Faith and The Vampire ✔️

Chapter Ten

The weirdness of that encounter was also being replaced by something else: excitement. This was it. One of the momentous day for us, scholarship-awardees. We would finally have our residence permit. We were legally citizens of Brașov, again.

A residence permit is a document that allows you to live in the country for up to five years, depending on certain conditions such as marriage, work or in my case, study. After entering Romania you must obtain a residence permit. It certifies your right to stay in Romania and you can get it from the territorial units of the General Inspectorate for Immigration in the county where you live. To obtain a residence permit you have to submit personally a number of documents at least 30 days before the expiry of the right to stay granted by the long study visa.

By owning a visa, usually they allowed you to stay in Romania for quite some times, but not longer than 90 days. In order to stay longer than that, every foreigner had to obtain a Romania residence permit.But, the thing was, you could only get a permit after you were already in Romania. If you were here for study, you must get authorization to study from the Romanian Ministry of Education. If you're a scholarship awardee, you had it easier, they would gave you right away after your arrival. A residence permit for studying purposes might be granted for up to year. So, yeah, we had to apply for extension if our permit was expired. That's why the University Scholarship Board gathered us once in a year.

"Hey, Mel."

Andrei caught up to me as I walked off to the Office of International Relations where our residence permit would be distributed. Andre and the other Moldovan-awardee already had the residence permit on their hands. The Scholarship board managed to divide the awardees into several groups based on our nationalities. For example, Moldovan-awardee along with American and Japanese were scheduled to accept the important document yesterday. And today, for Indonesian, Turkish and Hungarian-awardee, it's our turn.

Andrei and I got to sit together in our shared afternoon classes but didn't do much talking. Educational Psychology with Doamna Belinda Jurs was our last class. Andrei wouldn't come with me, obviously, he already bragged about his residence permit.

He gave me a lopsided smile that added a little boy type of cuteness to his long face. "Are you excited?"

"Yeah," I said. Our classmates were filling in the hallway, "It's nice to not feel like an unwanted immigrant all the time."

He turned thoughtful. "Yeah, I guess you don't have to worry as much."

"You got your sights set on staying in Romania?" I teased.

"Well, it doesn't matter. Most of the Moldovan-alumni work here lately anyway."

That was true.

"Still," I said, "I guess it's a question of where you want to stay, right? I mean, you could be living somewhere or traveling to exotic places." That last part appealed to me a lot, and I often had fantasies of me traveling the world.

"Yup," agreed Andrei. He nodded toward the office door. "They wouldn't believe how excited it was for us to finally having the residence permit extended."

"Well, at least they do care about how our study will go into our record"

Andrei nodded again and started to say something when a familiar feminine voice cut through the murmur of our conversation. We both looked up. While we'd been talking, some awardees had gathered in front of the Office of International Relations and now stood facing us in an impressive line. Another Indonesian-awardees were among them. Aisha was the one who called us.

"Just finished class?" She asked, walking towards us.

I nodded.

"I guess, I'm out of business now, so I'll go home." He nodded and waved his hand to another awardees, and walked away.