Important Paperwork

If you're ever unfortunate enough to find yourself at the bus station of Rakovnik, be sure to visit the station toilet. Yes, you have to pay for it, but it's pretty clean, and for the low low price of 4 kč you get not only six single-ply sheets of toilet paper, but also this fancy receipt!

Unfortunately the attendant failed to fill in the date on mine, so I guess I can't count on it for a tax write-off. I should really go back and file a complaint.

Czech Bureaucracy: Receiving a Package

If you’re a foreigner living in the Czech Republic, it’s a good bet that you have family and friends living elsewhere in the world. Mine happen to live in the United States, and now and then one of them wants to send me a care package. In the past I’ve always asked them not to, after hearing horror stories from others who’ve had to pick up packages from the post office, but since moving to my own apartment with my very own address, I decided to lift the ban and gave my address out to my relatives.

Forgetting this, I was confused to find a slip in my mailbox a couple of weeks ago saying I had missed a delivery. The only other time I had gotten one of these was when O2 had delivered my wifi router (another long story of bureaucratic nightmare), but the only name on the slip other than mine was a Czech woman’s name I had never heard before. Who was she, and what was she sending me? I decided not to worry about it for now – I’d have time to collect whatever it was a few days later.

That evening a friend came to visit me and I showed him the slip. His forehead wrinkled with concern and he told me these were the sorts of slips they used to indicate delivery of government documents. The name, he said, was either the name of a government worker or, possibly, just the name of my postal delivery woman. I’d better head to the post office as soon as possible, he said, because it might be something relating to my visa.

The words of another friend immediately ran through my mind: if they’re going to reject your application, they’ll do it within the first few months. You’ll get a departure order in the mail and have to leave the country within a certain time period, and you’ll have to wait 3 months to come back and start your visa application over from scratch.

There was no time to go that evening, and that night I hardly slept, wondering what on earth I’d do if I got deported. What about my job? What about my apartment? What about my friends? What about my cat?

The next day, immediately after work, I raced to my local post office. I had never been to this one before and had no idea where to go, but my Czech was good enough to politely ask someone standing in line where I should go, and he directed me upstairs. At the top of the stairs were a few windows with small barriers in front of them with gaps in between. All of the barriers had writing on them indicating clearly that there was ONE entrance to this area and arrows pointing to a gap on one side of the room where a young woman was waiting. There were several empty windows, however, so I stood around uncertain for a moment. Finally one of the unoccupied workers looked at me in annoyance and beckoned me over, the look on her face seeming to indicate that she was awfully tired of having to tell people to come to her window when it was free.

I handed her my deliver slip and my passport and after signing a form, she handed me a thick envelope with stamps and writing all over it.

I opened it on the way home to find five pieces of paper. Two of them were covered in Czech small-print legalese which I would have to interpret later. Two were empty forms which I assumed I would need to fill out for some reason or another. But looking through these four pages, I didn’t see anything I recognized. Nothing about an application, a business license, or a visa. At the bottom of one page was an address and a list of opening hours – I finally realized it was another post office. And the fifth piece of paper, when I finally got to it, turned out to be covered in familiar handwriting. Whose was it?

Oh. Right. It was my mom’s handwriting.

(I know that handwriting very well. It is a firm belief of mine that everyone, no matter their age, is still able to forge their mother’s signature even many years after they have graduated high school.)

(Not… Not that I ever forged your signature, mom.)

Finally I remembered that she had sent me a birthday box with goodies in it from the states. I breathed a massive sigh of relief when I realized this had nothing at all to do with my visa. My package had simply been moved to another building and I’d have to go there to pick it up. A Czech friend gave me further relief by telling me the empty forms weren’t necessary for me and I wouldn’t need to worry about them. (Apparently they were just forms giving someone else permission to pick up the package in my place.)

Naturally, it would not be simple. Most post offices in Prague are open weekdays and Saturdays until 20:00 (8 pm), but this one, the one where the customs department was for imported packages, located in a completely different part of Prague from where I live and work, was open Mon-Wed-Fri until 17:00 (5 pm) and Tu-Thu until 15:30 (3:30 pm). Oh, right, and I work until after those hours every day. I’d have to leave work early. And my package would only be held for a week, according to what I could decipher from the documents.

