by It hasn’t been the best of weeks so far; at times it’s been utterly dismal.
After Sunday’s debacle, I looked at another Dacia the following day. Although I’d spoken to the vendor half an hour earlier, when I got there he told me he’d already sold the car but would give it to me instead if I paid extra. Bullshit. The people I have to deal with here, jeez. It would have been a bit of fun to bomb around Romania for a bit before my trip to New Zealand, and on Sunday my chance of doing that was in excess of 90%, but with all the other crap I’m dealing with I’ve decided to delay my pursuit of four wheels until September.
On Tuesday morning I was free of lessons, so I got up bright and early to visit the immigration hellhole, attempting to get the address on my residence permit updated so that Barclays could have proof of where I live. I set my alarm for 4:40, had breakfast, and was there at 5:30. By “there” I mean outside the office (if you can call it that) which opens at 8:30. They’d drawn up an informal numbered list of people in order of their arrival; I was ninth. One man was incensed because apparently there had been another list which someone had ripped off during the night. I chatted to a young Serbian man who was studying at the university. He was a linguist. His English and Romanian were both impeccable. Eventually staff arrived and the doors opened. EU citizens, of which I’m no longer one of course, had priority. They only have one person processing everybody, so the queue moved at a snail’s pace. Then disaster struck. A group of eleven Vietnamese workers arrived, and because their boss was Romanian they could jump the queue. During my fifth hour in that inhuman cesspit where everything is yellow and brown and falling apart, it dawned on me that maybe I’d never reach the front at all before the office closed at 12:30. And that’s exactly what happened. What a waste of seven hours. There was anger, not least on my part, but the real shocker was the older Romanian couple in front of me in positions seven and eight on the list. Forty years ago they would have routinely queued for several hours just to get bread. Why they were in the office I didn’t know, but I went up to them and said, “You do realise that the office closes soon and we’ll have got out of bed at a ridiculous hour for absolutely nothing?!” They didn’t care. If it closes, it closes. Wake up, you fucking loons, I wanted to say. Perhaps I did say it, I can’t remember now. I bet you don’t vote in elections either. A country of incredible beauty, but one in which its bureaucratic systems and processes demonstrably fail to function. (The immigration office did function, up to a point, during Covid when virtually no workers were entering the country. Now they are arriving daily from India and Pakistan, and obviously Vietnam too.) That evening I saw the after-hours doctor and I came back via the office. It was 10pm, and people were already queuing outside for the following morning, all relying on a lack of Vietnamese or Pakistani shelf-stackers.
So, Barclays. I called them later on Tuesday. I was told that yes, if I visit a branch in the UK then I can get my ID documents certified and hopefully my money back. So, having exhausted all options that don’t involve actually being in the UK (I’m not going back to that office again until my residence permit expires in 2026; heaven help me at that point), I bit the bullet and booked a trip over there. I’m leaving on 9th June, two weeks today, and will come back on the 13th. I hope to meet my university friend there. Before I booked my flights I asked him which of my two options (the 9th and the 23rd) would suit him better, and he said clearly the 9th. Then he told me why. His girlfriend, in only her early thirties, has been diagnosed with breast cancer and will be starting a course of chemo later in the month. He said it’s been caught early and the prognosis is very good, but yeesh. What a shock. A lovely person too. Hearing that put my wasted hours in a queue into some sort of perspective.
Tina Turner has died. An extraordinary talent, a million miles from a modern diva, and in the eighties a superstar. And all after a tough upbringing and an abusive relationship. Yesterday morning Tonight, featuring Tina Turner and David Bowie, came on the radio. A beautiful song. And now they’re both gone.
