, asks you to sign it, and hands you your bezdlužnost. Step one: complete. God bless the women at the social office in Kladno.
In fact, let’s all just bow our heads and take a moment to appreciate these amazing ladies. If everyone in the Czech public service was like them, there would never be a problem with paperwork.
Thank you.
The second stop is the finance office. Your form is ready (oh thank god) and you need only sign for it. The woman at the desk is less than friendly and happy, but she doesn’t give you any trouble. You thank her very politely and are on your way.
So far it’s only taken about 30 minutes to get everything done. Unfortunately, you’ve just missed the 9:25 bus to Rakovnik and have a few hours to kill before the next one. Time to get some food and celebrate how smoothly everything has gone so far. Your stress levels have dropped considerably and you have a feeling today is going to go very well. Soon you’ll have your two-year residence card and everything will be okay.
After a nice early lunch and a leisurely stroll through the only nice part of Kladno, you make your way to the bus station and pass the long trip to Rakovnik with conversation completely unrelated to paperwork. It’s a nice day, you’ve got a good feeling, and this will all be over soon.
The police station is in the center of Rakovnik, just a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, but the foreigner police are located somewhat less conveniently. In fact, it’s about a 25-minute walk down a long road with no bus stops, located in a rusted metal building in an industrial park. The police officer at the front window tells you to go on in, and you enter the room where you will spend the rest of the day.
There are a lot more people in here than you expected. All of them appear to be either Vietnamese or Ukrainian. There are two open windows, and a cardboard box with numbers on slips of paper. You get number 32, and they’re already on 29. This should be relatively quick and painless.
An hour goes by. There are no toilets. Only one person is called. It’s not that they seem overwhelmingly busy. Everyone is just sitting around waiting. What are the people behind the window doing? One large woman is staring at a computer screen with a confused look on her face. Two others are chatting, partly about work, and partly about some social event they had both attended. A man walks into their office smiling and starts a friendly chat with one of the women that lasts for what feels like an eternity. Finally, they call number 31.
Your friend goes up to the window and asks if you’re waiting in the right place. Irritatedly, they say yes, now go and sit down. Simultaneously, you think you hear someone call 32, but you’re not sure. Your friend walks back to the window to ask the woman which number she had called. She’s just about ready to throw out number 32 and call 33 when he stops her and says you’re 32. Angry, she demands that you move a little quicker if you don’t want to lose your place.
It’s understandable, really. After all, you’ve only been waiting 90 minutes, and she had to stand at that window for nearly 30 seconds before you got there.
You join your friend at the window with your binder full of paperwork. There is a woman standing there with a smile on her face. It is the smile of a loan shark with a crowbar informing you you’re very late paying back your debt. The smile of a supervillain who has you and your loved ones dangling above a pit of starving wolves. This is the woman who will decide if your paperwork is acceptable or not.
The first problem is your application form. There are some fields left blank, such as “spouse” - since you don’t have one. She gruffly informs your translator that you must write “nemá” in each of these fields.
No problem, you say. Right away. So sorry for the mistake. You never stop smiling.
While you’re doing that, she rifles through the rest of the papers. “What’s this?” she says, as though she had discovered a dead rat right in the middle of the pile. She’s pointing at your work contract. Your friend explains that the work contract is part of your reason to stay in this country, along with your business license, and also proof of income, since it states your monthly salary. She stares at you for a moment as though he had just told her that YOU were the one leaving flaming bags of dog poo on her porch every Tuesday for the past six months, then sighs and shrugs. She’ll have to discuss it with her colleague. She walks away from the window into the office. You can plainly see and hear her chatting with another one of the women. They are not discussing your case. They laugh at some private joke, then she walks out of the office entirely.
Several minutes later she returns, a look of triumph on her face. No, they cannot accept your work contract as proof of income. You must also provide a bank statement demonstrating for AT LEAST the past three months that you are actually getting paid this amount.
But you only started the job two months ago.
Well, that’s not her problem, is it?
