Sorry it’s taken me so long to post the rest of the story from the bizarre land of vehicle registration. As I wrote earlier this month, registering my car has been one crazy adventure.
So by the end of November I had my new visa and accreditation and was ready to finally get my car registered properly. Anatoli, a Ukrainian colleague, agreed to go with me to the Customs office. We set out bright and early, drove out by a huge shopping mall where the main DHL hub is. The Customs office is on the third floor of the DHL building, with DHL posters and photos of DHL airplanes all over the walls. I started to wonder if DHL had paid for this relatively nice space for the Customs office? It was certainly one of the more modern government offices I’ve ever seen here. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? I mean, DHL has to deal with Customs all the time, so it must make their lives immensely easier to have a well-equiped Customs office not only on site but also up-to-date in terms of equipment and facilities.
We walked into a large open room, with probably 20 computer stations and a bunch of Customs officers in their snappy uniforms. Some were surfing the intertubes, some were gabbing away on their cell phones, a couple looked like they might actually have been working. Anatoli walked right up to an officer he had previously worked with for some other Customs issues. This guy was quite busy checking the boxing updates online, and told us we needed to see the Director downstairs first. We found that office but it was locked. I sat down and pulled out my newspaper while Anatoli did some investigating. Turned out the Director was out. Back upstairs to see the Deputy Director, who was on the telephone at someone else’s desk for a good 10 minutes. He finally is free, gives my documents a cursory glance, stamps and signs them. Back to the first guy’s desk, who is now MIA. There are three chairs for visitors, one is broken, one is blocked by an enormous plant and Anatoli insists I take the remaining one. Back to my newspaper. He stands nearby, out of the way, but gets yelled at anyways. Another Customs officer tells him to go out in the hallway and wait, but I pull a vague “They told us to wait here”, which gets the officer to grudgingly back off.
Our officer finally reappears. He shuffles through the huge stack of papers I have – originals and copies and more copies and more originals. The bill of sale (in English and Ukrainian), notarized; a letter from the US Embassy requesting the Customs Office facilitate my request; copies of my passport, visa and accreditation; the temporary registration (with 3 extensions); my employing organization’s registration; and more.
He goes over to a wall of binders, pulls one down, and much to utter amazement, flips through to the paperwork the previos owner had submitted. I was very impressed. He shuffles all the papers some more, then tells us to go out to the parking lot, drive my car into the special customs zone and bring him back a receipt. I don’t really understand what we’re supposed to do, but I’ve learned that it’s often entertaining to just see how things develop instead of asking a lot of questions up front. So we go out to the car, I drive it about 30 feet, through a gate into a fenced lot. There’s a little pre-fab type building on the lot; the door opens and we are waved in. I give my license plate number to a guy who writes something up, and a woman asks me for about 200 hrivna (about 25 bucks). The lady hands me a receipt, the man hands me another piece of paper with a stamp. “Just curious, but what did I just pay for?”, I ask with a smile. “That document”, she says, deadpan. “A very expensive piece of paper.” They find this hilarious.
Back up to the third floor, our guy is MIA again. The room is getting busier, more men waiting for whatever stamp or signature or document they need. There are female Customs agents, but I notice I’m the only female “customer”. Our guy reappears again after about 30 minutes and I hand over the very expensive piece of paper. I get to keep the receipt, though. Lucky me. More paper shuffling.
“There’s a new policy that imported cars have to pass a radiological and ecological test,” he says. “Your car never went through this check, and we can’t continue until you get the stamps.”
“But I have the tech-osmotr”, I say (the annual car check that you have to get done at a mechanic). “Don’t they do these tests during that check?”
“No, this is different. But since your car is registered with the Embassy, you just need the stamps, and there is no charge.” He gives us the addresses for two offices across town.
“I need to get two stamps certifying that these inspections were done, but I don’t actually have to get the inspections, I just need the stamps?”
“Yes.”
I ask it again, just to make sure I’ve got this. I can’t quite wrap my head around it. Anatoli is giggling. I’ve got several questions I’d like to ask, a few comments I’d like to share, but Anatoli hussles me out.
