In Russia, foreigners are required to register at a post office or police station within 3 days of moving to a city. I arrived in Russia last Saturday, which meant I had to register by Tuesday. Sunday morning my landlord Nikolai and I ran down to the post office to get me registered. The post office isn't usually open on Sunday, but Monday was a holiday and the post office was open Sunday morning. We filled out the appropriate forms but also needed to photocopy my passport and visa. The grouchy lady behind counter informed us that the xerox machine in the back room wasn't available to us. That section of the post office wasn't open that morning, I guess, and, no, the grouchy lady wasn't going to help us. Not her job, I suppose. We took off to find a shop in the city with a copy machine, Nikolai muttering under his breath. 40 minutes and 5 stops later, we finally found a shop that was open that had a copy machine. Sunday morning on a holiday isn't the best time to do business. We got back to the post office 20 minutes before closing, to find that the grouchy registration lady was now gone. The other lady didn't know where to, perhaps she was on break. We waited a little while, then left.
Turns out the post office was open Monday morning, despite the holiday. Nikolai offered to take care of the registration for me before he and Galina left for the day. Should only take a moment, he said. When they returned that evening, I found out that the lady at the post office had refused to register me. There was a problem with the dates on my immigration card. In a jet-lagged haze I had apparently written the wrong entry date on my immigration card. My bad. The woman at the post office refused to have anything to do with it, even though the customs stamp in my passport showed what day I had really arrived. She didn't feel like helping and that was that, I was out of luck. In Russia, the person holding the rubber stamp holds a great deal of power over you.
Tuesday morning, Nikolai and I went to another location to try to register. Nikolai asked me to bring my plane tickets with me to prove what day I had really arrived in country. Thank God I tend to use boarding passes as bookmarks, I hadn't thrown them out. We arrived at this other office, which was tucked away in an apartment building, at 8:40 am. A "line" had already formed outside the door. We put ourselves down on the waiting list which was circulating. The officials showed up at 9:15 am (late) to open up the office and the crowd moved from the steps outside to the cramped hallway inside. It was pretty packed and chaotic waiting in the hallway. Periodically someone new would push through the people and walk directly into one of the offices, only to be immediately ejected by the busy official. Someone in the hall would then berate the person for cutting in line and then they'd put their name on the list.
Around 9:45 am Nikolai and I finally made it into office #1, where the official promptly informed us that passport registration was taken care of in office #2. We'd been waiting in the wrong line. Fortunately, it was a short wait for office #2. Nikolai explained the mistake on the migration card to the official, who told us that was fine but we needed to start the registration paperwork again with blank paperwork. No, they didn't have blank copies of the paper work there, but there was another location a few blocks away that ought to have the paperwork. So, we walked over to the other office and got in line. This place looked like an army recruitment center, I'm not sure why they would have registration paperwork there. If I understood the lady behind the counter, she wasn't sure why they would have the registration paperwork, either. We returned to office #2, empty handed. This time, we walked directly into office #2 (Nikolai didn't feel like waiting in line anymore). The first guy we'd talked to was nowhere to be seen, so we had to start over with the new official. This guy was more easy-going and said we didn't need to start with blank paperwork. He had just started scribbling some changes on the registration paperwork when the power went out. After sitting in the dark for a minute we went out into the hallway, where some light from the door was shining through. The official finished scribbling on the paper work and then we waited. The power came back on after another 5 minutes, I got the blue stamp on the migration card, and I got my info entered into the computer. After 4 hours of work spread over 3 days, I was now legally registered in Anapa. Thank God for Nikolai, it would have been difficult for me to get this done.