Fortunately some of my students are very understanding and allowed me to end a business English lesson 30 minutes early so I could race off and collect my package. Stack of documents in hand, I went to the appropriate building – a giant warehouse of a post office with many floors, all laid out with traditional communist architecture. I found the name of the office I needed on the documents, matched it with something on the directory on the wall, took the ancient elevator to the third floor, and followed the signs to the office.

As I walked in, a large, exhausted-looking woman beckoned me over and reached out to take my papers from my hand. She sighed the sigh of a woman who hates dealing with people and rattled off something very fast in Czech. I apologized in the most polite Czech I could muster and told her my Czech wasn’t very good – could she speak a bit slower? She sighed again, then pointed out the door and said “nalevo, a nalevo.” (To the left, and to the left.) I nodded, forced a smile, took my papers back, and turned left out the door, left down another hall, and went through the door at the end.

In this room there were two windows. At one, a young woman was sitting at a desk looking bored. She didn’t so much as look up when I walked in. At the other, an older woman was busy working at a computer with a line of people waiting. I got in line and waited my turn. When I got to the window and handed her my papers, she informed me that I had to go to the other woman. The younger one at the other window. The window with no line.

Right. To the other window I went, and handed over the papers for a third time. The girl nodded, flipped through a filing cabinet, and gave me the original customs slip for my package (I only had a copy in my stack of paperwork). Then she told me with a hint of amusement in her voice that I would now have to go to the right, to the right – back to the first office I went to.

So back I went, original customs form in hand, and into the first office again. This time two men in customs officer uniforms were sitting at the desk and they called me over immediately. The first man took my original customs slip and then, performing what appeared to be the entirety of his duties in this office, he handed it to the other officer. The second man asked me if I was a student, to which I responded no, I was not. He sighed (a popular habit in public offices – they should consider doing it competitively), stamped the paper twice, and told me I now had to go back to the room I just came from and wait in line.

Being in a good mood, I very nearly started laughing at this point. But I made my way back to the other office, stood in line, and this time the woman took my stamped customs form and nodded approval. She asked me for 96 kč, which I paid, and handed the form back with a new stamp on it. Then she pointed behind me to a conveyer belt with a man standing by it and told me to go get my package.

This was the part I was really afraid of. I’d heard stories of people who were ordered to open their package on the spot, and if the items inside were declared “valuable” they had to pay thousands of crowns in import tax on them. One friend had advised me that when they asked me what was in the package, I must say that it was a gift, and personal items, that way it should be exempt from tax. But it turned out that this worry was for nothing. Perhaps because it was near to closing time, the worker simply handed me the box and said goodbye without so much as making eye contact.

Not everything has to be complicated, I guess.

In any case, the entire process took nearly 30 minutes and no less than 6 postal workers to complete. In fact, it seemed to be designed to employ as many people as possible – likely a holdover from the days of communism. Ah, well. At least I got my box of goodies in the end.

Czech Bureaucracy: Obtaining a Long-Stay Residence Permit (Part 4)

When we last left our hero, she was shuffling away from the foreigner police office in Rakovnik, her tears of despair mixing with the cold rain that was pelting her and her friend. That was me, about three months ago. For those of you haven’t been following the story so far, I’d just been told that despite having called weeks in advance to ask what paperwork was needed for the application, my information was wrong, my paperwork was incomplete, and it was unlikely I’d be able to get everything together in time for the deadline.

Apologies for leaving it at such a cliffhanger. Life catches up with you sometimes and you forget that you have a blog. It’s time to finally summarize what happened after that.

The following Monday, the gracious, generous, kind-hearted friend accompanied me back to Kladno to obtain the necessary papers from the social and trade offices. As usual, the process at the social office was so easy I thought I might have dreamed it. The trade office (živnostenský úřad), however, was not so simple.

After you’ve visited the trade office once, the same person must handle your paperwork every time you return. In the case of a foreigner, this is relatively frequent, since visas expire and several papers must be filed each time. In my case, I had the office worker from hell in charge of my case.

