We exist!

After 4-1/2 weeks in Sweden, this week we were finally recognized by the Swedish government as existing and being part of their society!  Let me explain.

Visas allow you to visit Sweden for more than 3 months and we received our visas in mid August.  Once we arrived, we visited the immigration office twice in order to obtain our residence permits.  They took our pictures, fingerprints, looked over all our paperwork, and about 2 weeks later, we received our residence permit cards--which we're supposed to carry with our passports at all times--in the mail.  The next step was to register with the tax office so we could get our personnumbers.  Personnumbers are the Swedish equivalent to US social security numbers.  They consist of your birth date and a unique 4-digit code: YYMMDD-xxxx.  We applied for our personnumbers the day after we got our residence permit cards and they told us it would take 2-3 weeks.

2-3 weeks isn't that long, you say, but without a personnumber, you can't do much of anything in Sweden; anything that people living in Sweden, not just visiting, can do.  For instance, we cannot get a bank account, we cannot get any sort of healthcare, we cannot purchase cell phone plans or internet plans, we cannot sign up for Swedish language lessons, we cannot get on housing search sites, and most importantly, Tyson could not get paid.  Fortunately, a creative administrator in the Biomedical Center was able to get Tyson's paycheck to him (which was an interesting experience in and of itself) for last month.  The same administrator called the tax office at the beginning of last week to see how the approval process was coming along, at which point they told him they had no record of our application.  What!?!?  So I gathered all our paperwork and set out across town to set them straight.  We could not go another few weeks without a personnumber! 

A very nice lady took my information and quickly printed off verification showing that yes, we had applied two weeks earlier and said it sometimes takes up to a month depending on the number of applications in the system at the time.  But fortunately, our long-awaited personnumbers arrived in the mail Monday of this week, so we now exist to Sweden!!!  Bank account and credit cards have been applied for, Swedish language lessons start in early November, medical contacts have been made, housing is being searched for (since we can only stay in our current apartment through December), and life in Sweden is a little bit sweeter, all because of a 10-digit number  =)