what I've been doing, including ID

I've been traveling a lot this last month or so. I was in the UK for the chemoinformatics conference in Sheffield and in Lithuania for the EuroPython conference in Vilnius. And after the Sheffield conference I did some followup work, which I just finished today. They required a lot of preparation, which made it harder to keep up with this blog.

I think there's only so much writing I can do in a day, and those other things took up any slack.

I still don't have a place of my own to live. I'm staying at Debora's apartment on Kungsladugården. She went home to Argentina for a while and then to France. She comes back this Saturday, so I'll be cleaning up and moving back to the House of a Thousand Wows.

I've started looking again. As lac pointed out, looking for an apartment is a part-time job, and I just didn't have the time for it. I've also got to talk with the bank again. Previously they said my folkbokföring wasn't finished yet, and once that was done the woman I was talking with would need to talk with the higher ups because, well, I'm an unusual case. After all, I'm not employed by any Swedish company and have no credit history here in Sweden.

Two Fridays ago I took care of the last bits needed to get a Swedish ID card. It's a bit tricky because there's no way for me to get one from the government. They changed the laws at the beginning of the year, and to get one now requires I come with a Swedish relative or spouse. As my nearest Swedish relatives derive from about 4 generations back, well, that's rather hard. But it is possible to get a card from the bank, and I chose my bank in part because they said I could get one from them.

I took all the paperwork in, my passport, the photo for the ID, and Jacob (they still needed a Swede to vouch for who I am). I had everything but one, a "personbevis". That's proof that I've been registered to live in Sweden and have a personnummer. One dictionary translates it as "birth certificate" but that's not quite right. So I went to the tax office and asked for a personbevis, then back to the bank. Oops! Turned out I asked for the wrong personbevis. There's apparently many sorts, and the one I asked for was "bank owner" when I should have asked for "identification."

Getting the personbevis was simple. "I would like a personbevis." "Why?" "" "Here you go." "Thanks." The boring part was getting from the bank to the tax office and back. So I went back to the tax office and told the woman I asked for the wrong personbevis. So she printed out several different ones for me, just in case the bank wanted a few others. Very nice of her!

It's being processed and I should get it in a few more weeks.