In case you didn’t know, I am spending this academic year as an ‘étudiant libre’ at the University of Geneva. Since I am studying Modern Languages (French, in particular!), I have to spend the third year of my four-year degree course in a country where the language is spoken. Geneva was recommended to my friend Isobel and me by our Latin tutor.

I am living in a flat in Geneva, going to classes in the university. However, I had to wade through an awful lot of red tape to get here. I’m not going to go into details of the process of applying to the university, which was further complicated by the fact that both Issy and I were initially rejected to come and study here for a year.¹ Nor will I bore you with the details of my seemingly interminable flat-hunt, since that wasn’t hindered by layers of bureaucracy so much as a very constricted accommodation market for Geneva with very little advertised on the Web. No, what follows is an account of the lengths to which I have been forced to go to establish myself as a resident in Geneva.

Swiss Consulate, London

The first thing to do was to find out what would be required of me as an Australian passport-holder going to study in Switzerland for a year. The website of the Swiss consulate in London provided absolutely no information for people wanting to travel to the country; it merely gave a few details for Swiss citizens living in the UK. So I sent an email to the consulate asking what I should do. A reply came back to me on the fifth day after I’d sent my original request, saying that I would need to fill in the attached form in triplicate (of course), provide photocopies of my passport ‘including valid visa and previous Swiss visas’ (it didn’t define the ambiguous phrase ‘valid visa’), a curriculum vitae with ‘explanation of the intentions of the applicant in Switzerland’, ‘Written confirmation that the applicant will leave Switzerland after the permitted period’ (that one made me laugh), examination certificates, an ‘attestation’ (little did I know that I would become pretty intimate with this word) from the university in Switzerland that I had a place, proof that I’d paid my university fees, and evidence of financial resources to support me during my time in the country. Phew, what a lot of paper: I knew that they just wanted to make sure that I was bona fide, so I set about gathering everything together and filling in the forms.

The only thing I lacked was the formal acceptance letter from the University of Geneva. When eventually that came, I made arrangements to travel to London to present my application at the consulate (sorry, ‘Embassy of Switzerland’) near Baker Street the following Monday. They would only receive visitors between 9am and midday, so I took the 7.30 a.m. train from Oxford to Paddington. I arrived at the consulate at 8.58, and joined the short queue of people already there waiting for the doors to be flung wide. Well, when I say ‘flung wide’, I mean we were let in one by one by a man who sought to examine our passports and establish that we were there for a productive purpose, gave us a numbered ticket, and invited us to sit down in front of the two windows established for serving non-Swiss nationals. Of course, only one of the windows was occupied. I was fifth in line.

Eventually my number was called and I went to the window, which was manned by a German-speaking woman. Perhaps I should say that it was staffed by a German-speaking woman? I said that I was applying for a student visa, and presented the requisite pile of documents (about half an inch thick!), at the top of which was a covering letter I’d written, giving precise details of each of the documents which formed my dossier.

If I had to sum up my experience in the consulate in just one word, I would say exasperating. The woman kept asking me where this or that document was, and I had to keep drawing her attention to the numbered list on my covering letter which she had glanced over but had evidently not taken in properly. Even though I had only been told that I would have to provide three copies of the application form, when I said that there was only one copy of all the other documents, I was greeted with a sharp intake of breath being sucked through teeth, as if to say, ‘What’s all this, then?’.

I had provided photocopies of all my exam certificates—GCSE, AS-level, A-level, the one AEA I did at school, and the type-written summary of the results of my first-year Oxford exams (the Preliminary Examination). These copies had been certified by my College’s secretary, since that had been demanded when I made the application to the university. Apparently that wasn’t good enough.

‘How do I know that your exam certificates are not forgeries?’ I assured her that they were, of course, not, since I was not in the business of forging examination certificates.

‘Well, people will try anything to get a visa.’ I couldn’t think of any appropriate response, and so let that comment hang there between us. I had no reason to disbelieve her: I’m sure people will try anything to get a visa.

Then she got annoyed with me because I didn’t know exactly what date the term here would begin, or when I would need to be here for language examinations.² ‘You have to make things easy for me. I have to write a letter on your behalf to the authorities in Switzerland.’ Again, all I could do was apologize. ‘Where have you written that you will need to sit an exam before the beginning of term?’ I had written it nowhere. So she went away and came back with a blank piece of paper for me to write that fact on before giving her paper back.

