Legal alien advice & bus antics

Today I have come full circle with the system here in Greece and I am back to where I started. This time a lawyer says that she will be able to find a way for me to stay here and I am not sure who to believe. I must say that it was quite a comical day. I’ve been laughing at and with people since this morning because the disorganized bureaucracy along with it’s collateral disorganization is nothing short of a joke.

Just after noon I was sent on a new treasure hunt to get my dad’s birth certificate. There I was, walking through narrow roads looking for a small sign denoting the apartment that archived these documents. No one knew where it was, so I had to use hints from the lawyer to be able to triangulate where it would be close to. I even asked a Police offer who worked for the city and he had no idea. I laughed in his face too. I bet he couldn’t tell me where the police station was.

Anyways, so my fate has been deferred one more day, as I will gather the remaining of the documentation by tomorrow morning and once again go to the Alien Police with a lawyer. For anyone keeping score at home, I have already gone to the alien police by myself (with all the documentation they had requested), with an officer from the army (where they told us a different story on how I could say), and now I am going with a lawyer who said she will be able to “find a way”. Are you starting to get a sense of what I am dealing with here?

The more the country wants to drive me out the harder I push because I realize this is part of the experience of living in Greece. Nothing is clockwork. You have to double check, triple check, and test everything. You always have to be paying attention to what people are doing or they might tell you the wrong information, charge you the wrong price, sell you a ticket with the wrong date, sell you the wrong product, or run you over with their car.

Today was also comical on the bus. I saw this old lady slap this younger lady (in her 30s) so hard that she nearly knocked the gloves off her hand. By some amazing coincidence there was an off-duty security guard who got in-between them. All this because the old lady tried to put her bags on the edge of the younger ladies seat. There were lots of cuss words that caused the public to start saying “Shame on you both!!”. Anyways, this was a lower class incident and not something indicative of every bus ride. Normally you see people yelling at others for pushing them, not letting them sit down, or getting in their way. It almost always involves old grumpy people. The ironic part is that it is a society that pushing, touching, and resting against are all part of the culture. I guess everyone has their breaking point.

More tomorrow. Where will the roulette wheel fall?