Visiting the Foreign Regional Registration Office is something anyone other than a tourist needs to do within two weeks of arrival. Two weeks goes really, really fast, incidentally. I only would have had a few days left to get it sorted out at this point.

(Edit from eight months later: Don’t make my $500 mistake! Although you almost never actually need the two stapled pieces of paper that make up your FRRO – they had been sitting in my drawer for months – you DO need them if you intend to travel outside of India! They would not give me a boarding pass without these two sheets, even though I had my PAN card and passport.)

Every book I have read on living in India has stories about the FRRO Bureaucracy Hell: of the getting up absurdly early to wait in line after line for hours in a non-air-conditioned concrete building only to likely be told that your paperwork is incomplete or your passport photos (at least 5 are needed) are the wrong size.

I avoided this scenario entirely by paying a relocation organization called New Horizon (that my company arranged for me) about USD$150 to organize the paperwork and meet me at the FRRO office. (Spending the dough to hire a professional was described as “definitely worth it” by the last ex-pat who worked for my company. I think his email might have nudged everyone into action since, as I found out later, he actually ran the place for a couple years. I got his name from another employee who is childhood friends with the wife of someone I work with at the Colorado office. Connection!) I also avoided the worst of the FRRO, I believe, because my residence is technically in Ghaziabad and not New Delhi.

In fact, just the ride to the rural FRRO office was worth the trip!

Ghaziabad Traffic

Going to Ghaziabad proper (instead of the high-rise / shopping-center section I live in) was like traveling back in time. Narrow, dusty roads. Marketplaces selling chips and apples and rice by the bowlful and motorscooters and spare parts. Lots of people out and about in traditional wear, sometimes pulling wheelbarrows. I even saw two women carrying loads on their heads like a National Geographic special. I felt for the first time like I was seeing “the real India”. Except for the vehicles crowding the roads, I could have been stepping into a city fifty years ago.

I got to experience my worst traffic jam yet. Gridlock for almost half an hour. It was fascinating (and surprising for the middle of the day.) Though I felt guilty because I had already been late meeting the taxi so we ended up being half an hour late to meet the FRRO guy. I wish I got a photo of the jam, but the above photo was just the standard traffic on the way back.

I also saw quite a few sights along the way. Something that looked like a slum – canvas tents on poles, but with sections for cows. Then hollowed-out crumbling brick buildings that served as one step up from that. Then a pretty cute town with not a name brand, except maybe Coca-Cola, in sight. The driver stopped every three blocks to ask directions.

The sign for the FRRO office was *inside* the FRRO office. (Not just the inside. The back corner. And it was faded. I never would have found it.) It was in a vaguely adobe-looking one-storey yellow building in a complex of similar-looking yellow buildings. Some of the buildings had lines of people out front, but not mine. No line. The one-room FRRO office had two people behind a desk, two chairs in front of the desk, and no one in front of me. I had to fill out one more form, but that was it. A woman came in while I was there trying to get a visa extended for her American-born son, but that was the only other customer I saw. I think I was there less than half an hour. That has to be some kind of record. Or, more likely, simply worth the hundred and fifty bucks.

On our way out of the city, there were two ragged kids – a boy and a girl – wiping the dust off of car windshields with a rag as the vehicles were stopped in traffic. My driver was on his cell phone and, as far as I could tell, ignored the boy. The car in front appeared to give the girl a coin. When the girl passed the taxi I was in, she must have noticed me. I could see her in my peripherals, waving and then tapping the back window across from me to get my attention. I was not sure what to do. I think I would have been heartbroken if I looked the poor girl in the face. She probably was looking for a tip from the wealthy foreigner (I keep trying to remember that the word ‘wealthy’ is associated with me here) but she may have just wanted to wave hello to the mysterious blond woman, too. I just looked forward. Hrm.