They’re letting me stay
I don’t often blog specifically about being an expat; I’m not sure why. There are a few reasons, I guess. I moved to Switzerland in December of 2000 – the classic “fish out of water” “American puts foot in mouth” stories happened years ago (and oh, how they did happen). I’m not currently in a language class so I don’t have weekly reminders of maddening German gramatics. And, frankly, my German is pretty good and I finally, after years in the wilderness, understand Swiss-German* so there aren’t even a lot of “lost in translation” stories.
I am not blind to the joys of Swiss life and the beautiful things that surround me. I still stop in my tracks when I walk to the Old Town by way of the train station, something I do almost every day, and stare at the panorama of the Bernese Alps spread out before me. I still think, often, I can’t believe I get to live here. But my days are just days like everybody else’s: filled with taking care of the kids and the house and doing the laundry and writing a poem. It’s life. It’s my life and I don’t spend a lot of time feeling like an expat. I don’t spend a lot of time feeling like an Ausländerin. I am. I am a foreigner technically, legally, but this is my home. I feel at home here; I am at home here. There aren’t so many expat stories, anymore, when one wakes up in the place one belongs.
Ah, but yesterday I needed to renew my C-Pass, my permanent residency permit. Ah, I thought. An expat story. A Swiss Bureaucracy story. Except it wasn’t, really. It was thoroughly un-blog-worthy. I went, I took my number, I handed over my documents, I got a new C-Pass. The whole thing took just under an hour – and would have taken less time than that but for my forgetting** to bring a picture and having to run back home to get one – and I left with a C-Pass valid until 2013. And not much of a story. But when you’re dealing with the bureaucracy that lets you stay or makes you go, I guess not much of a story is a good thing.
So there it is, my non-story story. I’m staying. Which was totally never in doubt anyway.
* insert standard caveat “as spoken by Bernese Swiss over 16 and under 60″ here.
** By “forgetting” I mean they failed to indicate anywhere on my official form that a new picture would be required this time around.
Filed under NaBloPoMo08, Switzerland | Comments (7)7 Responses to “They’re letting me stay”
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I know exactly what you mean – I frequently stop and say to myself ‘Ich wohne in der Schweiz’! My husband thinks I am crazy…
I am a bit confused – I thought a 5 year pass was a ‘B’ and ‘C’= permanent right of abode???
India
I think B passes have different time limits depending on the circumstance and canton. I had a friend whose B pass was valid for 7 years; mine needed to be renewed annually. She lived in Solothurn and was married to an EU citizen who, craziliy enough, have a better spousal deal than Swiss citizens. The C Pass is a permanent resident but it does as a technicality need to be updated every 5 years. At least in Canton Bern.
How odd that permanent res needs to be ‘updated’. In Germany you only have to get a ‘new’ perm res permit when you get a new passport (and my understanding is that it’s just transferred from the old passport to the new passport).
oops! Sorry. Your reply field kept my Thanksgiving nickname…lol
Have you thought about getting the passport instead of the permit?
J – it’s just a reason to charge you an extra 65 Francs now and then
robyn – yeah, the paperwork’s been sitting on my desk for a year. I got slammed by post-partum depression and it just wasn’t important. But yes. My boys are going to go to school here and, if things don’t change, enter the military here so I need the passport. I want to be able to vote here.
Yep, the voting would be enough of a reason for me, too (if it wasn’t already an extremely good idea anyway, what with my Australian passport being fairly non-useful in Europe). I still have a good few years to wait, though …