Customary Customs

We received a fax the other day from the German moving company who will be taking our household goods from the port in Hamburg (where the ship arrives about the 2nd of April) to the house in Jülich. A standard sort of letter asking for documents that will be required for our things to clear customs. Documents such as a copy of my passport, signed declaration that we aren't bringing in anything illegal etc. Of course they also require a copy of my German residence permit. Can't be sending stuff to people who aren't supposed to be there right?

The problem being that, officially, we aren't here yet. Even though my work and the house we are living in is in Germany, I am employed by a Dutch organisation, F.O.M. (which in English stands for Fundamental Research on Matter. More on them here and about the division I am employed in here). So before we can be German we have to be Dutch. Technically, it is only me who has to be Dutch then German. Gaynor and the children are all EU citizens (they entered Amsterdam on their British (EU) passports) by virtue of Gaynor's English birth. So they are pretty much free to wander as they please but if they intend to reside somewhere they have to show valid health insurance and income support.

So I am almost Dutch now. That is, I'm waiting for my Dutch residence permit to be finalised. Of course, applying for that wasn't straight forward either. I had an appointment with the immigration authorities at the local town hall, a week after we arrived, only to find out my birth and marriage certificates weren't acceptable. Turns out my marriage certificate (which had been accepted by a number of Australian bodies previously) wasn't more than a commemorative one anyway! Naturally, I'd been warned to this fact by Gaynor some years earlier but it seems that piece of information had been filed in my mind with "Things I May Need to Know One Day", right next to "Things to Recall If I'm Ever on a Quiz Show". For the documents to be legally recognised they need to have an Apostille afixed to them. This is an extra stamp ($60 per document) which essentially authorises the document as legit (it is issued by DFAT) and makes it recognisable under a 1969 Hague Convention to which Australia became a party in 1991. I can hear that last filing drawer opening as I type ...

Anyway, so the procedure now is to get my Dutch residence permit approved (within two months), then to go with the family to the German embassy in Amsterdam to get official stamps in our passports to say we can go and live (and I, work) in Germany. Then, we go to the local town hall here and register with the immigration police. This then gives us a German residence permit. Exhales slowly. Which brings us back to our stuff arriving in a few weeks in Hamburg. The best we can hope for is a fluke of bureaucracy where our German residence permit are finalised by then. More than likely though, we'll need to pay for storage of our things until the rest of the paperwork has lined up.

Not that this has been a rant (well not exactly), but this is the price of staying together as a family, the way we chose to do it. Oh, as a happy side benefit of obtaining our German residence we'll be able to register a car.