Then came the next blow—the Australian bank statement I had provided as evidence of appropriate financial resources was ‘too old’ (since I get my statements quarterly, this one had been printed two months previous). She asked if I could arrange for the bank to send me an up-to-the-minute statement. I said that I could, but knowing that would be a hassle, I suggested that I could equally just make a print-out from my Internet banking records. Oh yes, she said, that would be fine. Oh no, you can’t use this computer (I would have been surprised if I could, to be honest); you’ll have to go to an Internet café near Baker Street station. Brilliant.

She then asked me what language the teaching would be in. When I said that it would be in French she went away again to get a form which had evidently been photocopied many times, which had rows for German, French, Italian, and English, and columns for different levels of linguistic competence, ranging from ‘Keine’ to fluent. She muttered under her breath, ‘English, obviously fluent’, and asked me if I spoke any German or Italian. I apologetically shook my head no to both questions. She then started talking to me in French, asking me to define my competence in the language—a question which I evaded just by carrying on talking, saying that I didn’t really know, but that I was a student of French at Oxford and had been taught well, such that I could hardly be described as ‘fluent’ (and of course I forgot the word for ‘fluent’–how appropriate!) but I could hold my own. Evidently this seemed to satisfy her since she ticked some box or other (I don’t remember where it was on the matrix) and added that form to the now-bigger pile of papers.

But the linguistic assessment wasn’t over, oh no! She went away again to get another blank piece of paper, and came back, and said to me—in French—that I would need to write something. But what should I write?, I asked. It doesn’t matter, she said, just as long as I did it all on my own. She sent me away to a table stacked with promotional literature while she set about dealing with my papers. She called me back after a brief moment to ask (still in French) what I would be studying, since the attestation from the university simply said ‘Faculté des Lettres’. She asked if that meant that I ‘speak’ Latin, and I said no, ‘But you’re good at it?’, and I conceded the point. I returned to my writing and she started dealing with the next person. I sat and wrote a hundred words or so, hammering home the point that I was just going to go to Geneva for a year, just to speak some French, like just about every other third-year Modern Languages undergraduate in the country.

I really didn’t mind this linguistic assessment. What I found utterly ridiculous, however, was that absolutely no mention of any such test was made in any of the extensive documentation I’d seen about applying for a visa. In fact, it felt like the woman behind the glass was just trying to find more things to throw at me in the hope that something would trip me up! After I‘d finished my oeuvre I waited for her to finish with that person, and then dashed up to the window to hand it in, slightly confusing the person who was in fact next in line.

I then went to the Internet café to print out my banking records. Having got back to the consulate, I was able to do my trick of dashing up to the window after one person left and before the next got there. When I handed it in, the woman seemed to be pathetically grateful that I’d actually come back. It would take six to eight weeks for my application to be approved by the appropriate authorities in Switzerland, after which time I would have to come back to the consulate to have the visa inserted into my passport.

While in Australia during July and August I got a voicemail saying that my application had been approved (that was a relief!). I go to London when I get back to the UK to hand in my passport. Of course, the visa couldn’t be stuck in there and then: it would take twenty-four hours. When I return the following day to pick up the passport, it is accompanied by a very confusing document, or rather a fragment of a document written in French which seemed to imply that the visa in my passport wasn’t really a visa. The document also said that I would need to go to the ‘relevant Cantonal authorities’ within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland. I already knew this latter fact, but decided that that was their purpose in leaving me this document, rather than that stuff about ‘this visa isn’t really a visa’. It turns out that I didn’t need to have worried about whether or not I would get turned away upon arrival, because when I handed my passport over to the immigration official at Geneva airport open at the non-visa visa page, he said in surprise, ‘Un visa? Dans un passeport australien?!’

In search of a residence permit

I knew that I would have to go to the Office Cantonal de la Population³ within eight days of my arrival in Switzerland: it had said as much on that strange part-document I’d got when I’d retrieved my passport from the Swiss consulate, and on the back of my original acceptance letter from the university.

The thing is, though I had heard many different accounts of what documents I would need to take to the OCP: one school of thought said that I would only need my passport, university acceptance letter, passport photos, and 130 CHF to settle the relevant fees; while Issy—who had arrived earlier than me and had already had a frustrating experience at the OCP—suggested that I would need everything which I had already taken to the consulate in London.

