bureaucracy is beautiful

One of last week's adventures was my trip to the Syrian Immigration and Passport Office to extend my residency permit. Although Syria grants 3 month visas, if you plan to stay for more than 15 days, you have to register. However, there is a 15 day grace period and amusing fact #1 is that, if you show up before day 14 or 15 of your stay, you'll be told to return the next week.

So, well into week 3 of my residence in Syria, I went to extend my visa. This process involves, first, rushing to the office (like most government offices, it closes at 2:00) and climbing to the third floor. Second, go to the window marked "foreign residency" to pick up form #1. Do not, of course, stand in line to get this form, but join everyone else in pushing and shoving until you've firmly planted yourself in front of the window. This is the strategy for EVERYTHING in Syria; walk right up to the person in charge, passing anyone foolish enough not to do the same, and place your order--but only after exchanging extended greetings and pleasantries.

Third, fill out the form--in french and arabic only--on a miniscule table. Leave blank the parts you can't answer or translate; it doesn't seem to matter. Fourth, take the form, 3 photos, and your passport back downstairs to an outdoor copy kiosk. Hand them all over to the guys working the copy center and wait a few minutes until they hand back copies and a mysterious stamp. (On a side note, I arrived in Syria with about 20 passport photos. They are now ALL gone. I used the last 2 becoming a "chercheuse" at the French institute for Middle Eastern studies.)

Fifth (?), climb back to the third floor. Go to the same window and pick up Form #2. Fill that out--also in french and arabic only, on same miniscule table--and return to the window. Sixth, hand over all forms plus official letter from the University to same official, who affixes the mysterious stamp and signs one of the forms.

Seventh (??), go to a small office for another signature. Eighth, go to the neighboring office for yet ANOTHER signature. There, a few pertinent pieces of information are written on an index card, which gets filed in an antiquated file cabinet, already almost bursting at the seams with earlier visitors' yellowing cards.

Ninth (???), return to original window to hand all forms and passport over to same official. Last, with a sigh of relief, leave the building. Of course, you have to return the next day to pick up the passport. But now you have a shiny new 2 month visa extension!

This sounds like some sort of bureaucratic hell. But the actually process is actually incredibly efficient, in spite of being so convoluted. Everyone knows the routine by heart, so, as long as you just go along with the procedures and don't insist on knowing exactly what is going on, it takes at most an hour. As with many things in Syria, you start to suspect that this is one more strategy for reducing the national unemployment rate (for others, see the plethora of ticket-checkers on the bus and garbage collectors in the streets).

All in all, it could be a lot worse. And, as if to prove that point, the Cook County court system has just sent me a jury duty summons! Yep, I'm supposed to be in court on July 11. Developing...

UPDATE: Cook County has kindly let me off the hook. But now the U of C library is demanding an overdue library book. I have no idea where it might be...