Anyway, the business license is completely unacceptable. It expires on the same day as your current visa. You tell her of course it does - they won’t extend it until you have a new visa. She looks at you again with a whole new expression of annoyance. Maybe she misheard - did you accidentally just tell her that shirt makes her look fat? You’re pretty sure you didn’t.
She takes a deep breath. It’s clear that she’s very tired of having to explain this to you. How is it that you haven’t psychically taken the information from her brain by now and saved her the trouble? But she’s a patient woman, and she manages to explain to you with almost complete calmness that you must first go to the business office in Kladno and apply to extend your license. They will give you a letter stating that you have applied for it, which you must then give to the foreigner police to prove that you’re really going to do it. Until they have that, there’s no way they can even consider your application.
But being the kind-hearted woman she is, she will look through the rest of your papers to make sure they’re all in order. The bezdlužnost from the finance office is fine. So is the one from the social office. But where is the proof you’ve paid your social insurance?
Well now you’re truly confused. Isn’t that what the bezdlužnost is? It’s a document stating that you don’t owe any money. If you don’t owe any money, then you must have paid your social insurance, right?
The woman reacts to this bit of logic as though you’d tried to prove that the Easter Bunny is real and living in a condo in southern France. She shakes it off like a blow to the head and repeats, you need a paper from the social office listing each and every payment you’ve made.
It is around this point that your friend turns to you and says, still smiling and in the calmest of tones, that this woman is not making any sense whatsoever (even in Czech), and that her attitude is making him want to punch a hole through the wall. You need to hurry up and finish as quickly as possible so he can go outside, scream, and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes.
I’m going to step back a moment now and simply summarize the rest of the encounter, because you’re getting the idea, and to continue to write it out in such detail might trigger an attack of PTSD. Of the documents you were told by phone to bring for your application, more than half of them are unacceptable and many are missing. Your lease is fine as proof of accommodation and the bezdlužnost papers are fine. Your application form is now okay. Your work contract will be considered as part of the application but you need the official bank statement. Your insurance card is good, but you also need to provide “proof of payment” for your insurance - meaning your receipt from the purchase. (The implication here is that people are going around forging insurance cards, but that it would be impossible to forge a receipt with a stamp on it.) Your business license is useless and you must go to Kladno to apply for the extension. You need to visit the social office and get a stamped paper listing all the social security payments you’ve made.
So the complete list, now, of what you still need, is:
1. letter from the business office declaring you have applied to extend your business license
2. official list of social security payments
3. receipt of payment for health insurance
4. stamped bank statement proving your income
You write this all out neatly on a piece of paper and show her, and she confirms that if you bring these four things, your application will be complete. Your friend politely asks how it’s possible that when you called weeks ago, they gave you completely different information. Her face turns angry and she insists that this is not possible - you must have called the wrong office, or misunderstood what you were told, because this office does not make mistakes.
Of course not.
Regarding the matter of temporary extension for your visa, there is another problem. Once your application is officially submitted in its entirety, they will give you a temporary visa extension for up to three months while they process you (and then you have to go to the business office to get a similar extension for your business license), but they won’t give you this until there are no more than seven days left on your visa. So you’ll have to come back again and spend another day here waiting in line just for that.
The biggest problem now is not that you will have to miss more work, but that you are rapidly running out of time. It’s only the middle of December, and you have until the last day of the month, but in a week and a half it will be Christmas and everything will be closed. You won’t have a chance to visit the business office in Kladno until Monday, and Christmas is the following weekend. If they say they require a week to process your request to extend your business license (as they typically do), or if the social office requires time to provide your list of payments, you’ll simply be out of luck. If you had known about these requirements, you would have had these documents already - but it doesn’t matter that you called them, asked what you needed, and they gave you the wrong information. It’s still on you to find a way to make this work. And let’s not even think about how you’re going to deal with this proof of income. It’s too much to process right now.
Appropriately enough, when you finally leave the office, the weather has changed from sunny and warm to pouring rain, strong winds, and near-freezing temperatures. Couldn’t make this stuff up.
This mess is so far from over.
