If you’re a European citizen and you want to stay in Greece for more than 3 months you’ll need a residence permit (άδεια παραμονής). In theory (take a look here and here), if you stay more than 3 months you should request a residence permit. And remember that it’s not mandatory in order to work: you have the same rights as a Greek citizen in a job opening (yes, in theory).

The real facts are that in Greece you don’t need the residence permit unless you start dealing with high level bureaucracy. You can work, have insurance and pay your taxes without the need of a residence permit. Even in some police stations they will tell you what I state here. But bureaucracy is sacred in Greece, so let’s get started to obtain our white/yellow card.

Prerequisites (or what you need):

These are the papers that you need to prepare:

• If you work: a certificate from your employer stating that you are working. This certificate must be signed in a police station or in a ΚΕΠ. It’s called  Η γνησιότητα της υπογραφής.
• If you don’t work you must have sufficient financial resource (Don’t know exactly how you can demonstrate that, I believe that a paper from the bank stating your savings will be enough).
• Insurance: any proof that you’re insured. If you have IKA: your IKA number and your Health Book.
• Passport: with your ID is supposed to work but a passport is always more trusted than a card with “strange words”.
• A copy of the contract of your house, apartment, … . You need to prove that you’re living somewhere.
• 3 passport pictures.

And remember to carry at least TWO copies of these papers. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy.

Where to go:

Go to your nearest police station and ask for a residence permit. Usually they will send you to the right main police station, but perhaps you live near the right one!.

Also ask for the phone number of that police station. You should call them before you go in order to know exactly what papers are needed and when you can go there.

How long it takes:

Usually the same day after you wait the queue and stand the bureaucracy show.

Remember that is automatically renewed. So you do it once and then forget about it

My personal experience in Athens

I had to get the permission because I needed it to get a Greek driving license (why do I need a Greek driving license is a matter of another post). I visited 3 ΚΕΠ (bureocracy offices) before they could point me to a police station. Also I visited my local police station and they pointed me to the nearest place where I could go to do the papers (+1 to Psixiko police station).

The two police stations I know you can go to do this paper are: (But remember to go to your local police station first!)

• Marousi. Behind Ygeias Hospital. (I went there).
• Petrou Ralli. I was directed there first, but then I asked in my local police station and they sent me to Marousi.

I required the help of my gf to deal with the papers. So if you have a Greek friend, well, you’ll have to invite him to frappes during all the month

They day I went there the first person was waiting since 6:55. I arrived at 7:30 and I was the 4th in the queue. Because the holidays it took them a while to warm up (50 minutes the first person). So prepare to wake up early.

My gf called the police station to obtain a list of papers to prepare. They only told us one copy (you need two) and two pictures (they asked me for 3). Lucky me I always carry a huge pack of passport pictures when I do bureocracy .

Remember that they don’t do photocopies! So bring your copies if you don’t want to look for a place with a photocopy machine near the police station (they’re going to milk you). Also bring enough pictures.

The most annoying/funny thing was when I needed “a stamp and a signature” from the office director. We went to the place he/she should be, and of course nobody there. We asked his secretary, and she “kicked us out” like “not here! not here! ask there!”. Thanks god a male secretary in the same room shouted while we were leaving “wait! wait! wait! It’s here!” and kindly he took the stamp from the table of the woman (Incredible, she said “it’s not here”) and he put his signature. By the way, the woman was making crosswords: so the scene was a woman with a magazine and a stamp in her table, scaring people out of her eyesight.

That’s all. Good luck with your permit.

More Information:

• Visit kat’s blog, she’s has lot’s of really good posts for non-european citizens.
• European union website.

Desde Atenas, mi mas sincero pesame.

Beautiful, isn’t it? Today the Parthenon was open at night and it was for free for tourist like people. Also it was full moon an also moon eclipse (The next one will be on 2010). Nice opportunity to appreciate Athens at night from one of its symbols.

As far as I know the Parthenon opens only once per year at night, so today was the day for me to visit it for the first time (Yes, more than a year here without visiting it). The only bad thing was that the Parthenon was full of people.

