RuKsaK

Trying to leave Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, for a holiday in Turkey:
‘Where other boy?’ rolling ‘Rs’ across the roof of his mouth.
‘Sorry?’
‘Where other boy?’ pointing at my daughter.
‘What boy? I don’t understand.’
‘Go office.’ A flicked hand, more tongue rolling and greasy eyelids.

Jeddah International Airport is a long shit of slabby architecture curled off on one side of the city. Its wall’s are beige to black-brown from passengers and staff smoking everywhere and I fucking hated the place. There was always a passport problem.

In the office there was one of these tight-ribbed cunts who talks down the end of a cigarette:
‘What prrroblem?’ with a millionth of interest.
‘I don’t know. The passport control guys keeps saying ‘other boy?’’
‘Show me passports.’
He stood up like he hadn’t done a shit for a year and vaguely hinted at us to follow.

Back at passport control he poked our passports and asked:
‘Girl is boy, yes?’
‘What?’
‘Same-same in passports.’
‘Ah yes! Same-same in passports. She’s dual nationality. Russian and English.’
‘Okay. You go now, no prrroblem.’

My daughter has a British passport and is in my wife’s Russian passport. The photos are about a year apart and the Saudi inefficials thought we had two kids – the younger British one we’d left at home? Our boy who wasn’t there. Fuckwits.
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She’s now three and has been to eight different countries that she’ll remember nothing of already.
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She was a day before one-year-old the first time she went abroad. Leaving St. Petersburg for London, with a British passport:
‘Where is visa?’ (Russians and Arabs have similar grammar issues)
‘What visa?’
‘Prrroblem.’
‘What is the problem? We’re flying direct to Heathrow. She has a British passport.’
‘No visa – prrroblem.’
‘How can she need a visa? She’s never entered Russia. She was born here.’
‘She must have visa.’
‘How can she get a visa?’
‘Not inside Russia. From other country’
‘Nobody informed us about this.’
‘It is not my fault you are stupid.’

That’s one the most momentous things anyone ever said to me. Magnificently logical and faithless. True. A kind of apathetic, loutish Zen. Use it a lot myself now, usually silently. I prefer learning things from surly administrators to leaders and the like. You can trust it that way.

We didn’t fly that day. We left the airport with yet another ludicrous Russian bureaucratic conundrum designed to drive dollars into open hands stretching under desks. The next two days were spent chasing this hand and finally obtaining The Holy Exit Visa.

Russian corruption and bureaucracy make a handsome couple and I remember many happy occasions bribing officials and purchasing dodgy goods. Some not so pleasurable.

Anyway - hoorah for corruption!

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Fucking passport control prrroblems