Residency

We are officially residents of Poland! When we first arrived we had to go to the Foreign Affairs office and apply for residency and to get PESEL numbers, which are sort of like Social Security numbers. Since Mike and the kids have Irish passports they are considered European citizens and therefore because Poland is a member of the EU whatever they had to do to apply for residency was a lot simpler that what I had to do. As a foreigner I am only allowed to stay in the country for 90 days maximum (without a visa or residency card). Thankfully this dawned on me the week before we were leaving to visit Dublin, so I called the woman who was helping us with the registration process and she got me a letter from the Foreign Affairs office to bring with me stating that my application was in process. It turns out they did pick up on my 90+ days here so I was stopped at passport control both leaving and coming back into Poland, so thank goodness I thought of it before I left or I would have missed out on the Dublin trip. Mike and the kids got their cards months ago, but today I finally received mine, which allows me to stay in the country until 2014. I won't even show the inside of it since it is one of the worst pictures of me I have ever seen...but here is the front. Now I just have to remember to carry it with me whenever we travel - I had a similar one in Dublin but I didn't think it was that important because I had a special stamp in my passport that said I could stay in the country for 5 years - but then my wallet got stolen with my residency card inside it so I didn't have it when I flew back to Ireland once and customs officers did not like that one bit and said I could have been arrested (?). Oops.

Mike and the kids think they are really cool because they get to blow through the EU passport lines at all the airports (which aren't always the shortest lines, and they still have to wait for me on the other side!) But because they applied for residency on their Irish passports, they can no longer travel on their US passports which means no more stamps from any EU countries that we visit. Oh well, at least I will have them in mine as a keepsake (suckahs).