Applying for citizenship ... and goodbye

So, the moment has come. We've paid our dues here, lived and worked for five years (more than actually) and paid our taxes and we get to apply to become citizens. Nelson City will give us each a tree to plant.

I say that tongue in cheek as we've looked forward to this for five long years. We always knew we would apply to be citizens, but I'm looking forward to the actual process and to going through the ceremony and getting our passport.

The process really begins with paperwork. There's about a 10 page application that's pretty straightforward, as long as you aren't a terrorist, and you have to supply your original passport (including ones that expired within the time frame you've lived here), birth certificate, and marriage documents.

And you pay money. Nearly $500 per person. More if you need your documents translated into English, if from a foreign country.

You can ship your materials off in the mail and it takes apparently 4 or so months to process, or you can walk them into an appointment with the Department of Internal Affairs in one of the major centres. There they will review them and do what they need, and then hand them back to you most likely. So if you need your passport for travel, you can have it back.

We will fly to Wellington next month and lodge our application. I'm not sure how long it takes if you choose this process versus mailing everything, but we will soon find out. After we are approved, we go to a citizenship ceremony locally (actually for Don and I who work at the city council, it's just upstairs from our offices), we're sworn in, and we get a baby tree to plant.

All very exciting!!

And now to the 'goodbye' part. This blog has really run its course. Over the last five years we've received so many emails from people from all over the world following our story and asking questions. Now that we're at the end of the immigration journey, the blog is going to come to an end as well. We've been far too busy living our lives and enjoying our new home, writing about it seems to have taken low priority. And now there are others to follow who have come more recently than us.

We will concentrate on finally moving the prior years of blog entries to this site (you'll notice some pages are empty still, argh, we've been busy!) and then we'll leave it up with our contact details. People will still find us and are welcome to ask questions - we'll be around. But I find that I have less and less to say as I integrate more into the kiwi culture. And that's a good thing. Now we're off to living life!

I'll post one last time when our citizenship is finalised just to close the circle.

A HUGE thanks to the hundreds of people who have communicated with us over the years, it's been incredible reaching people in so many places all around the world. I hope some of you have lived the dream and made the jump. For those of you who haven't, you only live once and live without regret! As we said early on in our adventure, live the day.

Angela and Don