Life in Linköping

A nice little article on the BBC today about water sellers in Nigeria.

It's odd to think back to 18 months ago, when I could turn on the tap and never be sure whether water would come out of it. That and the amount of time I spent boiling and filtering my drinking water. I was lucky, my house had a piped water supply and it actually worked much of the time.

By the way, this is where the title of this post comes from (or try here or here).

My personnummer arrived in the post today, so I'm finally a real person in the eyes of most Swedish organisations. Now I just have to go to the police station with one of the bits of paper to get my ID card.

Now that I have a number I could finally register my Telia pay-as-you-go account, which allows me to get data and MMS enabled. The picture in the post was MMSed to my My Opera account, it's the view from my living room window. The view from the other side of the apartment is a bit nicer.

One of the fun things about moving to a new country is how the bureacracy is different but still oddly the same.

There are always at least a few hoops to jump through. For Sweden I spent a while trying to work out what the hoops are:

• Get a 'right of residence' — which is actually a document
  
• Use this to get the magic personnummer — used by the government and many businesses to refer to you - from the tax office
  
• Use the personnummer to open a bank account, so I can get paid
  

As it turns out I didn't actually need to wait for the 'right of residence' to start getting my personnummer, but it will take a week or two before I get one.

Somebody at Swedbank originally told me I needed a personnummer before I could open a bank account, but that wasn't strictly accurate. Today they opened a bank account for me with only my passport and a letter from Opera saying I work there.

Now I have to wait and see what surprises the Migrationsverket and Skatteverket have in store for me...