If you know me, you might know how much I HATE paperwork. Actually, I don’t only hate it, I just can’t. I can’t mentally deal with the pressure to fill it out well and I can’t comprehend what I’m meant to do most of the time, so usually, if I have some paperwork to do, there are many other people involved (thank you all ♥). And to get my NIE (number of identification as a foreigner), it wasn’t any different.
It all started when I arrived in Spain and realised that despite being a citizen of the EU, I can’t stay in Spain forever just like that for longer than 3 months. I need a NIE. And while this process is probably much more difficult for people outside of the EU, I started panicking. Why do I even need it if I’m here for less than a year? Do I actually need it? No one knows if I’m here or somewhere else in the EU, since they don’t check the documents, right? But being the honest person I am, I wanted to make things the way they should be. But as I said before, I just can’t,
(Stress, part 1)
So first, I contacted my university (after silently reading the group chat messages from my classmates when they talked about their appointments). They told me that I do in fact need the NIE and that they could try to get me an appointment. And thank God for that, because otherwise it could have been a pricier process, though possibly shorter, because I had to wait for about 2-3 months to get my appointment.
With my appointment, I also received a list of documents I needed to prepare. That list was genuinely daunting. I needed a copy of this and that, about 3 documents filled out, I had to attach a sworn declaration of my financial situation being good enough and more. Luckily, my appointment was after the winter break, so I could print everything out at home. Did I procrastinate it until the very last day before leaving for Spain? Well, that’s none of your business, right, all that matters is that I got it all ready. Did I wait with filling it out until the evening before the appointment? Again. But at least, I have a good reason for that! I was waiting for my Spanish friend to help me with that – I wanted to double check I was doing it right.
And good thing I did, because I had made a mistake! Did you know that Barcelona was in the province of Barcelona and not Catalonia, because that’s not a province in Spain? Me neither. The problem is that this document was already filled out because that was the only way to print it out. Luckily, my flatmate has a printer and she let me use it. Was it easy and straightforward? No, obviously, anything related to printing must be unnecessarily difficult, that’s how it works, right? It didn’t want to connect to my computer. But we figured it out.
(Stress, part 2)
I was also told, that this document that I’d just printed out, needed to be paid for at a bank before my appointment. Banks do open at around 8:30, so I had about half an hour to get it done. So the first thing in the morning, I race to a bank only to discover that in order to pay for that document, you need a NIE!! The same NIE I was applying for with all those documents. (That’s why we hate paperwork) The man in the bank was very lovely though, and he reassured me I could pay for it at the office in cash (spoiler alert: I couldn’t) or alternatively, once I get my NIE, I’ll be able to pay for it.
So I went to my appointment, feeling small, worried that I didn’t have everything ready. But you can’t show fear, so after a few minutes of waiting, I walked up confidently to the desk and handed in all my documents. The man there was, again, really nice and the process was rather smooth. But as he gave me the provisional NIE, he told me that I had to go and pay for the document.
(Stress, part 3)
I was very happy, but I didn’t want to jinx anything – after all, I didn’t know if this was the end to the whole process. So I just went to the nearest bank and tried to pay for it with my new NIE. Declined. I tried with a different card. Declined. Is there really no end to this??
So apparently, I couldn’t use my card to pay for it, since it’s foreign (or at least, that’s how I understood it), but I could go to this other bank 15 minutes away and pay for it in cash. And so I went. After battling with the ATM (with a help of the bank assisstant), I managed to finish the mission and went back to the appointment place, where I had to wait my turn again.
This time, a different worker attended to me and asked me in Spanish what I was missing. So, in Spanish, I said “paying”. Well, he probably didn’t hear me and mistook it for my lack of understanding (fair enough). I went along with it and good thing I did, because then my complete blanking on the word for Y and I wasn’t as awkward (I hope none of my Spanish teacher will read this, lol). On the card I was handed, the place of birth was misspelt, with an I instead of a Y. In Spanish, one is called Latin I and the other one is called Greek I… but which one is which? For the life of me, I could not remember. (After a reflection on it, upsilon (ypsilon in Slovak) is Greek, obviously!!!)
Anyway, all’s well that ends well and after a stressful day, I am happy to announce I am staying in Spain legally again. And it wasn’t even that bad in the end. Could I have done it by myself? Potentially. But I appreciate all the help I got, it made it so much easier.
