Livingston, I Presume

Making the Foreigners' Police look good

Slate has published an unbelievable first-person account of one man's struggle to get a U.S. passport. Could be yet another ho-hum tale of a huddled mass member yearning to be free and live the American dream except for one thing: The man in question, Bruce Reed, is in fact an American citizen and is merely trying to get his own passport--and those of his family--renewed in time for a planned trip to Australia. That sort of thing used to take a few weeks; now, with the new passport requirements that mandate U.S. citizens have a passport if they're flying to Mexico, Canada, or the Caribbean, it can take not just months but many months. Sometimes longer.

Reed and his family applied--and paid--for rush passport delivery a full two months before their departure. It was not enough, not by a long shot. By the day of the intended trip, he still had not received the passports--despite many promises to the contrary by officials staffing the overjammed phone lines--and headed for his last hope: a Washington-based passport office. Here's how he describes it:

The scene bore a passing resemblance to the fall of Saigon. Some people were crying. Others were screaming, either at agents or at the armed guards who herded us from one spot to another until the room became too packed to move. A few travelers were in more advanced stages of resignation, sitting on the floor staring at books of Sudoku or simply praying the dwindling supply of oxygen would hold out long enough.

Hyperbole, surely, but having spent some time in the passport office at the U.S. Embassy in Prague, I'd say it's probably not that exaggerated. He waited nearly three hours before being able to see someone, and that's where I very nearly fell off my chair with mingled laughter and horror:

I reached the caseworker window in a mere 150 minutes, still with a faint hope of making an evening flight. But the agent at Window 8 had other plans. She angrily questioned why I needed a passport that day, when my flight wouldn't land in Australia until two days later. I tried to explain the International Date Line, but she had already reached a verdict: Our passports couldn't possibly be done in time for us to leave, so that meant she had no obligation to complete them. And since the office was closing for the weekend, she gave me a slip to come back for them—on Monday.

Seriously? There is seriously someone working in the passport office who doesn't understand that a flight all the way to goddamn Australia can't be done in a single calendar day? I think that frightens me more than zombie fat and semi drivers yakking on cell phones.

Reading the whole thing gave me an immediate flashback to the hellish bureaucracy that occasionally characterized life in the Czech Republic. The old jokes were that Kafka was a journalist, not a novelist and that the way official things worked in that country was the result of the unholy union between the Austro-Hungarian and Communist bureaucracies. Even so, and maybe this is nearly three years away talking, I don't remember things being as terrible as Reed's passport experience was.

Oh, we had some doozies, for sure. Having to get Connery and me--a scant six days post-partum and only a day after we'd been released from one hospital--to a separate Prague hospital miles across town to undergo blood tests and physical exams to get Connery's insurance stands out as a real low point.  Finding out that I had been accidentally living illegally in Prague and would have to pay a fine was another. Still, once you figured out the system, navigating was occasionally time-consuming but not soul-crushing.

I tell you what, U.S. passport office, when you start making me feel nostalgic about Czech bureaucracy, you have a big problem. My passport is up for renewal in 2013. I'd better get on that now.

Travelers, not tourists

I quietly added Uncornered Market to my blogroll a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to write up a little recommendation for it. Since most of the United States will be spending the weekend either: a) sweating b) hiding in air conditioning or c) hiding in the basement wishing for air conditioning, I thought now would be a good time. You can only watch so many movies, you know.

Anyway, Uncornered Market is the closest thing Dan and Audrey--friends of ours from Prague--have to a home right now. They embarked on what most of us would call the adventure of a lifetime--a year to 18 months of traveling around the world--earlier this year and have been writing, taking pictures and video, and posting about the whole shebang. It's the kind of site that will make you wonder why it is that you are reading blogs and not, say, being driven around by mad, drunk Georgians or boarding buses filled with Iranians or taking 10-day jaunts to Turkmenistan. (Why aren't you? Huh?)

Dan and Audrey are the kind of travelers that most of us wish we were. They're flexible, ready to rough it, and absolutely committed to seeing the "real" in any country. They aren't searching for the McDonald's or the Starbucks because they're too busy charming the locals into finding the best places to eat and drink. And with their site, they are putting together an amazing collection of information about places that most people will never see.

Have fun exploring!

Two dollars! I want my two dollars!

My mom called today to tell me that they had received a registered letter for us from the Czech Republic. Apparently our bank there has turned us over to collections for a charge that came through on our account several weeks after we closed the account. What the charge was I don't know--I'm still waiting to see the letter itself--but since we stopped using the account a week before we closed it and everything there is done via electronic transfer, I'm not quite sure how they could have accepted a charge on a closed account. Now, please keep in mind that we closed this account in September 2004. Yes, 2004. We got a letter about this issue a few months after we'd returned to the U.S. and I called the bank and dealt with it...so I thought. Now, they have apparently decided that they are really serious about this, which seems to me to be a day late and a koruna short.

This is the same bank--eBanka, if you're curious--that charged a fee for literally every financial step that we took. If money was transfered into our account, there was a fee. If we transfered money out, there was a fee. If we withdrew money from the ATM--even when the ATM belonged to eBanka--there was a fee. If we picked it up in person at the bank, there was a fee. I'm pretty sure that if I had ever required a kleenex while at eBanka they would have charged me a fee, one for each sheet of a two-ply tissue. If indeed something did get inadvertently charged to our account--which seems to me to be unlikely since we had to turn in our ATM cards and electronic PINs when we closed the account--you can damn well bet it didn't come anywhere close to adding up to the amount we paid to them in fees over four years of banking.

It may horrify you to discover that this is not the first time I've been turned over to Czech collections. When we moved to our last flat, our landlord neglected to turn in the papers (yes, there were papers, many of them and in triplicate) to transfer the phone back from us to him. Consequently, we were billed for a month that we didn't use, a month that should have been paid by our scofflaw landlord.

Cesky Telecom kept sending the notices to the old address after our forwarding order had expired (you only get a month of forwarding, and you have to pay for that), and it wasn't until we went to visit our old neighbor lady when I was about 39.275 weeks pregnant that we discovered that we'd been turned over to collections for the princely sum of 324 crowns, at that time about $12.46. You can imagine my mood when I called that collection agent.

In my very best Czech, I tried to explain the situation (this was after repeated calls to the deadbeat landlord) to the rudest man in all the Czech Republic. Hormones raging, I was verging on tears at not being able to express myself perfectly and at his willful refusal to understand me. "YOU are responsible," he kept saying to me. "Because YOU are Nicole Rosenleaf Ritter, are you not? SHE is responsible." Finally I tried the coward's way out, "Do you have someone there I could speak with in English?"

"No, we do not. We are a Czech company and we speak Czech."

Perhaps this exchange is why I always want to punch people who whine that immigrants should learn to speak English.

In the end, I sent Chip off to the post office to pay the stupid 324 crowns. We were going to have a new baby at home and far larger bureaucratic battles to fight.

I find that even as I relate this my blood pressure is rising, and I'm reminded of how challenging life could be there--and not always in a good way. It's necessary to remind myself that as much as we loved our time in Prague, it wasn't just cheap beer and the Charles Bridge. We had these kinds of petty skirmishes every day, partially because that's just how things functioned and partially because we didn't know how to work the system. After a while, we stopped fighting on things that weren't important. We didn't ask about ice for our drinks. We saved the boxes and all original packaging for returns. We learned where not to go.

As beautiful as it was and as much fun as it was, the next battle was always just around the corner in Prague, whether it was with the crabby lady at the pharmacy or the pickpockets on the tram. In that way, living abroad is rather like parenting a toddler, now that I think about it. The rewards are immense, but so are the daily challenges.