Red tape tango

Whoever thought 5 days would be enough to organize a car, house, schools and the infamous 'permesso di soggiorno' (stay permit) clearly hadn't considered how much red tape is involved in every official administrative task over here.
Here's a quick rundown, because if I explain in detail it'll take all day..

1. Permit to stay - Difficulty rating = 9/10 - this is the unadulterated joy of Italian bureaucracy. You've got to be willing to take the pain on this one if you want to get items 2, 3 and 4 and if you want to stay in the country longer than 3 months.

Most travel references for living in Italy recommend getting the right visa, reporting to the Questura (local police station - another fine experience) within 8 days of arrival, and then you more of less get your permesso. 

This has to be better than waiting in a police station

We front up at the Questura on day 2, with all our documentation and our friend who lives in Biella so knows a few people around town. The day we rock up it's for appointments only. We stand around (with the kids!) for about an hour, trying to figure out how to get into one of the doors that are closed and have no windows so we can find out what to do or how to get an appointment. Simon goes and chats to one of his mates, and finds out that we need to go to the post office to get an appointment. I take the boys to a local park for a bit of running around (there's only so much tiggy you can play in a government department courtyard) and Simon and Shane head off to the post office.    

A couple of hours pass. The boys let me know that the post office gives the documents that need to be completed but don't give you an appointment unless you have filled out the documents and paid about $400 to file them. To get help filling out the documents we need to speak to Signora Jamilla at the local union office (?) or something like that but she doesn't work today, she only works 2 days a week. We come back the next day and speak to her. We make another appointment to come back the day after to complete the documents. We need to provide different documents that were filed for our visa because this is a different document to our visa...the visa itself won't do, because that was submitted to the consulate, this is a different department....and so it goes on. All the while the kids are being dragged around from office to office with the promise of gelati if they're good, no gelati if they're not so good. Shane is exasperated, I've never seen him get frustrated with this stuff...I'm amused by all this because I think I expected it. 

We get the documents filled out after I don't know how many hours in Signora Jamilla's office with no air conditioning over 3 days - she tries as much as she can to help us and the help is welcome. Once we have the documents done, we head to the post office to wait in line for another hour, pay what we need to pay and get our appointment at the questura only to find out that because it's summer time we need to wait longer and won't get an appointment for another 3 weeks. We'll be driving back to Biella (a leisurely 7-8 hour drive) on the 19th July for our appointment to get fingerprinted and hopefully  our permit to stay.

2. Car - Difficulty rating = 7/10 you can't buy a car in Italy unless you are an Italian resident. You can't get a friend to buy a car for you because then the liability is on them or it opens them up to more scrutiny from the taxman....you ALSO can't buy a car unless you have a permit to stay. We don't have our permit to stay so we rent a car to get us to Umbria and gratefully use Simon and Fedi's car to get around Biella. Simon and Shane drive to Milan to see a few cars, and after one car seller not giving Shane a good vibe and another confirming that they can't sell the car without a permesso di soggiorno, we are left waiting for our permesso. Unfortunately there aren't that many automatic cars in Italy for sale that fit what we want, so I'm going to need to learn to drive a manual on the RHS of the road...more on that later.



3. School - Difficulty rating = 2/10 (so far only because we have gone to a private school for a meeting, otherwise we need an address so we can enroll at the local school for Charlie.) This school takes the kids skiing in Winter as an extracurricular activity, every Wednesday afternoon for 10 weeks for 100 Euro (for the whole program) - Shane is all over that one, sounds awesome.

4. Apartment - Difficulty rating = 4/10 (as long as you can understand what real estate agents are saying) We found a great apartment overlooking a park for 1200 euro a month (expensive for Italy but dirt cheap compared to Melbourne prices)...the woman who owns it is really eccentric - she collects exotic animals and has them at her country house, she also has a house in Sardegna that she spends a lot of time at and keeps tropical fish in her apartment in an open air pond...you've got to see it to believe it, she is cool. We go and look at a few other apartments, that are really cosy and a lot smaller and spend the whole week waiting to find out if the one we like is available, to find out yesterday that it isn't. We need to make a decision on this other apartment, pretty quickly. Downsides - it's not cosy, but it's light and very comfortable, and the oven doesn't work. Upsides - it's overlooking a park, there's undercover parking for our imaginary car, the nice lady lives upstairs, and there's a toy pig in the bedroom (boys' upside not mine)....not sure if we jump on it yet, I think the oven is a deal breaker....especially for a LOOOOONG WINTER.