Why Does Doing Everything Right Still Feel So Wrong? A foreigner's experience of Serbian bureaucracy — by the book, against the grain

How have your experiences been getting documents sorted at a Serbian police station as a foreigner? I'd love to know if it's just me.

Every time I've gone, the process has felt oddly fragmented — like each officer only holds one small piece of the puzzle and no one is talking to anyone else. What surprised me most was being told I needed to bring a translator to convert from my first language into Serbian, even though I was sitting right there speaking perfectly clear English. It felt less like a language requirement and more like a bureaucratic wall.

And then there's the moment your case gets passed up to an inspector. That handover carries its own particular feeling. More than once, I got the sense that the inspector would rather the case — and I — simply didn't exist. The unspoken message was hard to miss: you're a foreigner, this is complicated, and you could always just leave.

It's a strange thing, to be made to feel like an inconvenience in a place you're trying to do everything by the book.