петок, јуни 15, 2007

Getting married - Oops, this document is new

In order to get married in both NL or Macedonia, a document stating your residence is necessary. This document is not hard to get for me: the NL Embassy brings the solution. However, there's no embassy or consular service of Brazil in Macedonia. And for San it is here in Macedonia where we need to get her residence document. Calling around learned that this document is something that we can start making ourselves. Here's the way:
  1. When we moved into our new house in Skopje last October, we got ourselves registered at the police (necessary for that: [1] a work registration form, [2] a notary approved/stamped rental contract, [3] statement from Ministry of Interior approving our stay, [4] visa in our passports). All this results in one card: the certificate of residence.
  2. This certificate of residence shows where we live and that it is approved by the police - unlike Brazil and Netherlands, it is the police who keeps these registrations and not any other community service. A copy of this certificate needs to be legalized by the public notary, together with, again, copies of the the passport pages with photos, signatures and visa.
  3. These notary documents need to be legalized by the Ministry of Justice: at the primary court of Skopje (Skopje eden) by putting the Apostille stamp on it.
  4. With this legalized document, we can officially state that San's living in the given address in Skopje. Nema problem.
Piece of cake? So, that's what we thought. And we started looking for these certificates of residence of ours. In the 8 months that we're living here in Skopje, these certificates got burried a little deep in our administration. After one hour of archaeologically disciplined excavation in our archives, we found them. Ha! Suprise! Our certificates were somewhat new forms. These forms did not reserve space for our living address. And as to expect, the address of residence was not written on it.

Sigh!

We had to get new ones! Luckily, the police was quite nice and cooperative in helping us out in this. However, it took yet another afternoon to get it done!

Next stop: registration of marriage plans. But where?