Registering as a foreigner in Kazakhstan

I crossed the border into Kazakhstan at 11:45pm on a Thursday evening and didn’t arrive in Almaty until 3:30am on a Friday. The registration office is closed on Thursdays and weekends. I need to register at the OVIR office within five days of entering the country. When Monday comes around, it’s day five.

First I have to find the office, I copy down the address but then as the day pans out, I end up taking the address from the security guard at the Canadian embassy. He’s a nice guy, but I end up out in the suburbs at the wrong office.

Arriving at the office at 4pm there’s a notice saying they accept documents for registration between 10am and 12:30pm and return the registration between 5pm and 6:30pm. Since it’s my fifth day, I decide to stick around and see if I can plead my case. After an hour of waiting in queue, the officer in charge (Leonid Borisovich) shows up and sends us into another queue. We reach the front of it only to be sent back. Back and forth, Leonid decides he’s not accepting documents. The answering machine for the OVIR office says they accept documents between 10am and 6pm. Two foreigners are waiting in line and aren’t getting any help.

Leonid, despite the fact that he knows English, finds someone else in the queue that speaks English to help the girls organise their paperwork. Finally he relents and lets me give my passport to register. I pay the money, fill out the forms only to find I need to be registered at the house of a Kazakh citizen. Thankfully, Sveta is able to help me out with this. I hand in the forms only to be told that I need to show up to the office in Sveta’s suburb, with her present, between 10 and 12:30. Whether or not she can get time off work at such short notice is of no concern to him. Total time wasted, 2.5hrs.

The following day, Sveta and I head to her local OVIR office, are scolded, but not fined and finally register. Two days wasted for pointless Kazakh bureaucracy, legalised extortion.