Legal Documents

The bureaucratic system in the Netherlands is quite efficient. They asked for a lot of documents (including apostilles for everything, which was a huge headache), but they were pretty fast on their end. We got our residency cards on Tuesday, so we are legal to stay here for the next year!

We did have a moment of panic though.

Most of the family had brand new passports when we made the trip. Mine was getting towards the end of its life. Set to expire in June 2023. I thought about renewing it in the US, but passport application times in the US are ridiculous. Even expedited they can be 2+ months. I had some international travel scheduled in July, so I couldn’t risk it.

So, I knew I’d have to renew my passport while in the Netherlands.

Luckily, there is a pilot program for Americans to renew their passports with the embassy in the Netherlands, and it’s only 3-5 weeks rather than the 5-12 in the US.

Looking at my calendar and planned international travel over the next year (there’s a lot of it), the best possible time to renew my passport was early October. However, we didn’t have residency cards yet. But, the person at the expat center said that our residency applications were complete and we’d get the residency cards in the mail.

So, I decided to renew my passport.

I filled out the paperwork and went into a DHL location to send it via certified mail to the embassy. The employee explained that they were only a package dropoff point. My item was more like a letter in size, so they couldn’t take it. The employee recommended I go to the post office. She directed me to one, but it was actually closed.

So, I googled another one and went there. It was actually just a grocery store that sold stamps, not a real Post Office. As such, they couldn’t take a certified package, but they could weigh my envelope and put stamps on it. Then they said I could drop it in the mailbox in the parking lot.

At this point I had been wandering around downtown Tilburg for over an hour and decided to try it.

I stuck my passport and the renewal forms in an envelope, sealed it, addressed it, put on stamps, and dropped it in a random mailbox in a grocery store parking lot.

I was now in a foreign country with no passport and no residency permit. I was just a little bit nervous. What if my passport didn’t make it. Sometimes mail gets lost/stolen after all. What if war broke out before I got my new passport back? Would I send the rest of my family home? Or could Linda get me into the embassy? Ok, just don’t think about it too much. It will all be fine …

Yesterday my new passport came in the mail. 2.5 weeks after I sent it in (compared to the 7+ weeks for each of my kids’ passport applications in the US).

So, I have both my passport and my residency cards. I’m legal again. Just in time for us to go to France for the kids’ school break next week.