THE BUREAUCRACY & ADDRESS IDIOSYNCRACIES

THE BUREAUCRACY

I’ve spent a fair amount of time this past week dealing with the logistics of being here. A couple examples: I went to ICE, the national Telephone/Electric Company, to get a Cell-phone number. All numbers, both cellular and landlines, are distributed by ICE. Since landlines can take many months to get, a cellular line is a better bet. However, they don’t have any lines available at the moment, so I got my name on a waiting list, and will “maybe” get a line in mid-May. After that, one goes out and buys a phone, brings it back to ICE and they install the number. (Jorge tells me that there will soon be 600,000 new numbers available, and a new plan to discourage cell-phone theft has recently come into being. If your cell-phone is stolen, you just report the theft to ICE and they immediately de-activate your number, making the cell-phone useless. ) The whole process was fairly typical and only involved a wait of an hour or so to get my turn with the service personnel.

I’ve had a more frustrating experience trying to open a bank account. There’s kind of a circular way of doing that. First of all, you have to have a place to live, and either a Residency Permit or a registered business corporation in Costa Rica. So, armed with my permit, my passport, my post office box number and my address, I went to the bank and waited about 45 minutes to get served, only to find out that I also needed a verification of income (I had my Social Security papers in my suitcase) and a municipal bill of some sort from the house I will be living in, not necessarily in my own name. So, two days later, armed with all the second batch of necessary papers, I went back and pulled a number for another wait. This time, I made it a little easier on myself by leaving the bank, having an ice cream cone in the central park, and doing a little shopping. I got back to the bank just as the number before mine came up on the screen. Sat down at the desk when it was my turn and proudly laid out all my papers. Ha! Not so fast. Turns out I needed proof that I was actually renting the place, either a copy of a rental contract, or a rent receipt plus a copy of the owner’s “cedula”, something like his proof of citizenship. Since I haven’t yet paid any rent, I of course don’t have any of that stuff. I’ll see the owners tomorrow and hopefully they will have a contract form I can sign and get a copy of, and maybe the third time will be the charm. This pattern of several return trips to satisfy bureaucratic requirements is typical of Costa Rican negotiations, and is one of the things that drives expats up the wall. At least I am doing all this in the town where I live. Sometimes government requirements can only be filled in the capitol, and each return trip may involve the better part of a day on the bus.

ADDRESSES

My Post Office box address is:

Corrine Anderson
Ap 319-4100
Alajuela Grecia 20301
Costa Rica

Home addresses are trickier. The houses are not numbered, the streets are for the most part not named except in the very center of town and even then there are no street signs. Directions are given by saying something like “100 meters south of the church and 200 meters east” with the number of meters somewhat relative. 100 meters usually means the distance from one side street to the next, whether the actual block is 30, 80 or 200 meters long. My house, for example, is located in San Isidro de Grecia (an outlying suburb) and since there is only one main road into San Isidro, the only other indicator is “150 meters east of the church.” I’ve seen it described as 200 meters east, and was told verbally it was 800 meters east. Out in the country the address can be described as “150 meters west of the lot where they load the sugarcane,” said lot only being used to load sugarcane a couple times a year. People often say, “Call me when you’re close and I’ll come and meet you.”