Strange as it may seems, New Zealand does not accept a marriage certificate as proof of partnership. Instead, we must prove our relationship in other, sometimes odd and convoluted ways. One of the requests is for:
"Letters of support from family, friends, employers, or others who can confirm your relationship. The writer should include name and contact number."
They also want:
"Photos of you together, especially with other family/friends or at significant events."
I thought this might actually be kind of fun. If you want to play, please send me a Facebook message, blog link, email or even *gasp* hard copy with your letter of support. By all means, include photos. The more detail you provide about the "genuine, stable and ongoing relationship" between DrC and myself the more potentially entertaining and useful your contribution. If you want to share your support with more than just NZ Immigration, go ahead and put it somewhere public but please send me your contact information for the authorities.
Thanks everyone!
Hardcopy should go to:
s/v Don Quixote
Bayswater Marina
Bayswater, Auckland, NZ 0622
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Sunday, November 06, 2011
Yes, We Really Are Married
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Step 1 - Get a Phone
[Editor's Note] Better late than never... I'm finally going to post our "Moving to New Zealand" series. It's 8 or 9 steps which I'll publish more or less in sequence over the next month or two though the events that inspired them were smushed more like into three weeks. I'll probably intersperse these with more interesting and personal stuff since the series is rather drier and more practical than is truly my nature. If you want to read the series all together, I'll give them a single "moving" tag.
When we dismantled our lives in Seattle, we were forever astonished by how many strings we left trailing behind. It seemed that for months random charges, irate emails, and miscellaneous to do's appeared out of nowhere like urbanized black magic sprinkled through our days. For those considering dropping out, going for a walk about, or otherwise escaping the Real World, I'd like you to first adventure with me on a little thought exercise.
I want you to pretend for a moment that the companies with whom you routinely do business are actually toddlers -- strong willed, very healthy, robust toddlers dressed in company colors with appropriately logo'd baseball caps. Each company more or less only reaches to your waist. Since very few can jump high enough to grab you in a stranglehold, abandoning them to the wolves in the forest merely requires a hard heart and pair of ear plugs. Sometimes, it's easier if you leave a basket of food behind. For example, you could simply pay a small discontinuation fee on an account or forego getting your money back on a security deposit which distracts the toddler-company long enough for you to get offshore and out of reach.
A few of these toddlers have big brothers who can and will turn you upside and shake until the gold in your fillings drops out of your mouth. To escape, you need to identify these lien holders early on and get them paid off. Make sure you have their assurance in writing that your presence is no longer necessary for their happiness and well being. While we were bobbing on the hook in a wild anchorage of northern Vancouver Island, we had one bank chase us down and try to foreclose on a piece of commercial real estate for the sin of not being physically where they expected us. These people you do not want to screw with. Best to make them go away in advance.
But with persistence and a long knife, you can and will be able to cut nearly all strings that tie you to the daily world of bills, mortgages, payments, subscriptions, auto-transfers, annual fees and the lot. The rest you give to your mommy and say, "Take care of it."
Then you leave.
Great, but now we're trying to reenter the regular world and are finding it takes nearly as much work to get yourself reestablished as it did to cut the ties to begin with. First, while we have grown and matured during the intervening years, the companies with whom we do business are still whiney, spoiled toddlers. Those who actually remember us from the good ole days are whiney, spoiled, vengeful toddlers. The rest are merely annoying and petulant.
As we reengage with civilization, we discover the world is full of Catch 22 loops such as the following:
* At most New Zealand banks, you can not open a bank account unless you have a permanent address.
* Most New Zealand rental properties will only accept a draft on a New Zealand bank account for your bond and first week rental payment.
Like that? How about this one:
* You can't get a visa until you have a job.
* You can't apply for a job until you have a visa.
Hmm.
