If you are foreign and you live/lived in Austria for any reason you might know very well what I am talking about: VISA permits! My first experience with requesting a visa in the country was smooth… Gentle officer, everything fine with the required documents, even some jokes about my “Austrian dialect” and period! “Please be back in 2 weeks to get your visa-card”, the officer said, and I happily `smiled´ goodbye to that nice Lower Austrian man. This day seem so long ago…
Well, so what happened is that I had to renew my visa, but this time we choose to do it in Upper Austria, in the District where my Austrian lives. Smooth was definitely NOT the word this time!
As we arrived in the BH VB (Bezirkshauptmannschaft Vöcklabruck, in other words, the place where you have to get your visa), the air was literally thick, and it did not take us long to realize why. My Austrian greeted the people in the office and informed we would like to renew my visa. That´s when this blond lady came into our lives, unfortunately! She was being very cold and even rude throughout the conversation. Not that I got everything, but you could just tell. Deep inside, she was trying to give us a hard time! Congratulations, you did it, happy now?!
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| Its all about this card... |
She was making so many (unnecessary) questions in such harsh tone that it seemed I had committed a crime against whole humankind. Even though she already had a filled paper with all my information in her hands, she started: are you two married? Does she have any children? Does she work? With what? Is it legal? What does she do here? Do you have a job (she asked to my Austrian!!!)? It kept coming, like a bomb attack in the middle of the night! And by that time I was already panicking. To be more exact, few tear drops were resisting badly to not coming out.
Once she was done with all the questions we had a little break from her in order to pay the visa. When I left the office I could not take it anymore, I started to cry. It has been a long time I don´t cry so much, like a desperate baby! My Austrian tried to calm me down but we had to go back to that woman… and we did; and she had bad news!
Before I tell the bad news, I have to make something VERY clear here: “tudo é um jeito de se falar”, which in Portuguese means, everything is a way of how you say things. The same way you can give great news in a happy way making it even more exciting; you can also diminish somebody´s pain by softening bad news, telling in a “less worse” way, if you know what I mean.
This lady could have just informed me, in a gentle way, that according to the Austrian law, from the age of 24 on people need to present 10.000 € in their bank account, in order to renew the visa. Last year I needed “just” 5.000 € because I was still 23 years old. In general, I would have not reacted so badly to this news, but that is how she explained me the situation:
“you have to show us 10,000 € in your account and you also have to bring bank records from the previous 3 months so we can be sure you are not here for prostitution, drug dealing or getting money with illegaly”
My next reaction was starting to cry so desperately that I thought I would faint in that office. My Austrian was shocked, embarrassed and overstrained for what just happened… he had no clue what to do with me.
We both left the office in a shock. My Austrian called other authorities to confirm if the information we were given was right. And it was… but we got a valuable advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: complain!
