I was beginning to feel that life in Cyprus involved rather too much paperwork. I've written elsewhere about the need to renew passports every ten years or so. We had a flurry of bureaucracy during Covid, of course, with the need for checking airline regulations, and taking tests with accompanying paperwork to demonstrate that we were Covid-free.
Just last year I wrote about the complicated process of trying to find suitable ID documents to prove that we are who we say we are. Also the need to prove that we are eligible for the national health system here.
Every time we get through another round of documentation, we breathe sighs of relief. Until the next time. Recently we seem to have had a lot of other paperwork to deal with. None of it particularly strenuous or complicated, admittedly, but somehow it feels rather overwhelming when several things come at the same time.
But sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming. A couple of weeks ago I wrote down the things we had to do fairly urgently:
- apply for me to have a UK pension
- validate Richard's existence, for his UK pension
- renew our European health cards
- chase up my ID card, which I applied for in October
I had not expected to be eligible for any UK pension, as I only worked as a paid employee for four years. After leaving to have my children, I did a couple of self-employed jobs, but was under the limit for National Insurance contributions. However, it appears that for every year when I received child benefit, a contribution was paid on my behalf. That was eleven years when we lived in the UK, and another seven in Cyprus, as we were still filing taxes in the UK. So according to the online calculator, I will be eligible for something later this year.
But in order to find out for sure, I had to fill in an extensive form online, covering several pages, with some questions which seemed almost irrelevant. Then I had to print it all out, sign it, and send it to the UK. I also had to send my birth and marriage certificates. It took most of a morning to sort this, and I was quite stressed by the end.
There's also requirements to prove that one is still alive and eligible for pensions; every year Richard has to go online to verify who he is for his BBC pension. But for the state UK one, he has to find a local professional who has an official stamp, and get them to sign a declaration that they've seen his identity documents.
And then there was my ID card. Six months ago, I didn't see any reason to have one. I have a British passport, and a 'yellow slip' giving me permanent residence in Cyprus. It was immensely complicated getting the yellow slips, something else I wrote about at the time. But mine had worked every time I needed to prove my residency. Then we learned that yellow slips are being discontinued, and that non-Cypriots are required to have a biometric ID card. And they're bringing that requirement in by this summer for British citizens.
But there's very little information online about how to go about it. I trawled through the government website - which seems to change every time I look at it - and eventually found an email address to contact, so I wrote and asked what I should do. I had a reply almost at once, telling me that I had an appointment at Immigration on October 3rd last year. I had to open the email on my phone to show it when we arrived:
We were mildly amused at the word which looks like 'Panty boy' although what looks like a capital P is in fact a Greek capital R, and the B sounds like an English V. It doesn't take much to amuse us. It was then quite satisfying to realise that the word, though translated as 'appointment', is in fact a Greek version of the French phrase 'rendez-vous'. The 'NT' combination is something like a D. (The word above it means 'printed form', which is a bit strange in an email message).
I'd downloaded a form and filled that in. So we went to the appointment armed with my yellow slip, my passport, the deeds of our house, an electricity bill in my name, and other paperwork that they might have asked for. Then all they needed to see was my yellow slip, and they didn't take the form I'd filled in; instead, they printed out something identical, and filled that in by asking me for my name, address, phone number, etc.
Then they took a photo of me, and I had to give some fingerprints. My fingerprints are quite faint, and it took a couple of tries before anything registered. And that was the end of the appointment. I was told that I would get my ID in the mail.
I didn't suppose it would be quick, and there was an article in one of the online papers saying that something had broken down, so ID cards were taking longer than usual. But by the beginning of December I was starting to be concerned. I trawled the government site again, and found a form I could fill in to enquire about delayed documents, which I filled in. And I wrote an email to the address I had used previously.
I didn't get responses from either of them, but then I found a system where I could send a text message, giving the number on my application form, so I did that. I had a response telling me that my application was approved, and that I would get an official response from them by mail.
With Christmas coming, and postal delays, I put it out of my mind, and then didn't even think about it until the end of January. I started checking our mailbox every day, but there was no sign of anything.
As an aside, Richard had applied to renew his British passport in November, as it was expiring, and received his new one within a couple of weeks. He has a Cyprus passport already, but new rules require that he will need a British one to travel to the UK. I thought it a tad ironic that a passport issued in the UK arrived considerably more quickly than my local ID. And with considerably more information - he received text messages regularly telling him what was happening. I received nothing at all..
Back to the present, and it was approaching five months since I had applied for my ID. I sent another text message at the end of February, and this time was told, 'your permit is valid'. I was quite concerned that it had got lost in the mail, and the process of having a replacement for a lost one is apparently very complex. But Richard wondered if it was waiting for me at the Immigration office. I was dubious... they had told me, twice, that they would contact me by mail.
But on the last Friday of February, we decided to visit Immigration anyway. I didn't know if we'd be able to get in; when I had my appointment in October, there was a guard in a little booth outside, ensuring that only people with appointments could go in. However, this time the guard booth was empty, and the gates open. People were milling around, and we spotted an office that said, 'ID cards'. As we waited outside, while someone else was talking in Greek to the man sitting there, we saw a crate full of what looked like ID cards...
Eventually we went inside, and started explaining that I had heard nothing and that I'd applied back in October. The man stopped us, and asked for my name. He rifled through the cards in the crate, and pulled one out. The photo was rather faint, but it was definitely my card. Then he wrote for a while in a huge old-fashioned looking book, to say that I had collected it.
What a relief to have it, at last, and to know that it had not been lost or stolen.
Perhaps, we thought, the system had changed in the months since I had applied, although it was odd that I had not received any notification that the ID card was ready.
Yesterday I glanced in our mailbox, and saw an official letter addressed to me.
It was, at last, the official approval of my ID card, with a notification that I should collect it within thirty days.. Dated January 15th:
The postal system here is not great, but it doesn't usually take almost two months for a letter to arrive. Just as well that I wasn't, in fact, required to collect it within 30 days or present that document.
After all that, we were pleased that renewing our European health cards, later yesterday morning, was surprisingly easy. We had to set up an appointment in advance, by phone, with the citizen centre. Knowing that they sometimes require all kinds of paperwork, I gathered up everything I could think of. In the end, all they needed was evidence of our identities. So I used my ID card for the first time, and within about five minutes we had our health cards.
Apparently it's not just Cyprus that has all this complex paperwork and systems, however. Coincidentally, the unit I've been doing in my Duolingo French in the past couple of weeks is about different permits, and how to go about getting various IDs - passports, residency permits, birth certificates, driving licences, etc. And it sounds just as complicated, with forms to fill in, paperwork required, and people being sent to different offices in order to apply and collect. And - according to Duolingo, anyway - there's also a 'family record book', where everyone is required to fill in details of important dates, with copies of relevant certificates. Interesting from a future genealogy point of view, I suppose, but at least that's one thing we don't have to worry about here.
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