Okay, not good enough? Try this one:
In New Zealand, they assume you have -- at some point in your life -- purchased electricity. So when you wish to turn on the lights at your new home, the first question in the online form is your account number without which the form literally will not progress. And what happens when in desperation you call the company... because gee... you don't have an account number? The automated friendly phone voice also prompts you for this same account number without which she dooms you to a virtually unending purgatory of musak until one of the electrical company's three live customer representatives gets back from tea.
The trick is the work around. The work around inevitably costs more money. Budget for your reentry to the world on the assumption that it is going to take more time and cost more than you currently anticipate by at least 10% in both cases.
We discovered that when all is said and done, the first thing you must do to get reintegrated into the regular world is to buy a phone. Without a phone number, you can literally do nothing. There is something about those mystical audio digits that confers "realness" in a way that bank drafts, passports, and work contracts do not. It also turns out that getting a phone number these days is about as dramatic a process as picking up a pair of new shoes. Wander the mall, look at the various models, select one, buy a SIM card, load it up with some money. They don't ask for your phone number (don't laugh! … By the time we arrived at the "buy phone" conclusion, we fully expected the store to require a phone number for us to get a phone number…). They don't even require that you give them your name. Drug dealers must love this.
So in addition to our preference for fast boats, sunny climates, and the avoidance of real work, cruisers have another thing in common with drug dealers… we like unregistered phones. It took us 72 hours to come to the Buy Phone conclusion during which we were quite literally unable to get anything useful done. Now we have a really dodgy piece of Sony Ericsson crap and a cellular phone number with a weird number of digits that make no sense.
Moving on…
When we dismantled our lives in Seattle, we were forever astonished by how many strings we left trailing behind. It seemed that for months random charges, irate emails, and miscellaneous to do's appeared out of nowhere like urbanized black magic sprinkled through our days. For those considering dropping out, going for a walk about, or otherwise escaping the Real World, I'd like you to first adventure with me on a little thought exercise.
I want you to pretend for a moment that the companies with whom you routinely do business are actually toddlers -- strong willed, very healthy, robust toddlers dressed in company colors with appropriately logo'd baseball caps. Each company more or less only reaches to your waist. Since very few can jump high enough to grab you in a stranglehold, abandoning them to the wolves in the forest merely requires a hard heart and pair of ear plugs. Sometimes, it's easier if you leave a basket of food behind. For example, you could simply pay a small discontinuation fee on an account or forego getting your money back on a security deposit which distracts the toddler-company long enough for you to get offshore and out of reach.
A few of these toddlers have big brothers who can and will turn you upside and shake until the gold in your fillings drops out of your mouth. To escape, you need to identify these lien holders early on and get them paid off. Make sure you have their assurance in writing that your presence is no longer necessary for their happiness and well being. While we were bobbing on the hook in a wild anchorage of northern Vancouver Island, we had one bank chase us down and try to foreclose on a piece of commercial real estate for the sin of not being physically where they expected us. These people you do not want to screw with. Best to make them go away in advance.
But with persistence and a long knife, you can and will be able to cut nearly all strings that tie you to the daily world of bills, mortgages, payments, subscriptions, auto-transfers, annual fees and the lot. The rest you give to your mommy and say, "Take care of it."
Then you leave.
Great, but now we're trying to reenter the regular world and are finding it takes nearly as much work to get yourself reestablished as it did to cut the ties to begin with. First, while we have grown and matured during the intervening years, the companies with whom we do business are still whiney, spoiled toddlers. Those who actually remember us from the good ole days are whiney, spoiled, vengeful toddlers. The rest are merely annoying and petulant.
As we reengage with civilization, we discover the world is full of Catch 22 loops such as the following:
* At most New Zealand banks, you can not open a bank account unless you have a permanent address.
* Most New Zealand rental properties will only accept a draft on a New Zealand bank account for your bond and first week rental payment.
Like that? How about this one:
* You can't get a visa until you have a job.
* You can't apply for a job until you have a visa.
Hmm.
