Sono a Milano: The Italian System

Sono a Milano: The Italian System

I have never come across such an outrageously inefficient system before. Honestly, everything here is so disorganised and you've gotta wait ages to get anything done. Order something at a restaurant and they take like half an hour before the bring it over; call for the bill and it gets to you an hour later.

I'm supposed to get a foreigner's stay permit to make my stay here legal, even though I have a visa. To apply for a permit, you have to go down to the main police station with 4 passport photos and a couple of documents. The police station does this thing starting 8am in the morning till like 1 or 2pm and then they close. However, in order to actually get inside the building, you've gotta start queuing at 3 or 4am in the morning!!! Like seriously, if you arrive any later than 5am there'll be like 100+ people in front of you and you will be refused admittance because they only issue like 80 permits per day and there are lotsa refugees and all sorts of people, mainly indian and african families who come to get a permit. I've currently yet to get one coz I went once but we only arrived there at like 5am and we queued till it opened at 8am but were refused admittance. I was so totally pissed off and so was my roomie who had been refused entrance twice already. Plus, the staff there non parlano inglese!!! One would think that given that you're working with foreigners, you'd at least employ people who speak english, but no that would just be too easy of course and too organised for Italians... I'm not sure if I actually wanna go again. It's pure torture really and you don't exactly need it unless you're planning on getting into trouble...like if the police stop you and ask for a permit and you dun have it you'd be in deep trouble, but otherwise...

I dun think I'll ever understand how italians get things done. You definitely have gotta have lotsa patience here, waiting for them to get things done. Like to pay rent we had to queue for about an hour and then class was supposed to start at 11.30am and they asked us to come collect our books at 11am. Naturally there was a mile long queue and naturally they never got around to giving everyone their books on time. In the end they just told everyone to check what class we were assigned to and then they'd give out the books in class...which is what they should have done in the first place!!!! Things are just pretty messy around here really which definitely takes some getting used to!!