The first time I visited this office, I took a Czech-speaking friend with me. The woman was kind, friendly, polite, and helpful. The second time, the friend was unavailable, so I brought a piece of paper with what I needed written on it in Czech and a phone to call a friend to translate if necessary. I might as well have showed up and demanded that the woman deal with me in Chinese, because she was extremely pissed off at my inability to immediately understand every word she spat out rapid-fire when she refused to speak slowly or simply. Eventually I got my friend on the phone and he told me that she basically just wanted to yell at me for not having a translator, and actually she didn’t need anything from me at all. Ever since then, I’ve always brought a translator, but she never forgave me for being foreign, and now every time I visit she tries to find a mistake in my paperwork that would give her the right to reject my application.

It was a different friend with me this time, and one who had never experienced the hate of this state worker before. After drilling me on the details of where I lived and what my job was and not managing to find any inconsistencies, she begrudgingly gave me the letter I needed for the foreigner police. She then pointed out that if I didn’t return in 3 weeks to claim the extension to my business license, she would throw out my file and I’d have to start over from scratch.

On the way out, I had to dissuade my friend from pissing on the building – only because a security guard was watching us.

The insurance receipt was easy enough, still tucked away in my insurance folder (you learn not to throw away anything with a stamp on it in this country, especially official receipts). As for the bank statement, it was easy to get, but they charged me 300 kc for the privilege of putting a stamp on it (see my earlier post on Stamps). Finally, without time to return to Rakovnik to submit my paperwork in person, I made color copies of all 4 items for myself and sent the originals, along with a letter from my boss explaining that I had only been working there for two months but they were very happy with me and expected me to continue working there for several years at my current rate of pay or higher (stamped with an official school stamp of course), to the foreigner police by registered mail.

Just before Christmas I asked my boss to call the office to make sure they had received the paperwork and that everything was in order. They had, they said, and everything looked okay, except (EXCEPT!!???) where was my insurance contract?

My boss and I both took deep breaths and calmly asked what in the hell they were talking about. No one had ever mentioned an insurance contract. They said the insurance card and the receipt were enough. They were very specific about that. The woman on the phone, exasperated, inquired how they were expected to make sure the insurance was sufficient if they didn’t have the contract to read through? The good news was that I could bring the contract when I came to pick up my temporary visa, no more than 1 week before the expiration of my current one (January 14), and everything else looked fine.

Finally, on Wednesday, 11 January, the kind friend accompanied me on one last trip to Rakovnik to get the temporary visa. The line was short and the process didn’t take long. After copying my insurance contract, the woman actually smiled a smile that wasn’t dipped in venom and said everything looks fine. She even returned the original insurance receipt I had mailed her. She put the glorious green stamp in my passport giving me 3 more months to live here legally and left me with the final step of going back to Kladno to pick up my extended business license.

The bus trip between these two cities is horrendously long, and we were grateful for the walk to the trade office to stretch our legs. Sitting in the hallway outside the office waiting our turn, both of us were on edge. I kept fidgeting and asking stupid questions, and he kept snapping at me to stop talking because I was making him even more tense. Finally we were called in. The mean lady at the desk was disappointed to see that I had successfully obtained the visa, but at this point there was nothing she could do. She handed me the new business license, stamped twice and signed by her, and said “that’s it” in a somewhat less than friendly way.

As we stood up, almost as an afterthought, she added, “you know, you don’t have to come to this office every time you need something done on your license. You can go to any trade office in the country. So if you work in Prague, you can just go to the office there.”

Both my friend and I stopped breathing for a moment and the air became slightly thicker as a fine mist of hate was expelled from our pores. She couldn’t have mentioned this sooner, say, on any of the seven or eight trips I had made here in the past couple years? Forcing robotic smiles, we thanked her for the information and practically ran out of the building.

On the way home, my friend was very angry with me for dragging him to Kladno unnecessarily. We argued for a bit as he insisted I should have done more research to find out I could go to any business office, while I assured him that I had done plenty of research and everyone had always told me I had to go to the office in my place of residence. It must have been a recent change. (Future research confirmed this – the change took place quite recently and in the past it was always necessary to go to your local office.) Finally he accepted my explanation, but despite our success, it was hard to be in a good mood after a day spent dealing with Czech state workers.

So that was almost exactly 3 months ago, and now is the time to renew my temporary visa since, surprise surprise, my long-term application has not yet been approved (and in fact I suspect no one has looked at it at all yet). What fresh hell awaits me this time around? Stay tuned for more updates soon!