Residencia

A big day tomorrow, we finally are going for our appointment in Almería for our residencia. We will formally be residents of Spain and not just long term visitors.

Technically we should have applied for this when we had been here for 6 months, but with such delays in getting addresses changed on things I wanted to wait until we had bought somewhere. Finally, we started the process 6 weeks ago by asking a local lady to make an appointment for us at the Office of Foreigners in Almería. The appointment can take anything from a week to 6 weeks to come through and ours has taken the full 6 weeks. I thought it would be quicker because I understood a lot of people were leaving Spain but apparently there must still be plenty coming in to Spain as well.

Having waited 6 weeks for an appointment to come through we were then only given 48 hours notice. The lady that was helping us e-mailed some details through and said she would ring to arrange to fill in the forms. Having waited for her call and not getting it, I rang her this morning only to find that her computer had crashed and she had lost all the data including our telephone numbers so she had been hoping I would call her.

So tomorrow morning, passports, NIE and Padrons in hand we are off to Almería for our appointment. We're hoping to change our Driver's Licences for Spanish ones as well tomorrow. The plastic card looks exactly the same except it is in Spanish instead of English.

Tomorrow could be a long day, doing most official things in Spain tends to take time. So,we have arranged for the dogs to be looked after as I doubt they would be able to cross their little legs long enough to wait for us to get back.