We get the car out of hock from the Customs lot and head across town. It’s getting close to lunchtime and traffic is heavy. We find the first place, the sign outside says it’s some kind of radiological laboratory. We find the office we need, it’s 15 minutes before lunch time and there are several other people ahead of us. We wait in the hallway. Finally our turn and we go into a narrow cramped office. I have to actually step back outside so someone else can get out – there’s no room in the office to squeeze around each other. The young lady helping us looks tired, irritated and ready to lock her door for lunch. She needs a copy of my passport, which I thankfully have one more copy but it’s in the car. I run out to get it, she lets us back in even though it’s technically lunch time now. She makes an entry in a huge ledger, adds my passport copy to a stack of papers, signs and stamps the car’s temporary registration form.
We head off to the second place, near the train station, at the Post Office’s depot. We’re in luck – it’s still open! We go up to the counter, posted on the glass wall is a sign says So-and-So works from this time to that time; it’s the right time, but the man is not there. There’s a woman sitting across the room, a computer monitor and telephone the only times on her pristine desk top. No files, no papers, not even a pencil. She’s sitting with her arms crossed on the desk, staring out the window. Staring. Out. The. Window. Doesn’t even look our way. It’s like she’s frozen or something, I pull out my phone, desperately wanting to get a picture of this. Anatoli and I are cracking up. The phone gets her attention, her head turns just enough to glare at me. I can’t get the angle right through the glass wall, the picture doesn’t come out. We wait about 10 minutes for the guy to show up, and the ENTIRE time that woman just sits there, staring out the window. The only movement she made was a very slight shrug when Anatoli gestured a question about when the guy would be back (she was locked safe and sound behine the glass wall). I still wonder about that lady. Not even reading a newspaper, surfing the ‘net or even doodling. Just sitting and staring out the window.
So this guy finally comes back. A quick glance at my papers, he signs and stamps. Doesn’t even need a copy of anything, much to my amazement – there are copies of my passport in half the offices of Kyiv, I think. My car has officially passed the radiological and ecological inspections, or at least I have the stamps that say it has.
Back to the Customs office. Big surprise, our guy is at his desk! We hand over the stack of papers again, two fresh new stamps making the packet complete. He tells us to come back in about 45 minutes. We walk over to the mall, get some lunch. I get to know a lot about Anatoli’s life. We bond.
An hour later, the Customs officer hands over a very official looking document on fancy government paper, an Act of some kind.
“You are half done now.” I think he has a sick sense of humor, but turns out he wasn’t joking. I have to go to GDIP for blah blah blah, I can’t take any more of this. My brain shuts down.
“When do I have to do this by?” I ask.
“You can do it today,” he says.
“I can’t take any more of this today. Seriously, it’s enough for one day.”
He says I should do it as soon as possible, like within a week or so. Cool.
Anatoli has lost an entire work day (me, too, for that matter). He can’t go with me again this week, and the next week I have a business trip. My husband says he’ll go with me on Friday.
I love Igor like crazy, he’s a wonderful man. But he tends to get a little anxious when dealing with beauracrats, he gets kind of worked up. He says it’s the Ukrainian nature to be pessimistic, and I know I amuse him with my naive hopefullness that this will really be the last stop on the car saga.
We find the building and miraculously find a parking space on the street, since there is no parking lot. Igor recognizes the area, the German Consulate is on this street. This sets him off – the terrible experiences he had there almost 10 years ago, when he had to camp out for 2 weeks to get his student visa for Ukraine Free University in Munich. Literally camp out. He waited in line every day for 2 weeks until finally he was able to get in. I don’t know how they were running things then, but it sounds so inefficient it’s hard to believe it was a German operation. I’ve heard stories about the pretty much the entire Consulate staff being fired not long after Igor’s terrible experience – the employees were so corrupt all they could do was clean house and start over. It was a long time ago, but the experience left such a mark on Igor that, to this day, if I talk about us going someplace that will require him to get a visa, he becomes almost physically ill.
But I digress. Let’s just say that seeing the German Consulate didn’t calm Igor’s nerve any for our visit to GDIP.
What is GDIP, you ask? It is General Directorate for Servicing the Foreign Representative Offices. The name doesn’t make much sense in Ukrainian, either.