At least I was a poor expat carrying a point and shoot camera. I saw a poor tourist couple being stopped because they were carrying, not a tripod but a mono-pod. I heard something like “If you want to carry that for professional pictures you have to pay”. Good, you open once and you want to get money if you carry good photo equipment.

My photo issues were fixed with stones to stabilize the camera and some fighting with the camera menu to find the right settings. I don’t know how to take pictures (Sascha, I have to learn from you), but I’m quite happy with the results.

In order to overload a bit your poor internet connection, here there are more awful pictures

• Mount Lycabettus from the Parthenon:
  
  
• Dark parthenon at night:
  
• Parthenon and full moon:
  

Days ago I tried  ASP.NET AJAX for an autocomplete text field in a form. The results were automatic, in no time you could have the most common and famous features you see in your favourite sites. But after dragging and dropping some controls here and there, and also adding a bunch of .dll’s to the project, a question appeared: what if I want a small modification?

Well, the answer wasn’t clear for me. Perhaps because my experience with ASP.NET is not so big enough to make some changes to a library that packs functionality in other language. Some times I want the things straightforward: from A to B.

So today I decided to reimplement the system using a javascript framework/library. I took a look to some of the libraries available on the net. I did a fast preview of these little amazing libraries and I liked them all. For my tests I chose jQuery.

Results: In one day not only was able to reproduce what I did with ASP.NET AJAX. I personalized the interface adding the functionality I wanted: calendars, creating new sections on the fly. And all this without a call to a piece of server code (except for the autocomplete part).

Before this change, even the javascript code was served using an aspx file server. For god shake! they’re static files! Do you really need to execute an aspx to serve a static file? Now I was able to setup the interface using XHTML, CSS and javascript.

But don’t think that .NET is the bad boy. I like a lot the “webservice” implementation it has. It can output JSON to feed your hungry AJAX/AJAJ applications. With a good web client for fast and quick tests.

Some other links I found interesting:

• AJAX Libraries API: improve your load times loading the libraries from google.
• Script.aculo.us: nice effects but using Prototype.
• jQuery documentation: good reading.

Beautiful, isn’t it? This marvellous image that identifies the evolution of the human kind. Glass, ice, metal and 0,3 litters of chemicals with bubbles. Cost… 3 Euro . What?!?!?!

Last saturday night we decided to go to the cinema in the famous (and only?) shopping mall in Athens: The Mall. As always we were a bit late but hungry so we stop in Ruby’s Tuesday for some food. Starting with a coke can for 3 Euro, then like a dozen of shrimps for 13 Euro and chicken steak served like a hamburger for 12 Euro. Last night we had dinner (2 people) for 19 Euro including coke and beer and we couldn’t finish! (Ladokola rlz).

After the overpriced dinner (and service), we went to the cinema. More surprises were awaiting us.

The cinema in The Mall:

• 9 Euro per ticket (ouch!).
• At the beginning of the film the assistant decided to move places, so we lost the start of the film.
• Of course the credits with light and without volume for a while, so if you like to see the credits at the end. Nothing for you.
• A guy put his feet in front of Stella. In the back of the seat just in front of her. What the…?!?!
• Some people people laughing, playing with the mobile phone and commenting the film.

To this you add that the film was the new X Files one, not very good. In this moment I was asking myself why I went to the cinema. At home I can enjoy more and watch “all the film” or even pause it if is really needed.

And to finish the night: 22 Euro for 1-1,5 litters of something they called sangría: sweet wine with some traces of fruit. At least it wasn’t the well known “Sangría Don Simón“.

Moral of the story:

• Be careful where you go, Athens can be quite expensive.
• Some times we swear about politicians not doing anything to fix this high prices situation, but we should look at ourselves because  we are paying these prices and therefore accepting them.

I confess. I’ve put a chip to my Nintendo Wii. The first good thing is not to spend 50 euros in games that you play 20 minutes and they’re just not for you. But what I love more is to play sonic again in 37 inches using that small Wii. I just love it!

The chip I put was the D2Pro 9 cables with a Wii-Clip. Here I don’t have a good solder for small pins so I asked some friends to bring me the D2Pro presoldered with the wii clip. The installation is only to open your Wii and attach the device. After that it just works.

