Well, I got up at 2am to see the blood moon rise over the mountains. It was very big but it wasn’t at all red. Very silvery. Back to bed quickly.
Cloudy when we woke up this morning and it felt rather nice. 26C and quite a bit of cloud. We had our police meeting at Kyrenia Police Station at 1055, so it was quite nice that it wasn’t too hot. We had to take all our paperwork to back up our applications for Temporary Residency Visas. We were a tad nervous that we would have missed something. There was quite a list to supply
We parked up in the police station carpark and went around the back of the offices to where the Immigration Office is. Usually you go inside, but at the moment they deal with your through an open window fitted with a plexiglas screen.
We handed in all our documents and waited. After about 5 minutes an officer came to the window and called to me, for clarification on one of the documents, then went away again. Another 5 minutes passed. Then another officer came to the window, beaming in smiles!!! “Welcome to Cyprus! Welcome to our island! Enjoy the sun! Enjoy the beaches! Drink a beer!” he exclaimed. “Here are your documents back” and returned our passports, kocan and the original of the co-habitation form.
Everything now goes to the government Immigration Department who check through again and determine whether, they will a. refuse us b. grant us 1 year temporary residency c. grant us 2 years temporary residency. We should get a text in a couple of days and can also keep checking online. The next step will be for the sms to prompt us to pay for our health insurance for either 1 or 2 years. It’s about £35 per year for cover for emergency and acute conditions. Very reasonable. After we pay for that, we will receive another sms invitation to pay for the actual visa. I forget how much it is, not much. And then we print it off and that’s that. So hopefully it will all continue to go smoothly and we can indeed “Enjoy the beach and drink a beer”!!!!!!! Can’t quite imagine Border Force taking a similarly cheery attitude but perhaps I misjudge….. LOL
Just to clarify if you haven’t read my previous blogs: we’re not applying for this to stay here indefinitely. We hope to be back in the UK by the end of June. We’re meant to be in Calpe, Spain in July for a couple of weeks. Our current tourist visa here gives us 90 days in any 180. So we could stay till early August without doing anything. However, getting a temporary residency gives us a lot of advantages. It means we can effectively totally forget about that sort of thing. We will be able to come for as long as we want, as often as we want. It gives us medical insurance here. And it gives us flexibility about what we do at the end of June. We could decide to stay on here. We could go to Spain from here, stay there 2 weeks and then come back to the UK that way. It depends on what the situation is with covid entry rules by then. It may well be that Spain is not a more advantageous previous destination for re-entering the UK than Cyprus….. We are hoping that some of our regular guests may decide to visit Cyprus this summer and if so, we will have prepared the house to a high level and it will be available.
We came home calling a a few yapis so that Bob could find some nuts he needed for the lounger bolts. We also called in at a local style supermarket to stock up on some fruit and veg. Oh, and we called at a couple of computer stores to see whether we could find a more powerful router than we currently have and preferably one that we can upload a vpn to. Verdicts out on that so far as we have to research the models that we saw in the shops.
This afternoon I got underway with some washing and Bob worked on the loungers. Had a chat to Deborah who is about to start the temporary residency pathway. Then we both fell asleep at about 3 and I woke up just after 5pm!
Bob cooked tonight – fish in a chinese marinade and some lovely green beans we bought this afternoon. I’d forgotten how much I like the ones here.