Okay, not good enough? Try this one:
In New Zealand, they assume you have -- at some point in your life -- purchased electricity. So when you wish to turn on the lights at your new home, the first question in the online form is your account number without which the form literally will not progress. And what happens when in desperation you call the company... because gee... you don't have an account number? The automated friendly phone voice also prompts you for this same account number without which she dooms you to a virtually unending purgatory of musak until one of the electrical company's three live customer representatives gets back from tea.
The trick is the work around. The work around inevitably costs more money. Budget for your reentry to the world on the assumption that it is going to take more time and cost more than you currently anticipate by at least 10% in both cases.
We discovered that when all is said and done, the first thing you must do to get reintegrated into the regular world is to buy a phone. Without a phone number, you can literally do nothing. There is something about those mystical audio digits that confers "realness" in a way that bank drafts, passports, and work contracts do not. It also turns out that getting a phone number these days is about as dramatic a process as picking up a pair of new shoes. Wander the mall, look at the various models, select one, buy a SIM card, load it up with some money. They don't ask for your phone number (don't laugh! … By the time we arrived at the "buy phone" conclusion, we fully expected the store to require a phone number for us to get a phone number…). They don't even require that you give them your name. Drug dealers must love this.
So in addition to our preference for fast boats, sunny climates, and the avoidance of real work, cruisers have another thing in common with drug dealers… we like unregistered phones. It took us 72 hours to come to the Buy Phone conclusion during which we were quite literally unable to get anything useful done. Now we have a really dodgy piece of Sony Ericsson crap and a cellular phone number with a weird number of digits that make no sense.
Moving on…
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
First Impressions
So Toast… what are your first impressions of New Zealand?" - Steve of OceanBlue
We arrived in New Zealand two weeks ago. So now is probably the best time to just blurt out those first impressions without the influences that will filter in after a few weeks, months, or years to digest. We'll touch base in another six months or so to see if these initial impressions play out.
Green -- DrC describes it this way, "Wet Southern California -- palm trees and eucalyptus with lichen. Weird." Lush. Summer warm, sunny, and beautiful. Strong winds, vigorous gardens, and a whole lot of grass. The Kiwis -- to their eternal credit -- are park, sport, and recreation mad.
Multicultural -- American hubris strikes again. When you live in the U.S., you think we're multicultural. These folks put even Berkeley to shame. I've never seen so many nationalities and races rubbing cheek by jowl on a regular basis. It's incredible.
Immigrations R Us -- This goes with the prior thought, but it feels like native folks -- both Maori and Pakeha (or NZ European as they like to call themselves on all the paperwork) -- are by far the minority here in the Auckland area. Everywhere we go, we're interacting with people who arrived like us without furniture. As a result, this is a very sympathetic environment to the newly arrived immigrant. However, we Yanks are by far the minority; The majority are from the Pacific Islands, India, and China.
Expensive -- Distorted dollar perception or simply post-Mexican culture shock, it feels heinous. Looked at analytically, it's about the same as Seattle. So, I'll say it again, Auckland is expensive.
80's Flashback -- No insult to the Kiwis, please, but the culture feels like we've taken a step back in time to high school… both the positive and the negative bits of that era.
Small -- Again, without dissing the Kiwis or their country, this place is so small compared to Mexico or the U.S. The entire population is roughly that of Washington State. National news feels local. The upside? If New Zealanders want to do something, they just do it. The downside… no neighboring states or federal presence to fall back on when problems are big and intractable. This WA State to NZ comparison, btw, keeps popping up. DrC is attending a conference in a few weeks of all the ophthalmologists in the country. The meeting anticipates roughly the same number of attendees as the annual WAEPS conference (WA's eye doctors).
Seattle Echo -- There can be no Aucklander or Seattlite who would feel displaced swapping places. They should be sister cities. Size, economics, neighborhoods, traffic patterns, social ills, social benefits. I'm not saying this because Seattle was our homeport and familiar. DrC and I have lived in six major metropolitan areas during our lives and visited many others. Tick for tick, we've never seen two cities more similar in character.
