Thursday March 21

Residency--hold on a darn minute there Hinckas

Well according to the lawyer in Amsterdam(who I now think usually handles illegal tulip plantings or stroopwaffel theft) we were to have no problems today when we went to immigration. Jerry went to the office super early and came home to pick us up at 11:30. We arrived at 12:30 for our 1pm apmnt, but government workers in Holland, as in the USA, get a full paid one hour lunch, so please come back at 1pm. We found a lovely park and enjoyed the fresh warm air and sunshine. We signed in at 1pm and were given our numbers and sent to a second waiting room. The girls and I were the only women not wearing hijab, so I think that the Netherlands must be a popular county to immigrate to from Muslims countries. We got called after about 15 minutes, and after a 15 second glance, all of us but Jerry were sent back to the waiting room! So much for our showers and nice outfits! I had grabbed the ipad so we were able to continue with our read-aloud (Love, Ruby Lavender by Deborah Wiles if you are interested!) and that made the time go quickly. The long and frustrating upshot is, the lawyer had registered Jerry as a regular shmoe and not a highly skilled migrant worker. The shmoes face far more scrutiny and much longer processing. And so, we are back to square one and with no country ID which equals= no bank card, no chip-card for the grocery and trains, zip,zero,zilch!

My advice to Jerry’s company would be to hire a relocation firm next time. They specialize in housing, paperwork, helping people adjust--but big surprise! No one wants my opinion!

The gang drowned their sorrows in brown gravy (I know, I know, eat Dutch food-but IKEA is cheap, quick and tasty!) and Jerry dropped us off and went back to work. Poor guy.

We lounged around the back yard reading until it was time to head to town for Danny’s judo class.

Poor Charlotte-she had been so excited to come, we both hauled our laptops in our backpacks, and she was going inline to check email and the latest Yankee baseball news. Bad news--the construction on main street hit something or other and the internet in the whole town is out! The grocery stores couldn’t even do their transactions. She was very upset but handled it quite well. We watched speed skating and looked at the photos on her computer. She has been working hard on captioning them, and she loves to show off what she wrote. It is very sweet.

So to summarize, if there is a knock on our door, we will be hiding in the closet to avoid deportation!