The first stop in Kladno is the social office. You walk into the office, your friend says who you are and what you need, and the woman grabs a document from a bin, asks you to sign it, and hands you your bezdlužnost. Step one: complete. God bless the women at the social office in Kladno.
In fact, let’s all just bow our heads and take a moment to appreciate these amazing ladies. If everyone in the Czech public service was like them, there would never be a problem with paperwork.
Thank you.
The second stop is the finance office. Your form is ready (oh thank god) and you need only sign for it. The woman at the desk is less than friendly and happy, but she doesn’t give you any trouble. You thank her very politely and are on your way.
So far it’s only taken about 30 minutes to get everything done. Unfortunately, you’ve just missed the 9:25 bus to Rakovnik and have a few hours to kill before the next one. Time to get some food and celebrate how smoothly everything has gone so far. Your stress levels have dropped considerably and you have a feeling today is going to go very well. Soon you’ll have your two-year residence card and everything will be okay.
After a nice early lunch and a leisurely stroll through the only nice part of Kladno, you make your way to the bus station and pass the long trip to Rakovnik with conversation completely unrelated to paperwork. It’s a nice day, you’ve got a good feeling, and this will all be over soon.
The police station is in the center of Rakovnik, just a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, but the foreigner police are located somewhat less conveniently. In fact, it’s about a 25-minute walk down a long road with no bus stops, located in a rusted metal building in an industrial park. The police officer at the front window tells you to go on in, and you enter the room where you will spend the rest of the day.
There are a lot more people in here than you expected. All of them appear to be either Vietnamese or Ukrainian. There are two open windows, and a cardboard box with numbers on slips of paper. You get number 32, and they’re already on 29. This should be relatively quick and painless.
An hour goes by. There are no toilets. Only one person is called. It’s not that they seem overwhelmingly busy. Everyone is just sitting around waiting. What are the people behind the window doing? One large woman is staring at a computer screen with a confused look on her face. Two others are chatting, partly about work, and partly about some social event they had both attended. A man walks into their office smiling and starts a friendly chat with one of the women that lasts for what feels like an eternity. Finally, they call number 31.
Your friend goes up to the window and asks if you’re waiting in the right place. Irritatedly, they say yes, now go and sit down. Simultaneously, you think you hear someone call 32, but you’re not sure. Your friend walks back to the window to ask the woman which number she had called. She’s just about ready to throw out number 32 and call 33 when he stops her and says you’re 32. Angry, she demands that you move a little quicker if you don’t want to lose your place.
It’s understandable, really. After all, you’ve only been waiting 90 minutes, and she had to stand at that window for nearly 30 seconds before you got there.
You join your friend at the window with your binder full of paperwork. There is a woman standing there with a smile on her face. It is the smile of a loan shark with a crowbar informing you you’re very late paying back your debt. The smile of a supervillain who has you and your loved ones dangling above a pit of starving wolves. This is the woman who will decide if your paperwork is acceptable or not.
The first problem is your application form. There are some fields left blank, such as “spouse” - since you don’t have one. She gruffly informs your translator that you must write “nemá” in each of these fields.
No problem, you say. Right away. So sorry for the mistake. You never stop smiling.
While you’re doing that, she rifles through the rest of the papers. “What’s this?” she says, as though she had discovered a dead rat right in the middle of the pile. She’s pointing at your work contract. Your friend explains that the work contract is part of your reason to stay in this country, along with your business license, and also proof of income, since it states your monthly salary. She stares at you for a moment as though he had just told her that YOU were the one leaving flaming bags of dog poo on her porch every Tuesday for the past six months, then sighs and shrugs. She’ll have to discuss it with her colleague. She walks away from the window into the office. You can plainly see and hear her chatting with another one of the women. They are not discussing your case. They laugh at some private joke, then she walks out of the office entirely.
Several minutes later she returns, a look of triumph on her face. No, they cannot accept your work contract as proof of income. You must also provide a bank statement demonstrating for AT LEAST the past three months that you are actually getting paid this amount.
But you only started the job two months ago.
Well, that’s not her problem, is it?