Weird Light -- So we'd read about the high levels of U.V. down here. The articles do not do it justice. You can fry your neck and arm sitting in a car on the 10 minute drive home from work from the sun glancing in at an angle through the window. The UV is extreme and dangerous. There is a national campaign to Slip, Slop, Slap: Slip on sun glasses, slop on some sun screen, slap on a hat. Cruising Puddle Jumpers, take this VERY seriously. The Congers have the deep tan only cruisers of many years in the mid-latitudes can boast, and we've all five seen our skin redden in very short exposures to the full sun here. But where I'm going with this is that you actually notice a difference in the light. Everything feels slightly too bright to me… as if I'm looking at it through clear glass.
Too Much.
And with that I'll finish my first impressions because it's not fair to New Zealand or Auckland to say it's too fast, too commercial, too modern, too stressful, too urbanized. It's a beautiful city, and three years ago I'm certain DrC and I would have mortgaged our souls to the devil to buy a house in Ponsonby and settled in with verve and contentment. After spending years progressively shedding our middle-class, type A personalities -- during which we let our stress levels leak out our toe nails over successively more beautiful sunsets in nearly silent anchorages -- it's absolutely impossible to be happy living in Auckland. Every time we drive north towards the city, I can feel my shoulders bunch and a low grade headache start. All those beautiful little mirror-world pocket neighborhoods, so like our familiar haunts in Ballard and Fremont and Bellevue, are just too full of loud noise, fast moving people, and pressure.
Pressure. The pressure is intense. To get into the right neighborhood so you can get into the right school. To get the right job to afford the right neighborhood. To buy the right things to fill the right house in the right neighborhood with the right schools. Two weeks and we're already running screaming for the hills. Fortunately for us, Auckland is (again like her mirror sister Seattle) surrounded in stunningly beautiful farmland a mere 20 to 40 minutes outside the city boundaries. DrC's job is 20 minutes south of the city, so we found a neighborhood 20 minutes south of that in the middle of rolling hills, lush green farmland, and miles of trees.
Kilometers of trees.
Metric. *shudder*
We arrived in New Zealand two weeks ago. So now is probably the best time to just blurt out those first impressions without the influences that will filter in after a few weeks, months, or years to digest. We'll touch base in another six months or so to see if these initial impressions play out.
Green -- DrC describes it this way, "Wet Southern California -- palm trees and eucalyptus with lichen. Weird." Lush. Summer warm, sunny, and beautiful. Strong winds, vigorous gardens, and a whole lot of grass. The Kiwis -- to their eternal credit -- are park, sport, and recreation mad.
Multicultural -- American hubris strikes again. When you live in the U.S., you think we're multicultural. These folks put even Berkeley to shame. I've never seen so many nationalities and races rubbing cheek by jowl on a regular basis. It's incredible.
Immigrations R Us -- This goes with the prior thought, but it feels like native folks -- both Maori and Pakeha (or NZ European as they like to call themselves on all the paperwork) -- are by far the minority here in the Auckland area. Everywhere we go, we're interacting with people who arrived like us without furniture. As a result, this is a very sympathetic environment to the newly arrived immigrant. However, we Yanks are by far the minority; The majority are from the Pacific Islands, India, and China.
Expensive -- Distorted dollar perception or simply post-Mexican culture shock, it feels heinous. Looked at analytically, it's about the same as Seattle. So, I'll say it again, Auckland is expensive.
80's Flashback -- No insult to the Kiwis, please, but the culture feels like we've taken a step back in time to high school… both the positive and the negative bits of that era.
Small -- Again, without dissing the Kiwis or their country, this place is so small compared to Mexico or the U.S. The entire population is roughly that of Washington State. National news feels local. The upside? If New Zealanders want to do something, they just do it. The downside… no neighboring states or federal presence to fall back on when problems are big and intractable. This WA State to NZ comparison, btw, keeps popping up. DrC is attending a conference in a few weeks of all the ophthalmologists in the country. The meeting anticipates roughly the same number of attendees as the annual WAEPS conference (WA's eye doctors).