We find Galina in her third floor office. A pleasant enough and very business-like woman. Straight to the facts. Shuffle through my documents and copies. I had added a few more things, just in case, and in turned out she wanted one of them. Whew!
“Where’s the letter from the Embassy?” she asks.
“Here’s a copy, they took the original at Customs.”
“You need to get another letter from the Embassy.”
Crap, I think to myself. Another day wasted, another trip back to this hell.
“You can just bring it when we meet at MREO,” she says.
Wow, cool! I don’t have to start over here for lack of a letter? But wait, did she just say “when we meet at MREO”? That sounds suspiciously like we aren’t finishing this today.
“What does the letter have to say?” Igor asks. I knew I’d brought him for a reason. He is brilliant.
“The same as the letter to Customs, only addressed to GDIP.”
Of course.
“I beg your pardon,” I can’t hold it in any longer, but I smile and put sugar on my words, “where could a person find the instructions for this entire process? So they could be prepared, and like, have all the right documents and do things in the correct order and go to the right offices, and not waste your time because they don’t have a letter.”
She stops shuffling papers and stares at me. Hard. Crap. I’ve gotten so far, so close to finishing this hell and now I’ve shot myself in the foot because I couldn’t hold my sarcasm until I have an actual registration in my hands.
I’d like to believe that what she’s really thinking is “Damn, she’s right. This really should be written down somewhere and it would be really helpful for everyone,” but what she says, after a long pause, is “Well, there are instructions at MREO, but I highly doubt
you are going to go
there and read it
yourself.” I’m not sure if she’s implying I can’t read it because it’s in Ukrainian (which I can, thank you very much!) or that I wouldn’t go to MREO (which I have and will again) or that I wouldn’t take my time to find it (which is probably true).
“Really?”, more sugar. “And there are instructions for GDIP’s procedures at MREO?”
“Well, no, not about GDIP.”
Which is what I figured, because why the hell would the BMV for the general public have information about what the General Directorate for Servicing the Foreign Representative Offices needs?
“So how can one know about the process with GDIP?” I’m pushing my luck, but I can’t help myself.
“You can call me,” she snaps.
I decide not to tell her that we tried to call yesterday but she didn’t answer the phone. She is, after all, doing me a favor by letting me bring the Embassy letter later, when we meet at MREO. Speaking of which, she asks if Monday is convenient for me.
“Actually, I’ll be out of town next week. Is it possible to wait until after the 12th?”
“That’s fine. MREO doesn’t have any license plates right now anyway.”
Huh? Did she just say the Bureau of Motor Vehicles is out of licence plates? And was she going to make an appointment for me to get the plates that they don’t have? WTF?
We agree to call her when I’m back from my trip. She hands back my stack of papers, with the addition of an invoice, and tells us to go pay at the cashier window down the hall. A friend had told me to bring money today, and thankfully I had enough cash with me to pay the 900 hrivna processing fee (about $110). I don’t mention to her that this is yet another example of the kind of information that would be really handy to know in advance.
45 seconds later, I’m handing the invoice to the cashier.
“Where’s the letter?”
“What letter?”
“The letter from Galina.”
“She didn’t give me a letter.”
“There is usually a letter.”
The girl is flummoxed, doesn’t know what to do. She calls Galina’s office, no answer.
“When did you see Galina?”
“1 minute ago, I came straight from her office.”
“She’s not answering.”
We are 20 feet from Galina’s office, I offer to go knock on her door. The girl decides to go herself, pulls out a big set of keys and locks up the cashier’s office. 30 seconds later, she’s back.
“She’s not there. When did you see her?”
“We came straight to you from her office.”
She fusses around for another minute or two and finally decides to let me pay with just the invoice as documentation, without this mysterious letter. I add the receipt to the thick folder of car papers.
Fast forward. I’m back in Kyiv, we call Galina to set an appointment at MREO. Wednesday at 9 am. A bit early for me, since it means leaving the house around 8 to avoid traffic, but my naive optimism tells me one time won’t be so bad.
