We Are Officially Legal

We received the call we have been waiting for this morning. All our mounds of paperwork for Temporary Residency has been approved and the decision has been made to allow us to stay in Poland through the end of June! This is an unbelievably complicated process. We have been so lucky to have someone to help us navigate the system. Myles' colleague, Magda, saved us many times over with this complex, time consuming process. There is no way a foreigner could do this without lots of help. That said...we are not quite done yet.

Back on October 29th we went to city hall with our landlord to register our lease with the city. At that point the city authorized our stay in the house we are renting until December 27th. That is the day that our tourist visas expire. We needed that authorization from city hall to to apply for the Temporary Residence in a different government office. So we took that authorization among many other pieces of documentation, including the paper that says that Myles and I agree that the children can live with us while we are in Poland, to the folks who make residency decisions. This is the office that has 45 days to make their decision.

Now that we have our decision (with 10 days to spare before the kids and I got deported for overstaying our 90 day tourist visa), we now have to go back to city hall and re-register our address (the same one) that we are going to live at for the next six months. After we do that, Temporary Residency cards will be issued, and that will take at least another month or so. Now that I have the "decision" documentation, I am not going to bother with registering with city hall until we get back from Budapest. We leave next Friday and will be gone that whole week between Christmas and New Year's Day. I have no idea what kind of hours city hall will even be open next week because of Christmas. We are hopeful that this is something we can do on our own, rather than bother our landlord with it again.

This process is painfully difficult and has cost us $1,500. We had to have all our US documents (birth certificates, marriage license, insurance paperwork etc) translated into Polish by a certified translator--not cheap! But the bottom line is that we have paperwork that says we can stay. So for the next couple of weeks we won't worry about city hall and enjoy our Temporary Polish Citizenship.