As you can recall from the last update, our list of things to do is this:

1. Matt will fly back to Australia. Femke will stay in Holland and continue work at her current job.
2. Matt will need to get a job in Brisbane.
3. Once I have a job we will finalise all the paperwork required. I will have to send “certified copies” of papers and general copies and forms to Holland.
4. Fem needs to call the German Australian Embassy in Berlin to arrange an appointment (Netherlands has an Australian Embassy but they don’t have Visa capabilities – sigh)
5. Fem goes to the appointment with all the papers. If everything is in order, then she will be granted a temporary spouse visa that same day. This is valid for 2 years.
6. Fem organises and executes her move to Australia!
7. After 2 years, we supply additional paperwork to immigration for that period to show us still being together etc and the temporary visa is upgraded to a permanent spouse visa.

There has been some developments since then, which I will now attempt to explain.

I have now put together all of my documentation that I need to send to Femke. This was mailed to her 2 weeks ago and she has successfully received them all. Femke has also received the Australian police check in the mail as well. Yes! All good there. So as far as paperwork that we need there is only two items left.

• New Zealand Police Check
• China Police Check

New Zealand Police Check

Femke has sent off both the requests for the New Zealand and Australian police checks at the same time, so it was assumed she would get them back at around the same time. A week after she received the Australian police check, she sent an email to the NZ Justice department just checking up on the progress of it. We were informed they had a large backlog to process and we would just have to be patient. We estimate that she should have the NZ police check in about 2 weeks from now. Nothing too major, just need to wait a bit.

Chinese Police Check

This is where the fun starts. We had a few delays with getting Ebe (Femke’s friend in China) to help us. It turns out we have contacted her at one of the worst times possible. She currently has a lot of major work and personal issues she is currently dealing with which take up most of her time. After a few weeks she was able to help us out for which we were very grateful for.

We all followed the process for obtaining a Chinese Police check and she ended up at the local police station. There she was told that they don’t handle those kinds of requests. So we have hit a brick wall. Ebe and her friend Maggie ring around and try to find out another way to get the police check with no luck.

Fem and I are starting to get concerned. Fem then emails both the Chinese and German Aussie embassies asking for how we are to proceed now. They both respond and say that they acknowledge that some documentation required is very hard or impossible to obtain. If we cannot get the police check, if we show proof that we tried then that would be acceptable.

Yes! A way through this we thought! However there was a catch.

Initially step 4 of our master plan involves Femke going to Berlin for the interview while they process the papers. If everything was correct, she would have been issued the Spouse Visa that same day. But now that we are most likely not going to have the Chinese police check, this means that we would not be able to do the same day processing. The German embassy would have to do some additional enquires through their channels. They recommended the best option would be for Femke to mail in her paperwork and wait for them to process it through their standard queue. This means step 4 has gone from taking 1 day to possibly months. sigh.

Yes there is still a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Late last week Ebe and Maggie said they might be able to get the Chinese police check by going to a bigger police station, but they are continuing their enquires and will get back to us when they can. So we are still hopeful that we might still be able to get it.

So that’s where we are right now. Amazing how an entire visa process now hinges on two sub papers from the police check section! Funny how it all is! Well keep your fingers crossed!

Just a quick mention of two add-ons to this blog that will make things easier for international readers and for people who are not sure what RSS reads are about.

On the top right section of the blog you can see a section called “Subscribe to new posts via Email”. As you can guess this means that if you are not sure about RSS feeds, you can enter your email address and click on the Send button. A confirmation email will be sent to your account. Once confirmed, when ever I put up a new post you will be notified almost immediately. Pretty cool! If there are any issues, let me know.

The second feature is the Translator located directly beneath that. Clicking on the flags will translate my blog to that language. This has proved useful for my Dutch friends here. Fem has proof read the Dutch translated page and she says that while it’s not perfect it’s pretty good.  So if English is not you major language, it will now be much easier to read my posts. If there are an requests for additional languages to display let me know and I will add them.

Also if there are any features that you want to see, let me know and I’ll see if I can add them too!

So what have I done now?  I have now some web hosting thanks to the nice chaps over at dreamhost. So now I am hosting the blog in an area that is fully controlled by myself. Wahoo!

So what does all this mean for you my readers? Nothing major really. The blog is still at http://blog.mattcorr.com. However I now have no restrictions,  as there was a few when the blog was hosted at www.wordpress.com. I will be able to try out some new plug-ins and widgets and themes myself to also enhance the viewing experience both for you and myself.

So expect to seem some changes around here. Not all will be visible, but it should be interesting, nonetheless!

Matt

I have just decided to change my blogging server from blogger to wordpress.

Why did I change? Well, it was rather painful editing and embedding photos via blogger. But I didn’t know of anything better. A few days ago I surfed on the wordpress site and trialled out their free blogs. I was totally stunned at how much better, flexible and more powerful the interface was. Plus I could also import in all of my blogger posts seamlessly (as you can see below).

Some of the killer features include:

• Flexible width columns- no more reading a blog in a tiny 400 pixel wide column which has always been a pet peeve of mine
• Media Library – I can manage my uploaded photos separately to the articles themselves, and even upload whole directories of photos if needed. (blogger was one at a time and embedded in articles so they were too static)
• Post editor is much better
• Page designer is more powerful and customisable
• and on and on….

If you like or hate the new format let me know via the comments below.

More updates coming soon!

Matt

Overall I am very very happy with it. But it was a bit of a long drawn out process, as I wanted to get the right one from the start.

Basically you first start with the list of much have features. ie What I needed was the following:

• 15.4″ screen
• nice keyboard
• good style
• light
• compact
• and decent memory and hard drive.

I was going to go for the Dell Inspirons, as we have a few of their older models and they seemed rather good and well priced. A few days before I placed the order, I went to a Dell kiosk at Chermside on a whim just to see if they had them so I could see them hands on. I was so glad I did that as the current model of Inspirons are utter shit. The keyboard quality was utter crap. SO I dropped rather quickly and had a chat to the sales staff there.

They recommended the Dell Vostro, which was supposed to be better. so I scoped it out and they had a good price. so I was about to order that and the I read a lot of reviews about it online and pretty much EVERYONE was saying “great lappie, but damn it is BIG and THICK and HEAVY”. This was enough to put the seed of doubt in my head so I dropped the idea of getting the Vostro.

So finally I thought of getting a lappie through my work, and our supplier usually deals with HP. I previously had avoided HP like the plague especially since when they had their dark queen there for 6 years of hell. But since she got booted out in 2005, HP seem to have improved significantly.

After some more research I found out their laptops are currently rather good. So I ended up buying my first HP device and am loving it immensely.

So now I am more mobile, and starting to take the lappie rather than my giant desktop to LANS. Will this be the future? just laptops at laps? Who knows? Time will tell.

Later!