Resident Status

Erin received a letter just after Christmas from a Dutch government office. She finally decided to decipher the letter this week using Babel Fish. To our surprise we discovered the letter meant Erin's residence card had been approved...finally! After a 30 minute bike ride in the cold and a 20 minute wait, Erin is now officially a Dutch resident. We have now both successfully gone through all the hoops and both have residence cards!

As if life isn't already complicated enough, we are now "residents" in two different countries at the same time. This, of course, is not physically possible, but apparently it is possible on paper as far as the governments are concerned. We still own a house in Texas and just this morning we were filling out forms to get our duplicate driver's licenses from the state of Texas and had to fill in our "residence" address in Texas. (Yes, after many weeks of procrastination we decided to go ahead with the complicated process of attempting to get a driving license in the Netherlands. Since the Netherlands government confiscates and destroys our U.S. driver's license, it is best for us to order a duplicate copy now so we will still have a U.S. driver's license upon our return to the States.) In case you don't understand any of this, don't feel too stupid. We don't really understand it either. On top of being residents in two countries, we also have a third address, our mailing address, at a PO Box in New Jersey. We have bank accounts in dollars and euros, credit cards based in the U.S. and in Europe and entire chaotic files of originals and copies of pieces of important documents that usually takes about 20 minutes to look through everytime we need something.

(As a side note, while digging through the aforementioned chaotic file of important documents this morning, Erin discovered an information sheet, in English, describing the process of getting a "highly skilled worker" sticker in your passport and obtaining a residence card. She soon realized, however, this information would have been of no use when she read that "after obtaining the sticker in your passport, your residence permit application will be reviewed and should be approved within two weeks." Two weeks? Ha! It took John two months to get his residence card - four and a half months for Erin. This information sheet is obviously fictional in nature.)

If you are now confused as to how on earth to contact us best, stick with e-mail. E-mail is universal, free, and can be accessed on any computer anywhere.

Several times this week Erin has had conversations with Dutch people who tell her that living abroad seems like it must be exciting. She responds that "exciting" is the perfect word. According to several different dictionaries, excitement can be "an emotional state characterized by its potential for impulsive or poorly controlled activity," "the state of being emotionally aroused and worked up," "something that agitates," "lively and cheerful joy," or "a disturbance usually in protest." All quite accurate.