Back to England

Well D went back to England this morning to pack up the rest of the house and put it into storage, leaving me here with the 3 girls. I'm not jealous of him being in the UK, but I am VERY jealous at the thought that he's going to be having proper bacon butties!

iPhone again

As I mentioned previously, one of the things I was looking forward to about moving to Sweden was that I was promised an iPhone when we got here. Decided to wait till the end of July when the new 3GS was released, but of course when I went on the day they had nowhere near enough stock in and I had to order one. They told me that it would be about a month, so you can imagine my delight when I got a phone call last night to say it had arrived already!
So off I trotted this morning down to the store in much excitement, only to find (after the shiny box was tantalisingly placed on the counter in front of me and we'd determined which tariff was appropriate) that actually I'm not allowed to have a contract phone until I've either been in the country for 8 months, or we have bought a house.
A very sad me left the Telia shop and wandered over to Carphone Warehouse to get a pay as you go sim card to put in my UK phone. Looks like I am doomed to only have basic phone functions for a while longer.

Trosa

We made our third visit to Trosa today and finally got to see it in the sun! Picnic, wander round the shops, ride on the little blue train and an icecream - what could be better?
Photos are here.

Taxinge Slott

Had a day out at Taxinge Slott today - better known as the 'Cake Castle' for reasons that are fairly obvious:


Don't know if it's just the novelty of living somewhere new, or the fact that there's so much right on our doorstep, but we do seem to be going out places a lot more since we came here than we ever did in England...
More photos can be found on flickr.

House sale latest

Just realised that I hadn't mentioned anything about the house sale since we accepted the offer - everything seems to be going through fine; D goes back to the UK next week to empty out the rest of the cupboards and the garage and put it all into storage. And of course go to the solicitors to do the last odds and ends of paperwork. So barring any last minute hiccups we should be completing either the 21st or 28th of this month.
All of which means that we can then seriously start looking for somewhere more permanent to live over here. But that's another post all of its own.

ID card application FAIL

Well after all the excitement of getting the personnummers through at the end of last week, today has been particularly frustrating.
When we first went to the Skatteverket, we were told that I had to go for my ID card first as D's passport was too old for them to accept it as identification (he hasn't got one with a chip in it), and then I would be able to verify his identity once I received my official Swedish ID card.
So last week we made the payment into the bank for the cards which has to be done in advance, and today I duly trotted back down to the office with my payment receipt, personnummer and passport, only to be told that my passport was also too old. For whatever reason, the cutoff date for passports being valid ID is September 06 and mine is just a couple of months older than that. I got a little bit snippy at this point.
All of which means we have to go and pay for D's card at the bank, wait a couple of days then go through the hassle of getting a Swedish person from D's company to go down to the office with him and verify his identity. And then once his ID card arrives, he can take me down there and verify my identity.
Either that or fork out a load of money to renew our passports. Bah.