Anyway, the business license is completely unacceptable. It expires on the same day as your current visa. You tell her of course it does - they won’t extend it until you have a new visa. She looks at you again with a whole new expression of annoyance. Maybe she misheard - did you accidentally just tell her that shirt makes her look fat? You’re pretty sure you didn’t.
She takes a deep breath. It’s clear that she’s very tired of having to explain this to you. How is it that you haven’t psychically taken the information from her brain by now and saved her the trouble? But she’s a patient woman, and she manages to explain to you with almost complete calmness that you must first go to the business office in Kladno and apply to extend your license. They will give you a letter stating that you have applied for it, which you must then give to the foreigner police to prove that you’re really going to do it. Until they have that, there’s no way they can even consider your application.
But being the kind-hearted woman she is, she will look through the rest of your papers to make sure they’re all in order. The bezdlužnost from the finance office is fine. So is the one from the social office. But where is the proof you’ve paid your social insurance?
Well now you’re truly confused. Isn’t that what the bezdlužnost is? It’s a document stating that you don’t owe any money. If you don’t owe any money, then you must have paid your social insurance, right?
The woman reacts to this bit of logic as though you’d tried to prove that the Easter Bunny is real and living in a condo in southern France. She shakes it off like a blow to the head and repeats, you need a paper from the social office listing each and every payment you’ve made.
It is around this point that your friend turns to you and says, still smiling and in the calmest of tones, that this woman is not making any sense whatsoever (even in Czech), and that her attitude is making him want to punch a hole through the wall. You need to hurry up and finish as quickly as possible so he can go outside, scream, and smoke an entire pack of cigarettes.
I’m going to step back a moment now and simply summarize the rest of the encounter, because you’re getting the idea, and to continue to write it out in such detail might trigger an attack of PTSD. Of the documents you were told by phone to bring for your application, more than half of them are unacceptable and many are missing. Your lease is fine as proof of accommodation and the bezdlužnost papers are fine. Your application form is now okay. Your work contract will be considered as part of the application but you need the official bank statement. Your insurance card is good, but you also need to provide “proof of payment” for your insurance - meaning your receipt from the purchase. (The implication here is that people are going around forging insurance cards, but that it would be impossible to forge a receipt with a stamp on it.) Your business license is useless and you must go to Kladno to apply for the extension. You need to visit the social office and get a stamped paper listing all the social security payments you’ve made.
So the complete list, now, of what you still need, is:
1. letter from the business office declaring you have applied to extend your business license
2. official list of social security payments
3. receipt of payment for health insurance
4. stamped bank statement proving your income
You write this all out neatly on a piece of paper and show her, and she confirms that if you bring these four things, your application will be complete. Your friend politely asks how it’s possible that when you called weeks ago, they gave you completely different information. Her face turns angry and she insists that this is not possible - you must have called the wrong office, or misunderstood what you were told, because this office does not make mistakes.
Of course not.
Regarding the matter of temporary extension for your visa, there is another problem. Once your application is officially submitted in its entirety, they will give you a temporary visa extension for up to three months while they process you (and then you have to go to the business office to get a similar extension for your business license), but they won’t give you this until there are no more than seven days left on your visa. So you’ll have to come back again and spend another day here waiting in line just for that.
The biggest problem now is not that you will have to miss more work, but that you are rapidly running out of time. It’s only the middle of December, and you have until the last day of the month, but in a week and a half it will be Christmas and everything will be closed. You won’t have a chance to visit the business office in Kladno until Monday, and Christmas is the following weekend. If they say they require a week to process your request to extend your business license (as they typically do), or if the social office requires time to provide your list of payments, you’ll simply be out of luck. If you had known about these requirements, you would have had these documents already - but it doesn’t matter that you called them, asked what you needed, and they gave you the wrong information. It’s still on you to find a way to make this work. And let’s not even think about how you’re going to deal with this proof of income. It’s too much to process right now.
Appropriately enough, when you finally leave the office, the weather has changed from sunny and warm to pouring rain, strong winds, and near-freezing temperatures. Couldn’t make this stuff up.
This mess is so far from over.
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