Blog - Residence permit (2)

Added on Tuesday, 2010-03-23 20:00 CET in category Moscow
Today I handed in the documents for my temporary residence permit!

After we started this entire process, we found out it wasn't quite as doable as we thought…

Since I have an EU passport, my passport contains text in 22 languages ("European Union", "Kingdom of the Netherlands" and "Passport"). The woman at the Federal Migration Service (FMS) dryly told us that that page would then have to be translated from all those 22 languages. After explaining that no person in the world is a recognized translator for all those 22 languages, translating from "just" Dutch, English and French would do.

I also filled out my name on my immigration card with Latin letters. That was also a big no-no. Foreigners are expected to fill out their immigration cards in Cyrillic letters. In my case I should just scribble it in Cyrillic somewhere where there was still space.

The marriage certificate and statement of conduct were missing an apostille… Completely our mistake, we forgot. So the papers had to be sent to the Netherlands and back. And then of course they had to be translated again. And notarized.

FMS people are especially strict when it comes to the request form itself. A comma in the wrong place and you can start all over again. (The entire form is four A4 pages.) And don't even think about writing in the margins! If the required text really just won't fit, you luckily are allowed to refer to an attachment. Also, no Latin letters are allowed, anywhere! Not even in foreign names and addresses. You have to translate this to Cyrillic yourself.

The 400 rubles administrative costs had by now become 1000 rubles.

And I almost forgot about the lines. Before you can speak to an FMS person, you usually have to spent three to four hours standing in line…

At the end I got a nice stamp on my registration card saying I handed in the documents, and now the waiting period has started. They'll be checking me in whatever way they can, to see if I won't be any threat to Russia. This may take no longer than six months, but they usually manage to not make it much less. And by then my visa will have expired… Still a long road of bureaucracy ahead…