Thursday, June 16, 2011

A Bureaucratic Saga: Working Abroad

Oooo-kay! I have just had my criminal record issued and much to my surprise it is clean! :) I had never asked for one before and I have to say I was a little bit nervous. Hold your horses, missy! If you think that you did your job when you defended you MA or PhD thesis, you’re wrong. This is only the beginning of a beautiful friendship with Vietnam and of a tiresome struggle with the academic and legal bureaucracy in my home country (Romania). I bet it’s the same for everybody.

What you have to do if you want to work in Vietnam:

1. get your criminal record: pay the criminal record fee at the post office, buy a 2 RON fiscal stamp, then go to the Police. They will issue the document on the spot. That’s easy.

2. take you highest diploma (the original copy of my MA diploma in my case) and have it legalized with the Ministry of Education. Make sure you also take the BA diploma, as well as your BA and MA school records, plus photocopies of all of them.

3. take your legalized diploma and criminal record and authenticate them with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as Vietnam didn’t sign the Hague Convention. So you won’t need an Apostille Certificate, but an authentication from the above-mentioned Ministry.

4. have your authenticated criminal record and your authenticated diploma translated into Vietnamese with a certified translator. These are really hard to find and very expensive. I paid almost 30 euro/page. Yap, that’s right!

5. authenticate the translations with the Ministry of Justice or with whoever authenticates certified translations and notarized documents in your home country.

6. repeat step 3 for all the translated documents.

7. take everything to the Vietnamese Embassy. They will authenticate (again!) everything.

8. the 7th step says: “authenticate your documents with the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs”. I really don’t know what that means, but I will surely find out.

Then, you’re good to go! Don’t forget about the visa. :D

4 comments:

  1. vai, vai, vai ! ce birocratie ! dar bine ca s-a rezolvat !

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  2. felicitari. imi place blogul tau. sper sa continui si sa ai succes in Vietnam
    bafta,
    Mike din Los Angeles

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  3. multumesc! voi continua si sper sa il fac foarte util, ca sa isi atinga scopul. numai bine!

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  4. [...] This is the last post before our new life begins. We are leaving tomorrow for Saigon. I am excited and scared at the same time. I definitely know why I am excited – Saigon can’t be anything else but a beautiful experience, but I really don’t know why I am freaked out. It’s probably because of all the bureaucracy we’ve been through in preparation for this journey – endless papers, stamps, fees, authentication and certification procedures. But I think it was all worth it. I described the entire process here. [...]

    ReplyDelete