Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Romanian guy who went to Poland

After finally convincing our landlady to allow me to register in her flat (it is said that
the Polish law is so absurd that once you register your stay in a house, you cannot unregister, and abuses may arise in such way that one can stop paying the rent and owner cannot legally evacuate him), today we went to do it. It went fine. From there they directed me to another office (supposedly the immigration office). Of course, after being sent from a room to another, I found out that it was the wrong building, wrong office, wrong address. I went to the right one. I knew that I didn't have all the documents I needed, so I went there only to ask what else I needed. Apparently only the health insurance (as a freelancer the company for which I'm working does not provide me with one), since my emergency tourist's health insurance didn't fit. OK, I said to myself, this is easy. I knew that in Bucharest for example, there are dozens of insurance companies and most of the banks have also insurance branches. After wandering about an hour in the center of the city, I finally realized that it might not be that easy. Every bank clerk was grimacing at my unusual request. 'Co? Nie, nie!' No Allianz, no ING, no Generali, no Comercial Union to be seen. As I was walking with to snow blowing in my face I saw the Deutsche Bank logo. I walked there, and it was indeed, a Deutsche Bank office. I said to myself, damn they must have it. And they did. The first lady that I talked to didn't speak English so she brought a colleague of hers. When explaining to him what I need it for and how it should look like, they told me it's impossible. You cannot sign a basic health insurance with a private insurance company. You have to be insured in the public health insurance system and then, if you want a better treatment while being hospitalized in the (lousy) Polish hospitals, you can sign an additional, private one as well. Nevertheless, I felt they were on my side. The lady offered to phone the immigration office herself to ask for more details. She had been on the phone for more than 20 min., when she started quarreling with that clerk. I could feel a whole war between systems in her voice, the public and the private one. Efficency fighting the unyielding, long-lasting bureaucracy. Thank you Mrs. Ewa Czyrz, you have been my heroine today. Even though (after talking myself to that gentleman) we could not understand exactly what I needed...
So here I am, going back to the immigration office. On the way there I discovered that the document registering me in the flat I live in contained a rather smaaaall error: instead of 01.02 it was written 02.01 (2nd of January), so practically one month less. I can't even get the living permit with it, so I'll have to change it tomorrow. It shouldn't be that difficult :))
In the immigration office, finding it impossible to give me a better solution regarding the health insurance they decided to solve me some other way. 'I have talked to my superior and we agreed that in fact you do not need a living permit after all.' 'But my employer poses it to me as a condition of signing the contract. I will be staying illegally in Poland if I don't get one' 'No, relax, it's OK'. So he was practically advising me to break the law. Or maybe he was just wishing that I got back to my home country (repatriated) and stop bothering him with my problems. After experiences like this one, I might as well return to Romania.
The funny thing is that today, after googling a bit, I found out that in most of the EU countries, including Romania, the living permit (for periods of more than 90 days) is optional for EU citizens.