I decided to play it safe, and took everything. Fortunately I was able to find two passport photos in my wallet (a couple of years old now, but I don’t look that different!) because otherwise I knew there would be unpleasantness and I would be turned away.

By all accounts, the office would get very busy indeed, and so having worked out the best bus to take (thanks to information from Issy), I arrived there at about 8.50 a.m. Although the office was due to open at 9, there were already people—members of the public—milling around inside. So I push my way in.

The first stage was to queue up at the outer reception desk in order to inquire exactly what I would need to fill in and what documents I needed to present in order to get my residence permit. The man behind the desk—we speak in French, even though he had been dealing with the previous enquirer in curt English—kindly gives me a certain form for non-EU citizens and tells me to take a numbered ticket. My first of very many numbered tickets over the coming days.

I go in to the main room, which has a large waiting area and about ten windows on one side where the appropriate business is taking place. In spite of the fact that it is still before 9 a.m., the room was chock full of people. According to the number display showing who was currently being served, I was about one-hundred-and-tenth in line. I sit down to look at the form and fill it in as best I can: it was in fact largely the same as the form I’d already filled in for the consulate in London, which included requests for details that just didn’t apply to my situation as a student-resident, such as who my employer in Geneva is.

The numbers are being called forward very slowly. Evidently this is going to be a long, long wait. After about fifteen minutes, however, a woman breezes through asking that anyone who has come to study at the Université de Genève wait in line behind desk K. Hooray, the opportunity to queue-jump! I was fourth in line in that queue. It turned out that there were about thirty students doing the same thing as me on that day, which wasn’t too surprising since it was exactly a week before the term was due to begin and it was the first day that the university was open for the registration of new students.

When I got to the front of the queue, I handed over my form. The woman sent a minion scuttling away who brought back a thick file, which contained all of the documents I’d originally submitted in London. It was something of a strange experience to see them all again—I’d come to get used to the idea that once you submit a form, you don’t see it again! Evidently this is a country which hasn’t embraced the possibility of scanning documents and dealing with digital versions (which take up far less space)…

While this was all going on I began to wonder why exactly I was required to hand over two passport photos. One would have sufficed for them to stick on to my residence permit, and I had already submitted passport photos attached to each of the three application forms I’d handed over in London, and which, as far as I could tell, were all sitting on that desk in front of me.

Things were moving fairly quickly. Once I’d paid the fee (nothing in officialdom here can happen without the payment of the appropriate fee, I’ve now discovered), the woman gave me a receipt, and returned my letter of attestation from the university, complete with the all-important stamp saying that I’d shown up at the OCP. She then told me that they would need me to post them something which I would receive from the university, but I was distinctly unsure what document she meant. I decided I would surely be told at the university itself. And so, after she’d told me that it would take three–four weeks for me to receive my residence permit, I went on my merry way, rejoicing that thanks to the special (and completely ad-hoc) students’ queue, my time at the dreaded Office Cantonal de la Population had been short. Little did I know that I would be returning for an extended stint…

Registering at the university

The university had informed us that we would need to register there during the week before term began, after going to the Office Cantonal de la Population, taking the letter of attestation stamped by the OCP as proof that that was indeed the case. I had originally planned to go to the university on the Tuesday, but that was because I’d been counting on having to spend an extended period at the OCP. When I got out of the OCP before 10 a.m., blinking in the sunlight, I decided that I seemed to be on a roll and so should go and register at the university that day.

I ended up spending four hours at the university. When I finally got out of there, I looked back on what I’d in fact achieved, and realized quite how inefficient the whole process had been. This is what needed to happen during my registration:

1. Have my photograph taken;
2. Show the originals of all my examination certificates—the same examination certificates of which I had sent certified copies with my university application;
3. Give information about my address in Geneva, and fill in a questionnaire about the information available to me while I was applying to the university (I had fun with that one!);
4. Pick up my student card, the invoice for the first semester’s fees, and a few leaflets for new students at the university.

Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Well, it should have been. But this is how it worked:

1. Go in to the building to be greeted by a friendly student helper who looks at my university attestation stamped by the OCP and hands me a stack of documents which include the forms I need to fill in, together with the all-important numbered ticket; he directs me to the second floor where all the fun’s happening.
2. Arrive at the second floor to find hundreds of people sitting around on the few chairs and on the floor leaning against the wall. There are a few student helpers standing around. I go up to one, and show her my numbered ticket; she says that I will probably have to wait about thirty–forty minutes, but that I could go and have my photograph taken now at the booths next to her. So I have my photograph taken. To this day, I’m not sure what purpose that photograph served since there is a photo pasted into my student card which is just one of the passport photos I submitted with my university application.
3. I sit on the floor and wait. And wait. Fortunately I had a book with me⁴ to pass the time. Thirty–forty minutes’ wait? Er, try more like ninety.
4. Eventually a block of numbers which includes that on my ticket is called forward: I follow the crowd. We then have to wait in a queue for about ten minutes more before being let into a medium-sized lecture theatre at the front of which a woman is standing taking people’s forms and tickets. I hand mine over, and am told to sit down (it really wasn’t clear what was going on), and my name would be called once she’d pulled out my dossier. After waiting another ten minutes or so, she starts calling out people’s names and we go to pick up our dossiers, after which we queue at the back of the room. I leaf through my dossier, to find absolutely everything I’d originally sent to the university: all my application forms, my covering letter, my passport photos, even the FedEx air waybill which had accompanied the packet of documents I’d sent!
5. I stand and queue for another half-hour. A girl a little way behind me is having an argument with one of the members of staff: she is a returning student, and wants to know what she should be doing; he says that registration this week is only for new students and so she shouldn’t be there; she says that she received a letter telling her to come this week; he assures her that no such letter was sent; she says that even if it wasn’t sent, she got it; he storms off. Good times.
6. Eventually I get to the front of that queue and am invited to a desk with a bearded man sitting behind it. He asks to see my dossier, and my original exam certificates. He establishes that I’m just there for two semesters. He pulls my student card out of the dossier (I’d already seen it, of course), folds it, and hands it over to me. He holds on to the dossier, and directs me to the desk next to the exit.
7. I go to the desk next to the exit, hand over the questionnaire I’d had to fill in, and in return receive the bill for my fees. What an exchange!
8. Finally I am able to leave. No one has told me anything about the document which I need to send to the OCP, so evidently I’m going to have to do some more investigation.

What seems so ridiculous about this chain of events was where I had to go through the rigmarole of picking up my dossier (hand in form and ticket to woman, sit down, wait for name to be called, receive dossier which includes the form I’ve just handed in) only to hand it to the bearded man! It was like a very slow relay race, where instead of a baton, there’s a stack of documents in a yellow file; instead of a high-speed sprint, there’s a lot of standing in queues. What a waste of time! Surely it would have been far more efficient to have made the bearded man my first point of contact? He could have then fetched my dossier for himself! Or, indeed, even more efficient would have been for him to have pulled up all my records on the computer system (I know that they had been entered in a database, since there was a print-out of my record in the dossier), and used the information there to speed things along? I know, crazy stuff.

Inside a Swiss bank

I needed to open a bank account (yes, a Swiss bank account, heh) as soon as possible, since I needed to pay for things like rent and my university fees, as well as to settle the deposit on my rented flat. And so, after leaving the university following my experience of the process of immatriculation (to use the French word), I had some lunch and took myself to the branch of a bank I’d previously identified as suitable for my needs.

Inside the bank, everything was plush and quiet. I went to the reception desk and said that I wanted to open a basic current account. They asked for a proof of identity, and I handed over my passport. But didn’t I have my residence permit?, they asked. No, I didn’t, I explained: I’d been to the OCP that morning and wouldn’t receive any such permit for another month or so. But didn’t I have an attestation to that effect? There’s that word again—attestation.

The only attestation I had thitherto come across was the attestation that I had a place at the university—the same one which had been stamped that morning at the OCP and then subsequently re-examined at the university. I brought this out as proof of my bureaucratic experience until that moment.

They looked at the university attestation and said no, that wouldn’t do. What someone in my situation needed, apparently, was a specific attestation from the OCP that although I didn’t yet have my residence permit, they were aware of my presence and would in due course deign to send me one. Once I came back with that particular document, they said, I’d be able to make an appointment to open an account.

So, that was that. I had to go away to go to the Office Cantonal de la Population to get the document to allow me to have an appointment to open a bank account. Not in the least bit convoluted.

By that time I was pretty tired and called it a day. Anyway, the OCP was closed by then: they close at 3.30 p.m. ’Nuff said on that matter.

