to immigration for residency permits

Today was our trip to the immigration office to apply for our residency permits. Ildiko went with us and helped out with everything. She is a wonderful Hungarian woman from ICSB who helps us out with this sort of stuff. She got all the stuff we needed together and told us what we needed to get on our end. She did all the translation work and whatever else was necessary. I am so grateful for her!

Apparently there are a few immigration offices, in fact one that is not too far from us, but we went to one that was pretty far away because that was the one we used to HAVE to go to and so they know the school pretty well and everything that has to do with it as far as we're concerned.

Now I had never been before. The last time that Kevin had to go was right when Seth was born, so I was obviously in the hospital and unable to go. There was some paperwork there that I was supposed to have nearly a year ago when we moved here that I just got today. Oops! At least I have it now...

Anyway, I was expecting it to look like an official government building, like the Embassy or something. Not so. Here's what it looked like...


And by the way, I'm sure you can tell that there wasn't any air conditioning in that place! It was in the 90's outside but even hotter than that inside. We waited outside until we were called, and Seth had fun playing in what little grass there was.

Praise the Lord everything went smoothly. We have to go back in a month to actually get our residency permits, but it all went well. Of course paperwork had changed from last week to this week on the papers for Seth, but fortunately Ildiko was there to translate and do that for us. He has different paperwork because he was born here or something. I didn't quite understand it all.

After we got back this afternoon, we went on our weekly trip to the grocery store. Nothing spectacular, but I did take a picture of Kevin's parking job.


He is an official Hungarian driver for taking up two parking spaces!

Oh, and I learned something new about the rules of the road here. Monday traffic on the highways tends to be worse than other days and filled with more semi trucks because they aren't allowed to go across borders over the weekend if their truck weighs over a certain amount, which I was told basically meant that every semi has to stop at the border on Friday and can't continue on until Monday. Good to know.