My post from that day doesn’t entirely capture the rage and frustration I felt. Galina had scheduled five or six of us for that morning, it seems. She appears now and then, bustling through the corridor from one office to another, avoiding eye contact. A little after 10 she herds us all outside. It is cold even in Farenheit – bitter nasty awful cold. Galina disappears into another building while we all wait by our cars. I turn my car on and sit inside with the heat on, but I know the Ukrainians won’t do this because they don’t want to waste the gasoline. It’s bitter nasty awful cold outside. Snot-freezing cold. Hurt-your-lungs cold.
Galina finally comes back, with a policeman. He goes from car to car checking VINs and taking pictures with a digital camera of the engine blocks or something. He finally gets to our car, but whatever it is he wants a picture of is too dirty. Igor crawls under the car to try to clean it off. Spit freezes on the rag. I find my bottle of hand sanitizer, that seems to do the trick. By now the inspector has moved on to someone else and we have to wait again. He comes back and takes the photo.
It’s 11 am and we get to go back inside. I ask Galina how much longer it’s going to take but she doesn’t answer. More bustling from office to office. I start looking for the instructions that she had told me were posted at MREO. There are lots of papers posted all over the place, but none of them are instructions for how to register a vehicle. I consider whether or not I want to bring this to Galina’s attention.
I notice that again I am the only female customer in the place. Lots of men hanging around, like us, waiting. I start standing by one of the service windows – three of them are labeled “Submit documents” and one is labeled “Receive documents”. I stare at Galina through the window. She’s flitting around like a big round hummingbird – dashing from one desk to another, in and out of the room. What the hell are they doing in there?
Just before 12 she hands me 2 license plates and a piece of paper.
“You can get the registration tomorrow,” she says.
I glare at her. “Tomorrow? I have to come here AGAIN?!”
“Well, I doubt you want to wait here until 3. So you can come back tomorrow.”
I think she thinks she’s doing me a favor. It will take at least another three hours for the registration card to be printed (it’s a plastic card, like a US driver’s license), so she’s giving me a paper copy and letting me go now. I suppose I should be grateful, I should thank her, but I’m fed up.
We’ve brought the wrong tools to attach the license plates – we have a screwdriver but we need something like a socket wrench. It’s nasty awful bitter cold. I have my pocket knife thing in my purse, which has little pliers. It takes forever to get the plates attached to the car. We are frozen.
People have parked willy nilly all around us, we’re blocked in. There are some guys waiting in their car, I ask them to pull up so I can manouveur out of my parking space. This parking lot is total chaos, cars parked any which way, 3 and 4 deep; it should be a one-way circle through the lot but people are going in all directions. I inch out of my spot and start around the lot. Cars are coming towards me, going the wrong way. A man rolls down his car window and says the exit is blocked by a bus, there’s no way out except to turn around and go out the entrance. I look up ahead and sure enough, an enormous bus has pulled right across the driveway and blocked the exit. I manouveur my way around and finally get turned the other direction. We are free.
The next morning, I go by myself back to MREO, get there about 9:30. There’s a guy at the “Receive Documents” window obviously in some kind of complicated situation, having an intense conversation with the man on the other side of the window.
Something I really hate here is when it’s my turn at the bank or the post office or the grocery store check-out and someone pushes up next to me and starts asking questions or just needs something “real quick”, ’cause they don’t want to wait in line. Inevitably, the bank teller or post office worker or cashier will stop what they are doing for me to respond to the other person. This annoys the hell out of me, I think it’s rude, and it’s unfair to those of us who’ve been waiting in line. And as I stand behind this guy with whatever his complicated situation is that clearly isn’t going to be resolved for a long time, I really really want to push up next to him and say “I just need something real quick.” I am too ashamed to do it though.
Finally he steps aside, problem unresolved but finally pawned off to someone else. The worker takes my passport, shuffles through papers, pulls out my car registration card.
“Where are the licences plates?” he asks.
“On the car,” I say.
“Oh, you got them already?”
I realize again that Galina did me a favor yesterday, giving me the plates and a copy of the registration so I didn’t have to wait there all day. I feel guilty that I didn’t thank her.
Six months and ten trips to various offices and my car is finally registered! Through August 2010. I get to do it all again in 8 months.
Anka in Kyiv 