Tuesday I picked up my shiny new Canadian passport, good to 2015. I love it. Dark blue, with nice clean pages on the inside. Not loud and garish. Quiet and dignified. Like Canadians. Like me*. It has 48 pages waiting to be filled with visas and stamps from interesting places. Especially the place where I live. Ukraine. I am registered here as a permanent resident under the number of my old passport. Need to fix that.
Wednesday we went to the document office in P'yatikhatki, 30 km away. As it is the "County Seat" and we live in a village in P'yatikhatshi Raion, we must go there "to be taxed". Tanya called the office and they told us we needed to apply to register a new passport. We arrived about 3:00 pm and filled out the two forms, only to be told we needed four passport photos. If we brought them back at 8:00 next morning they would go to Dnipro that day and we would have my passport back with a permanent resident stamp in it by Monday.
Now I have a Ukrainian Permanent Resident passport BUT Immigration at Ukrainian airports (or on trains at border crossings) are very hostile that I don't have a stamp in my passport. Immigration control are a different Ministry than the Ministry which looks after everybody's documents. The latter says we don't need a stamp in my Canadian passport; the former say we do. Since the former can refuse my re-entry into Ukraine, I need the stamp!
Thursday we were back with the pictures next morning at 8:00. At 11:00 we got a phone call saying oh, by the way you need to have the 4th page translated and notarized. Back to P'yatikhatki to get my new passport. Translating it was easy, we just made the changes on the translation of my old passport and retyped it.
Monday, we will go into Dnipro, to get our friend Natalia to stamp the translation as hers (she is a certified translator) then we will take it to a Notary friend of Natalia's who will stamp it without having seen Natalia sign it. Then we will take it to the Document office in Dnipro (I think) where they will dutifully stamp some more papers and hopefully even my new passport.
Or maybe we'll have to take it back to P'yatikhatki.
* cough, hack, choke
I tried not to gag when you said you were too. Nice try though.
ReplyDeleteOh so they figure you got that one hot off the black market press I guess. The U.S. is becoming so paranoid I understand the new ones have a microchip and bio identifier embedded. Silly I know.
ReplyDeleteNow if you use four copies of that avatar just tell them you were a little bit stubborn that day. Better not I suspect they have no sense of humor.