one small step towards being (more) settled

Today's big task for me was moving my (and the kids') household registration from Kaohsiung to Hsinchu. As of 11:30am today, Declan, Petra, and I are "Hsinchu people". Once Daniel's ARC status finally becomes a reality (oh please God), I will return to the government division to add him to our registered Hsinchu household.

I felt really empowered to successfully handle a matter so apparently steeped in bureaucracy. Fortunately, there were several personal blogs I found that detail some private, average citizens' own experiences with this matter. I even found a template for a letter of agreement in which Daniel can sign me as proxy so that he didn't need to take time off work (which apparently was really, really productive today).

Aside from a detour I had to make to the immigration office to correct a clerical error on Petra's residence card, everything was handled conveniently and fairly efficiently in one place--including part one of Petra's Republic of China passport application. The next step is getting to a travel agency near the university to complete the passport acquisition process, and also contacting the Ministry of Health so that Petra will also be covered by the national health insurance. I need to start catching her up on vaccinations that she must have in order to enroll two years from now into Declan's current school.

 Also, the coveted Hsinchu citizen card is now accessible to me. With this card, which requires household registration in this city, I'll be able to take the kids to every city museum for free (instead of paying the usual ~NT$20 dollars--hey, that's more than one city bus ride/a load of laundry wash at our apartment). There had also been a couple of city library events in which people with household registration in this city get to receive goody bags (the last event included two free children's books and a free bag)--super excited about that too.

Yes, yes, we'll probably need to start paying more taxes due to Petra's health insurance. But this also means I'll get to vote during the general elections on 29 November without needing to trek south to Kaohsiung. The pros to our registration move are still sweeter.

And with the experience of tackling this initially daunting government-ese/task under my belt, I feel just a bit more closer to home and self-assured in my daily life here so that I didn't feel too bad about filling out another government document--this time for Declan's school regarding some upcoming nation-wide physical evaluations--and messing that up so badly that I needed a brand new copy to re-do everything. Small steps, small steps...