The only problem was to buy again small screwdrivers for the Wii surgery. I don’t have my disassemble-everything set with me right now, but in Eksarxia I found the famous tri-wing needed to open the Wii.

Some interesting links:

• Open your wii.
• Homebrew Channel (HBC).
• Applications pre packed for the HBC.
• My favourite Genesis Plus emulator for Wii.

Today is my first day in a small internet travel agency in Greece. I left my job in a big ISP saving the world and some manager’s arses. Small company, quiet environment, small PC, and everything is done with windows and Microsoft tools.

Visual Studio, as always, impressed me with new tools that help a lot. But as always too, I could see the the not so good way it has to organize the code. Even I got scared when I saw the code for the automatic templates generated for asp web pages. Nothing is perfect.

Also I started to suffer the first windows problmes. In this case “I couldn’t open a .chm file”. So if you see in your windows a message like the one in the pic when you open a .chm file. Just modiy or create the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\HHRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\HTMLHelp\1.x\ItssRestrictions]
“MaxAllowedZone”=dword:00000001

All credits for this go to Ken.

So I hope I found a good place to work, and not another ISP chaos place.

These days I’ve been working with SMS messages. Due to the fact that I work in a Greek company, the character set of these messages should be Greek (or able to contain greek letters). As far as I know there are 3 options to accomplish this:

• Use unicode (UCS2, it’s like UTF-16). But you’ll get only 70 characters per SMS.
• Use GSM 03.38 encoding. You get 160 characters per SMS, but a reduced set of characters.
• 8 bit encoding. I wasn’t able to figure how this work with the Greek charset (yet).

After long Friday and Saturday finishing some java and xhtml jobs, Sunday was the perfect day to take things easy and spend the day with friends. We (Sascha and me) decided to go to Markopoulo, Panos base camp, and try to relax.

Panos was repairing his iBook. The harddrive of that beautiful piece of technology broke, and he got a new one. But disassembling a laptop is not easy: lots of screws around, manuals, drafts and of course the uncertainty of “will it work? or I’ll break it?”. So that was the reason we decided to give him some company and support.

But panos is very capable of doing that job. What will we do meanwhile? Well, I wanted to learn about Zope, and he works with Zope: perfect combination (no, not a “secret combination“). So Sascha prepared a tutorial on how to install Zope, and some examples. Also he introduced me to Darcs (code management system), and we were playing a bit with that and the local area.

Also I introduced him to Git (another code management system). But I’m not so expert on git, and also Git installation on Mac OS requieres patience and be able to stand MacPorts installing everything on your system (even if you had it). Anyway, you should check this video about Git with Linus Torvalds talking in Google. It’s about git, but it can be about any distributed source control system.

We did a stop for lunch, and perhaps because the planet was bored (it happens from time to time), an earthquake happened. I didn’t feel it, perhaps the two pizzas we ordered left me a bit numb (I fixed that with a fresh frape).

After the iBook surgery was complete, we went to the nearest beach (Markopoulo has no sea, but it’s near) on “Porto Rafti” for a quick and fresh swim. The water was a bit cold, but at 6 in the afternoon, there was no one there We were talking about how would be life doing the same job we do, but doing it in a small island in the Aegean sea. A VPN to the main office, no traffic jams, living near the beach, good food and cheap coffees.

Nice things to note from today.

• Zope seems a powerful web application server for python. I have to give it some time.
• Darcs also seems good. I’ll continue my experiments with Git, but now I know that I can work with Sascha really easily using Darcs.
• MacPorts behaves in a silly way when he wants to install software that it’s in your system. (The next step is to compile the Darwin kernel in order to install bash).
• I do not feel earthquakes when I’m sleepy.
• Love to have a swim late in the afternoon.

Now we continue slacking off while Panos installs Tiger in his iBook. I guess it’s time to return I still have to clean the dishes from yesterday and prepare dinner (Well, breaking news, we will have dinner here). Tomorrow more boring office job not doing much, just a bit here and there and waiting for the typical “We have to fix this for today” at 5:30 in the afternoon.

• What I’ve done. Violin by Dave Kim, piano and vocals by Marie Digby.

• What I’ve done . Piano and vocals by Marie Digby.

• Numb. Piano cover by ModistOne.