Seattle Echo -- There can be no Aucklander or Seattlite who would feel displaced swapping places. They should be sister cities. Size, economics, neighborhoods, traffic patterns, social ills, social benefits. I'm not saying this because Seattle was our homeport and familiar. DrC and I have lived in six major metropolitan areas during our lives and visited many others. Tick for tick, we've never seen two cities more similar in character.
Weird Light -- So we'd read about the high levels of U.V. down here. The articles do not do it justice. You can fry your neck and arm sitting in a car on the 10 minute drive home from work from the sun glancing in at an angle through the window. The UV is extreme and dangerous. There is a national campaign to Slip, Slop, Slap: Slip on sun glasses, slop on some sun screen, slap on a hat. Cruising Puddle Jumpers, take this VERY seriously. The Congers have the deep tan only cruisers of many years in the mid-latitudes can boast, and we've all five seen our skin redden in very short exposures to the full sun here. But where I'm going with this is that you actually notice a difference in the light. Everything feels slightly too bright to me… as if I'm looking at it through clear glass.
Too Much.
And with that I'll finish my first impressions because it's not fair to New Zealand or Auckland to say it's too fast, too commercial, too modern, too stressful, too urbanized. It's a beautiful city, and three years ago I'm certain DrC and I would have mortgaged our souls to the devil to buy a house in Ponsonby and settled in with verve and contentment. After spending years progressively shedding our middle-class, type A personalities -- during which we let our stress levels leak out our toe nails over successively more beautiful sunsets in nearly silent anchorages -- it's absolutely impossible to be happy living in Auckland. Every time we drive north towards the city, I can feel my shoulders bunch and a low grade headache start. All those beautiful little mirror-world pocket neighborhoods, so like our familiar haunts in Ballard and Fremont and Bellevue, are just too full of loud noise, fast moving people, and pressure.
Pressure. The pressure is intense. To get into the right neighborhood so you can get into the right school. To get the right job to afford the right neighborhood. To buy the right things to fill the right house in the right neighborhood with the right schools. Two weeks and we're already running screaming for the hills. Fortunately for us, Auckland is (again like her mirror sister Seattle) surrounded in stunningly beautiful farmland a mere 20 to 40 minutes outside the city boundaries. DrC's job is 20 minutes south of the city, so we found a neighborhood 20 minutes south of that in the middle of rolling hills, lush green farmland, and miles of trees.
Kilometers of trees.
Metric. *shudder*
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Three Inches of Paperwork
I'm not complaining. I swear I am not complaining.
Okay, I'm complaining.
Our documentation to apply for New Zealand work visas consisted of hundreds of sheets of white paper repeatedly stating the obvious: there are five of us, we are all related, we have no criminal record, and we don't have any known communicable diseases. Each must included a signed photo. Our name, passport number, and date of birth must be written on each and every page. IN ALL CAPS.
Now when we filled out all this paperwork, I experienced a deeply uneasy feeling that it wasn't going to work. No matter how good the government -- and New Zealand is ranked number 1 as the least corrupt country in the world -- submitting three solid inches of paperwork can not be good. It was inevitable that Bad Juju would happen.
At first, the problem was simple. New Zealand's medical authorizing agency didn't agree that DrC was a doctor. Now this might raise eyebrows, but we figured it was probably a tit for tat measure. Somewhere along the line, the United States got snooty about the qualifications of some Kiwi doctors so in retaliation, the Medical College said, "Hey… well if you don't think our docs know an ass from a hole in the knee, then we're fairly well convinced your docs don't either." We could be wrong. That's wild speculation. But it makes sense.
