Blood, delays and a bus

When you apply for your Residents Permit you have to undergo a medical and have your fingerprints taken. It sounds simple, but it isn't.

In order to get to your medical, Gary's employer kindly laid on a bus. A bus full to the brim with people, most of whom don't speak the same language as you, or as each other. So barely anybody talks, and those that do, you have no idea what they are saying.

When you pull up at the medical office, it looks like Manchester United have just finished playing and you are witnessing the fans leaving Old Trafford en mass. There are people everywhere, in groups, alone, talking, not talking, all queuing. We were the lucky ones, the ones who get to bypass the queue because we work for or are attached to essentially a government controlled organisation. We are grateful for it, because it means we get guided through the chaos that awaits inside.

Inside, you go to a window, and queue. Then you give your name and wait to be given a piece of paper. Then you follow to a set of chairs and you sit down. No one really tells you what is going on. Eventually you get given a hospital gown and are top to remove the clothing from the top half of your body and put on the gown. Then you queue outside a door.

When you finally get in the room, you realise you are going to have a chest x-ray, once you get through the queue of people thronging through the room to the x-ray machine. There are signs now, that tell you that if you think you might be pregnant, then to alert one of the team. A poor girl in front of me, who probably doesn't want us, the wives and co workers of her husband, to know that she is probably four weeks pregnant, before she's even told her mum, whispers to one of the girls that she is pregnant.

The woman stares. Then calls to someone on the other side of the room and says, very clearly and very loudly, "This one is pregnant". Every member of staff, of which there are far more than is required, stares at her. So do all the wives and co workers. The staff actually tut and then tell her she needs to go see the doctor, and ushers her out of the door with a form of some description, no advice or guidance about where to go whatsoever.

When it is your turn, a women puts you up against a board, and then jabs you in the back so that you are standing correctly, and then scurries away to hide behind a screen while they do the x-ray. Then it is over and you have to work out that you are done and leave, because no one tells you.

Next is the blood test, but you have to find it yourself as the group has now split up and there is no one in sight that you recognise. Thankfully this is quick and painless, and contrary to my normal behaviour, I do not pass out despite the fact that I am, for once, not horizontal when they take the blood, there is no room for a bed in the box room where three women sit taking blood like people working in a factory putting the lids on toothpaste tubes.

There is a third box on the form, which says clinical exam. Only they don't tell you that unless you are a manual labourer you don't need a clinical exam at all. I spoke to three different women (men have their own section) before a woman I recognise as our original guide, looks at the form and says "why are you still here, you should have gone home".

Interesting, mental and more than a little chaotic are the three most relevant words. Because I cannot do a post without a picture, here is what our new research and development hospital will look like when it is built, meet the starship enterprise in the flesh: