At the end of January last year, he finally went on a flight to Ljubljana, and less than a week later we had to rush to Vienna to get the last stamps before the arduous procedure for his residence permit in Slovenia began. I shared about the latter with you every now and then on my stories, I remember how I called in every week and how everything was just standing still… But I didn’t tell you what kind of headaches and heartaches we had before he even managed to fly out of Saudi Arabia. After careful consideration and inquiries from various sources, we decided that Tamer would first apply for a temporary visa, the same as a year and a half ago, when we only visited Slovenia for one month. He started the procedure a few days after I arrived in Ljubljana by myself and started anew in another rental apartment. The first hiccup happened when his application was supposedly incomplete. This time an invitation letter from the wife had to be added. My letter of invitation from Slovenia, that is. Why no one remembered this in the summer of 2021 for our joint visit remains a mystery. The visa type was the same.
Right, so I go to the administrative office, get the document, send it by express mail down to Jeddah. Of course, it wasn’t cheap. With the received letter, Tamer had to return to the agency, which processes all the documentation and sends it to the actual Austrian embassy. A few days later, Tamer receives a call that the document is invalid.
“How? Why?!”
The official seal is missing.
“But the letter was sealed when handed over to the agency!”
Apparently, when copying the document for the archive, the agency employee tore off the string seal and did not mark it properly. A new letter of invitation must be attached.
Right, I head on over to the administrative unit. Again. And I send the letter down to Jeddah again. But this time Tamer should and will claim a refund from the agency for this shipment! Easy peasy. In short: the agency did not take any responsibility, it pointed the finger at the employee so that Tamer would have to deal with him personally. With an employee who really screwed up. With an employee that makes you wonder who ever entrusted him with this kind of work if he doesn’t know that one does NOT TEAR OFF SEALS FROM DOCUMENTS for copying. So the agency did not take responsibility, and we would have to feel sorry for the poor guy behind the counter who was pleading for a discount. Nope. No more mercy on this already thorny path.
And then we waited… The embassy called again that Tamer needs to correct this and that in the submitted form. Really strange how we didn’t have any such problems before our visit together in 2021.
“Now it’s all set. We really gave them everything they asked for. There’s no reason it shouldn’t go through.”
We received an e-mail, this time in English (when Tamer tried to come for a visit before our wedding, he was adamantly rejected in German language with the option of complaining only in German as well). Visa application rejected. I cried hysterically. Then, after carefully reading the explanation, I went into a determined belligerent mode. “They screwed everything up.”
Whoever was in charge of Tamer’s documentation was either functionally illiterate or maliciously incompetent. Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, we were the ones standing stood opposite them. After I received information that our authorities could not intervene in the process, we wrote a comprehensive and bulletproof complaint, which restored my confidence in our right. No more despair, just counting down the days until the green light for Tamer to come to me. And so it was. They took their sweet time again, but they had no choice but to approve his application. The whole thing dragged on for about a month and a half. And then? Then we got ourselves ready for new victories. Together.