Visa day, take two.

We have good news to report: we should be receiving our permise de ședere in the next month, allowing us to stay in Romania legally for the upcoming year.  Yippee!  For those of you who read Jack's post about our visa saga, you'll know that this is a big relief.  We were late in applying, due to the computer failure last time we went to file, but it doesn't matter -- now everything is set, and we can stay.  Hooray.

Visa day number two had its own fair share of adventures, though.  Getting a volunteer visa in Hunedoara county requires a day in Deva, the county seat.  The only bus to Deva from Târgu Mureș leaves at 6:30am and gets there at 10; the only bus home leaves at 6:00pm and gets back at 9:30.  So there we were, again, at 6:30 in the morning, this time on a 20-seat maxi-taxi for the long morning ride.  Thankfully, there were no drunken conversations this time and we'd downloaded a few episodes of Car Talk and This American Life onto our iPod to keep us a bit more entertained during the long, winding road in the dark.  I had been fighting off a stomach bug all weekend, so the bouncy, curvy, breakneck-speed trip over Romanian roads was not something I was really looking forward to... but NPR helped, as NPR is wont to do.  :)

We got to Deva and waited a few minutes for our colleagues and friends from Lupeni to show up, and soon they did, with Ilie beeping the horn of his little red car to get our attention.  The first stop was the police station, where we climbed two flights of concrete steps to the immigration office.  The immigration office is a frosted glass window in a dingy concrete-floored room that boasts a table with benches and one of the ubiquitous Romanian coffee machines, which for 35 cents squirt out a hot cup of coffee or hot chocolate into a little plastic cup.  Ibrian (the hero of the day, our FNO colleague who walked us through every step of the process) tapped on the window, spoke to the guy behind it, gave him our passports and a a few other papers, and then we waited.  After a while, whatever needed to be done was done, and we were off again, back down the concrete steps and past the smoking police officers in the entryway, to our next stop. 

Next was the national bank, where we paid for some stamps, which are apparently part of the process.  It was quick and clean and simple, a striking contrast to the police station.  After the bank we went to the other side of town to the insurance building.  On the way, we walked through a demonstration of cops and children that we couldn't figure out -- there were about 100 school kids and 200 uniformed cops milling about a city square as "It's Raining Men" blasted from the loudspeakers.  We weren't exactly sure what to make of it... perhaps law enforcement appreciation day?  Anyway, they'd moved on to "I Need a Hero" by the time we gave up trying to understand and just left.

The health insurance building was packed.  It's a huge, sprawling place, with multiple floors of long corridors with crowded offices.  The office we entered was surprisingly empty: two workers in one room, each busily typing at computers, looked up when we entered and helped us file for the obligatory Romanian national health insurance.  We chatted in Romanian for a while with the friendly clerk, who was curious about why young people from America are moving to Romania when so many young Romanians want to move to America -- a good question, we agreed.  After we finished there, it was back down the hall to another tiny office, this time to pay another lump of money for health insurance.  After that was accomplished, we squeezed through the crowd, back down the stairs, and out to the street, where the cops and children had now gathered more formally in front of the statue in the square, though it still seemed like nothing was really happening.

Then we walked a ways further, to a mysterious building where I'm not sure what they do.  Something official.  We stood in line to get a little paper from a lady in an office, which directed us to go stand in an even longer line to pay a huge wad of money to a lady in another office.  I think this was for our visas, officially, because it was a lot of money.  We pulled it out of a paper envelope and I felt like my mom.

And then it was back to the police station, where it was time to Fill Out Forms.  Lots of them.  We only had one pen, so Jack and I took turns writing over and over our name, our parents' names, our address in Romania, and so on... but it was fun to talk with Ilie and Ibrian and Gretchen and to laugh at Jack's passport picture (taken when he was a sophomore in college, before the long hair and beard... he hardly looks like the same person).  Then it was time for pictures and fingerprints.  This involved standing in a closet that smelled rather funny, while the men in the immigration office attempted to make a camera work and take your picture through a window in the wall.  It didn't work for a good 15 minutes while I stood in the dark closet, watching, listening to the staff complain that nothing ever gets fixed around here when they request it, how are they supposed to work under such conditions and so on... it sounded really familiar, actually (except it was in Romanian), and considering that the man we were talking to now was the same man who had helped us four hours earlier when we first showed up, I figured he'd been having a long day.  But eventually the photos were snapped, the fingerprints were taken, and the signatures were signed.  And then we were done.

Well, almost.  The immigration office requested a paper they've never asked for before from FNO, so that has to be brought to Deva next week sometime.  (It happens often here.)  But after that's taken care of, we're done.  And in three weeks, we'll head back to Deva -- this time maybe from Lupeni! -- and pick up our permise de ședere.

Thanks be to God.