So we stood on one foot, jumped up and down singing a kumbya mantra, resubmitted roughly two thirds of his credentials going back to prove that he did emerge from a human womb, continuing with validation that he did drink the Koolaid in kindergarten and finishing up with a dance number in which DrC did -not- wear lace panties but he did wear the Do Me heels. With these slight changes, />poof/< It turns out that DrC is actually a doctor. Good to know.
So our agent then dutifully trundles off to the New Zealand embassy with our visa applications. And everything is complete. Right? Of course not. First, New Zealand is highly suspicious of the fact that the doctor doing our medical examination is the same individual who evaluated our chest X-rays. I'm betting our somewhat sarcastic and nearly automatic response to a situation of this nature -- This is Mexico -- isn't going to work. So because this IS Mexico, we trundled off to get a radiology friend of our doctor to reprint the reports on his letterhead.
New Zealand also understandably did not appreciate that the lab results were in Spanish. Off we go to get the lab director to retype up the report in English -- where in he must change words such as PSA to PSA and glucosa to glucose. It's a big deal.
I am not complaining, however. Not really. Getting into New Zealand is proving only slightly more challenging than getting our car registered in Washington state and slightly less difficult than securing a Mexican fishing license. With the exception of the weird rabies timeline on the cat, I find virtually all their requirements and requests reasonable, albeit tedious.
But the bottom line is that we still do not have visas. We have plane tickets, jobs, and a resident hotel reservation, but no visas. Fingers crossed people!
Okay, I'm complaining.
Our documentation to apply for New Zealand work visas consisted of hundreds of sheets of white paper repeatedly stating the obvious: there are five of us, we are all related, we have no criminal record, and we don't have any known communicable diseases. Each must included a signed photo. Our name, passport number, and date of birth must be written on each and every page. IN ALL CAPS.
Now when we filled out all this paperwork, I experienced a deeply uneasy feeling that it wasn't going to work. No matter how good the government -- and New Zealand is ranked number 1 as the least corrupt country in the world -- submitting three solid inches of paperwork can not be good. It was inevitable that Bad Juju would happen.
At first, the problem was simple. New Zealand's medical authorizing agency didn't agree that DrC was a doctor. Now this might raise eyebrows, but we figured it was probably a tit for tat measure. Somewhere along the line, the United States got snooty about the qualifications of some Kiwi doctors so in retaliation, the Medical College said, "Hey… well if you don't think our docs know an ass from a hole in the knee, then we're fairly well convinced your docs don't either." We could be wrong. That's wild speculation. But it makes sense.
So we stood on one foot, jumped up and down singing a kumbya mantra, resubmitted roughly two thirds of his credentials going back to prove that he did emerge from a human womb, continuing with validation that he did drink the Koolaid in kindergarten and finishing up with a dance number in which DrC did -not- wear lace panties but he did wear the Do Me heels. With these slight changes, />poof/< It turns out that DrC is actually a doctor. Good to know.
So our agent then dutifully trundles off to the New Zealand embassy with our visa applications. And everything is complete. Right? Of course not. First, New Zealand is highly suspicious of the fact that the doctor doing our medical examination is the same individual who evaluated our chest X-rays. I'm betting our somewhat sarcastic and nearly automatic response to a situation of this nature -- This is Mexico -- isn't going to work. So because this IS Mexico, we trundled off to get a radiology friend of our doctor to reprint the reports on his letterhead.
New Zealand also understandably did not appreciate that the lab results were in Spanish. Off we go to get the lab director to retype up the report in English -- where in he must change words such as PSA to PSA and glucosa to glucose. It's a big deal.
I am not complaining, however. Not really. Getting into New Zealand is proving only slightly more challenging than getting our car registered in Washington state and slightly less difficult than securing a Mexican fishing license. With the exception of the weird rabies timeline on the cat, I find virtually all their requirements and requests reasonable, albeit tedious.
But the bottom line is that we still do not have visas. We have plane tickets, jobs, and a resident hotel reservation, but no visas. Fingers crossed people!
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