Please take this document and stick it up your arse

Enrolment today.

I’ve been struggling to pick up my ‘nostification’ (nostrifikace) documents since Monday.

Monday my bike inner tube exploded, so I couldn’t cycle down.

Tuesday I did start cycling down, and lost my passport and £400.

Since enrolment is today, at 9am, and the nostrification office only opens at 9am, I have resolved to be in two places at once and everything will be fine.

Later:

I have enrolled! That’s the good news.

Fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.

Through a series of wrong offices and non-English speaking office staff, I valiantly prevailed to take my photocopies to the lecture theatre at Filozofická Fakulta. I was half an hour late, but this didn’t matter.

Good old fill-in-this-form-and-queue format.

My degree documents have now been 'authenticated' by five separate official bodies, in two countries, but apparently I was missing yet another official stamp - on the documents I had just picked up.

A committee of Faculty women, one by one, in Czech, explained this to me, and then one of them alluded to my only being there to get out of paying fees in my own country.

So that was charming.

For the record, since my course is taught in English I am paying fees. I also completely smashed their marking criteria for admission. Not to be a dick about it, but they should probably be paying me to be there.

A Czech student interceded, and I didn’t understand at the time why he seemed so irate. Quietly. Quietly intensely angry.

Then he took me for coffee, and the missing stamp, and told me what they said.

Mercifully I was at the end of the queue (deliberately, so I wouldn’t hold anyone up with my language barrier) so there were only a few Czech students left to witness my engineered humiliation.  It’s so much worse that I didn’t understand what was happening until afterwards.

I hadn’t even enrolled. Not even my first day - the day before my first day. My -1^st day.

I don't know how to process this. Eventually I went home and cried for a long time. I’m afraid this has been a big mistake. Is this a representative experience? I feel hated.

I miss Max.