All in an expat’s day
Yesterday the agenda was full. I haven’t lived in the USA for a long time, so maybe my finding differences in my experiences is out of date. I was wide eyed as I went through that day, for some reason noticing more than I have lately been noticing.
First job of the day was getting the two new tires put on the car. Giampaolo, the head tire guy, had said, “Eight exactly, because after that the cars start to pour in.” Like I did last week with that wheelbarrow tire sized spare tire thumping along the roads, having called Monday night and made an appointment for Wednesday morning with the owner, who doesn’t work there and who didn’t write anything down about me or my car. Giampaolo didn’t want to do anything for me, so I got aggressive about how could he turn me out into the cold world with that bitty wheel and no spare, and he gave in and put a used tire loaner on the car.
I don’t remember ever having to make an appointment for buying new tires when you’d ruined a tire. You could actually do it in lots of places, whereas here it is the gommista or no one. They are all closed on Sunday, so if you have a flat on Saturday, you’re out of luck. And even on Monday, in this case I was out of luck. Although I’d told the owner what my car was and asked if he had the tires for it, and he’d said yes, in truth they didn’t and wanted to turn me away. I was referred there by my friend Tina who is related to Giampaolo. So item one: i had a connection and 2: I was aggressive. I’d never had to play those cards before to spend money on tires.
So, I arrived at the gommista at 8:05 because there was a backhoe in our driveway that wouldn’t let us out onto the road. Customers were lined up and the doors were all locked. Most of the customers were giant trucks and tractors, the kind used on big farms. In the automobile line was a community service truck and me. So much for being on time. At about 8:15 a door opened and I was told to drive my car onto a lift platform. (There may be a real word for this thing, but I am not very clever with car words in either language, although I did hit a high by knowing the word toe last week.) It was with enormous relief that I drove in from the very cold outside. And then, as I left the car and went to the waiting room, lost that sense of relief when I found there was no heat. If it was under 32°F outside, it was also under 32°F inside but no wind.
This is your fashion advice for the day. In Umbria in winter, it is almost never safe to wear tights and a skirt anywhere. It doesn’t matter what you are doing later, hiking boots, woolly socks and wool trousers over leggings is what to wear. Lots of places have no heat.
Time passed and the community service truck was worked on while my car sat untouched. A man in an expensive Alfa Romeo sedan came, dealt with two tires and left with them. My car was still virgin. 8:35, and someone came to tell me to move toward a hole in the wall to warm up. What relief! It was like being in a jet exhaust. Air at about 115°F blew out of the hole with a roar. Apparently, it takes that long to warm it up, but the effect is only within a few feet of the exit blast and does nothing for the overall temperature. I was so frozen the hot air hurt me as it thawed me. Still, I felt saved.
At 8:45 they finally started on my car and by 10 I was paying a bill that was about half what I’d expected. No warranty.
I went to the post office to pick up the forms I needed to apply for my new permesso di soggiorno, or permission to stay. I’d read the instructions on the web, so I had with me the photocopies I thought I needed to do the deed. Year after year, I photocopy exactly the same documents as I have produced in past years. The only thing that ever changes is sometimes more stamps in the passport. I was number 17 for the “amico” desk that doles the forms to us. In just a few moments I was getting them with a warning, “Make sure it is all correct and complete before you come back, because we can’t help you.” Vabbe, OK, I’m not ignorant, I think I can manage this. I dropped by the tobacco store to but the euro 14 and change stamp I needed. I went to the photo shop and had eight photos made, which was why I was dressed decently and almost froze to death for it.
I went to a cafe for breakfast and filling in the forms. I hadn’t even half finished my panino when I realized that, no, I could not fill this out. One demand was the number of my present P di S. There are three numbers on my P di S. Which is THE one?
My friend had said there are people who will fill this out for euro 15, so I went in search of a savior. I went to the office of citizens, because they seem to have answers. This one they did not have and there ensued a confused conversation about patronati and sindicati. I apparently was supposed to have one of those. I don’t. Finally they mentioned CISL, which I’d always thought was a labor union. Given some directions that were fairly sketchy, I wandered and with some more directions found the office. It is in sections, and the labeling is all initials. INAS, CAAF, IRPA, how does anyone know what they mean? I sat down with a group in the part said to be only CISL. I admired the men. I waited. The Chinese man next to me was reading an office supplies catalog, which comprised the only reading material other than some brochures about Catholic church charities and how many people they help. After a very long time, the woman you could hear through the door came out and said good bye to her clients and then asked were we all waiting for her. How would we know? So she asked what we wanted and one by one told us to go here or there. She told me and two Chinese men we needed Abdul, but was that ABDUL, or Abdul? On investigation, there was absolutely no sign saying either. So we waited in the only other area that had any initials showing, none of them ABDUL. More time passed. Finally she passed through this area, and crossly said, “I told you to wait for Abdul!” and she pointed at what looked like a dark elevator corridor or perhaps a mop closet, where the only sign said riservato which means private. But one could hear faint sounds of conversation from behind an unmarked door.
At last the door opened and I waved the Chinese ahead of me, because they’d preceded me into the other original waiting room if not into this hallway. Eventually it was my turn and there was Abdul, a real person named Abdul. I had just lucked into one of the two times in the week that Abdul fills out permesso di soggiorno forms. I asked him, “How is anybody supposed to find you when there are no signs saying “help with permesso di soggiorno” or even Abdul? Why does one have to wait endless time to even find out there is an Abdul? And the biggest question of all, why is this form incomprehensible? I have a Bachelor of Science degree and I can read Dante in antique Italian, but I couldn’t fill this thing out. What is a Polish carer of the aged with no education do? He shrugged. Shrugs are a large part of communication here.
He redid all of my photocopies partly because they all have to go into the CISL system in case the state police lose the documents that go in with the form and partly because I had not realized that they wanted copies of every single page of my passport, even the empty ones and the boilerplate pages. He quickly filled in all the codes. Almost every entry requires a code instead of a word. We talked about Marrakesh, where he was born, he took phone calls and spoke rapid Arabic to someone. All the pages, when done, had CISL printed on them. I hope that helps. When he was done, he proudly stuck the stamp on a square printed just to receive the stamp and packed it all into a CISL envelope and handed me that packed envelope as well as forty pages of paper we had no use for. I’m still looking for a paper recycling bin.
Off to the post office where I am number 143 for the amico desk. A woman came in some minutes after me and took a number, 147. When my number came up, she pushed in front, crumpled her number and threw it on the floor, saying, “I am number 140 and you have skipped me.” Bitch. When I got to the clerk I told him she was a liar and was holding number 147. He shrugged. Then he went through the entire packet, page by page by page, pointing out that the white page numbers on the passport hadn’t printed and that he was trusting me that I hadn’t photocopied the same empty pages over and over. I pointed out that the homemade copies all had the numbers and it was the CISL pages that lacked some of them. Shrug. Finally, he added up the costs, which were just under euro 60. The Polish carer came to mind again. It cost me almost euro 75 to apply for permission to stay here. Had I found one of those filler-inners for euro 15, it would have been that much more. Add in the price of the photos, too. That’s a sizable price, considering that in the old system it cost you the photos and the stamp and a lot of time, but not all that much more time than it takes to find Abdul.
Supermarket, then, and then home, where I collapsed with exhaustion from the effort required to buy two tires and apply for a P di S.
4 comments November 21st, 2007
