Obtaining the Necessary Swedish Paperwork

My Swedish paperwork is starting to come together now.  I don't know a whole lot about the process because my employer is handling it all for me, but there are a lot of steps and pieces.

There are 3 pieces that you need to get to live and work here in Sweden.  You need a work visa, a residency permit, and a personnummer (directly translates to personal number, it is Sweden's social security number).  Obviously I am the only one in the family that needs the work permit.  One thing that is kind of nice is that once I have mine, Sarah can automitically get one, she doesn't need a local company to sponsor her.

Now the exact process to obtain the work visa and residency permit is a little fuzzy to me.  All I had to do was provide some personal information and a photocopy of my passport to an agency that was handling the process.  Then I know that my employer had to provide some information on the job they are employing me to do.  All of that went to some agency for processing, when they were done it went to one of the Swedish Unions for approval.  After they approved it, it went to a third agency for final approval.  Once it was all done and approved, I have to go and pick it all up at an Embassy outside of Sweden.  I had to get a couple of passport photos, and book a trip to Copenhagen tomorrow to get it taken care of.  This whole process has taken about 4 weeks for me, which was expedited.  Normally the process will take a bit longer.

Finding a place to live in Sweden

I finally found us a place to live here in Sweden, which isn't as easy as you might believe.  One of the things that has made it harder is that Uppsala is a University town, and school just began again, so everything got snatched up the returning students.

Then unlike the States, there are no massive corporate owned housing complexes.  Everything is privately owned, so you can't just cruise down to the local apartment complex and choose whichever plan you think suits you the best.  You have to browse the blocket.se (Sweden's craigslist, they do have craigslist here, but everyone uses the blocket) and find places to live.  Then for every listing, they get a ton of inquiries, so you just have to hope to get in there first most of the time.  I did get lucky in that some people were definitely trying to get professionals as opposed to students.  But on the other hand, I also found people who were not interested in having kids live in their rentals, so those were out.

First Day of School

Meant to post this awhile ago.  The kids started school down in Florida back on August 26th.  Ella has started kindergarten, she is in school from 8:45am to 2:50pm every day (Wednesday's get out an hour early).  She is pretty excited about it.  It could be a little weird for her here in Sweden when we move because kids don't start school until they are 7, so she will actually go back into daycare, with next year being more like kindergarten as we know it.

Another site update

Hope everyone likes the new site layout. I am done messing with it now. I can still do the read more link thing, but it is just manual as you type the new posts now, so that is pretty good.  This is setup to be pretty editable now, and should be easy to maintain.  Even the about and contact us links are working properly.  The only thing that would lead me to change it is if formatting photos in posts does not work correctly like the one from a few revisions ago, that was really annoying me.

Family weekend away

We decided to get away for a day before I leave for Sweden. I am not planning on coming back to see the kids for about 2 months. We spent the day at Animal Kingdom, and are spending the night at the Animal Kingdom Lodge where we have a Savannah view. We'll post more tomorrow, but this is the view from our room. Yup, those are Zebras, a Giraffe has been wandering around but were not in the view right now.