Back to the OCP for the attestation

The following morning I decided to ring up the OCP to find out how I should go about getting the attestation required by the bank. I dreaded to think how long before my call would be answered, but in fact it was answered within one or two minutes. The woman at the other end of the line asked me for my name and date of birth so that she could find me on the computer system (see, they do use computers!). Yes, she said, I could get the attestation that day by coming to the office and filling in the appropriate form. But I should come quickly because it was already pretty full. Big surprise there.

So I return to the OCP, now familiar with the bus route. I go to the first reception desk, explain that I merely want an attestation that I would be receiving a residence permit (permis de séjour) and they say that that’s pretty simple. For a fleeting moment the vision of the man just producing the attestation there and then flashed before my eyes. I should be so lucky. He handed me the appropriate form, and I took a numbered ticket and entered the main room.

If I thought there had been a lot of people there the day before, I would need to reassess my interpretation of ‘a lot of people’ today. According to the electronic number display, I was one-hundred-and-eightieth in line. I was in for a long wait. I filled in the form as best I could—once again it didn’t quite apply to my situation, since it implied that they would be posting the attestation to me. I wasn’t going to queue for an extended period—five hours, as it turned out—just to be told that they’d post me a slip of paper.

I sat and waited. And waited. And read. And waited. And got restless. And went to the loo. And came back. And boy, was it mind-numbing.

Eventually my number was called. I pinched myself to see if I was dreaming, and then hurried to the designated window before they had the opportunity to think that I’d done a runner and call the next person. I explained what I wanted, and handed over the form. The woman tapped away at her computer. She then proceeded to write out the document, and print it. She asked me to read it, to make sure it said what I wanted it to say (oh, how kind!); when I said that it seemed fine, she stamped it and asked for the fee. They print the receipt onto the document itself, to prove that it‘s a fully paid-up official document. Then the area where the receipt has been printed (by a dot-matrix printer) has to be stamped and initialled to prove that the receipt is valid. So, the attestation (the document I was after) needed to have an attestation that it had been paid for (the over-printing of the receipt), which in turn had to have its validity attested (by means of the stamp and initials). Why stop there?

As I was leaving the window I asked the woman in passing what the university document was that I would have to post to them—she said that it was the bill for the fees which I’d been given yesterday, and held up a copy of someone else’s as an example. I said that I had it with me—would she be able to take a copy of it and save me the trouble of posting it in? Yes, she would. I was worried that she would charge me for the copying, and then go through the rigmarole of printing the receipt on the copy and doing all that further attestation stuff, but happily it wasn’t to be. Evidently I had discovered a very slight degree of flexibility within the very rigid system.

I was particularly glad to get out of that building and back into the sunlight. I returned to the bank that afternoon to be told that I wouldn’t be able to make an appointment to open an account until late on the following Thursday afternoon. But at least I had my attestation.

I think that’s probably enough of that. Don’t even get me started on the rigmarole involved in getting the phone line connected…

1. My application (and Issy’s) was originally rejected on the grounds that I hadn’t done any maths or science for A-level. In Switzerland, like in France, school-leavers are all but forced to do at least some maths and science for their Baccalaureate exams, and so a local student applying to a university without any qualification in those subjects would be decidedly suspicious. In the UK, however, the fashion is only to do three or four subjects for A-level, all of which you choose according to what interests you and what contributes to whatever subject you want to study at university.↩
2. At that point I was under the mistaken assumption that I would have to show up early to prove my competence at the language. I was later told, and was very glad to hear, that as an étudiant libre, I would have to suffer no such thing.↩
3. For those that don’t know, Switzerland is a confederation, whose member-states are called ‘Cantons’. So the Office Cantonal de la Population might be called the State Population Office in a federation of states like the USA or Australia.↩
4. At the time, I was reading Storm over Uluru: The Greatest Hoax of All by Peter English. It’s a really fascinating account of the handover of Ayers’ Rock to its so-called traditional owners (when in fact the corporation which presents itself as such is nothing of the sort) which took place in 1985. The book is out of print now (and is quite poorly written in places), but is still fairly widely-available second-hand. I had rescued it from the downstairs of the Shed before leaving Witney: even though the book hadn’t been immersed in the flood, the low-grade glossy paper cover has wrinkled from sitting in the very damp post-flood environment for a mere few weeks.↩