Back in the ČSSR…

You don’t know how happy you are. OK, technically this was never an SSR, but the Soviet-era mindset is still in evidence some places. Yesterday we went down to the police station to register for our Temporary Residence Permits. A colleague from the university took us over there, which was good because we never could have figured it out ourselves. The TRP office is actually in an industrial wasteland east of town, with only a tiny sign. Once inside, we were buzzed in through a locked gate and directed down the hall to the appropriate office. We had all our forms filled out already, but the humorless woman in the office indicated that everything would have to be done again ‘in Slovak letters’. Our poor colleague was put to work recopying the forms with proper penmanship and grammar, while simultaneously translating requests for the current addresses of all of our siblings, the maiden name of our cat and other information necessary to determine that we were not Enemies of the State. Every document had to copied a few times on an ancient copy machine. One of the women behind the desk spent 5 minutes carefully going through our stack of documents over and over again – after a couple of minutes, it was obvious that she had no idea what she was looking for and was just trying to look important. But after only an hour and a quarter, we were handed a small slip of paper with some impressive-looking stamps which apparently is our Temporary Temporary Residency Permit, which will have to do until we get the Permanent TRP.