The End

I have not updated this blog in almost three years. During this time we moved again, this time from Wrocław to Oborniki Śląskie, where we bought a house. It’s a nice little town, half an hour by train from Wrocław. The commute (I work in Wrocław) is quite acceptable, not too long but does give some time to catch up on books and lectures from eduPort. There are lots of old trees and a forest 400m from the house for long walks with our dog. I am planning to live here in the foreseeable future.

If you are interested in more details of our life, you can have a look at my wife’s blog.

The car story continues

It happened on October 30th. I got the car. It was in a relatively good shape, no scratches or other damage. The battery was dead, but it recovered after a jump start and 15 minutes idling. There were some minor problems – the front registration table and a pair of spare wipers were missing. The shipment from Foxborough, MA to Wroclaw, Poland took  3 months and cost $1660 plus 7056zl ($2520).

Health care in Poland

Poland has a one-payer system with the state insurance agency called ZUS. One needs to register with ZUS to get the benefits. If you are employed at a company with more than 20 employees this is done through your employer. If your company has less than 20 employees (which was my case) the procedure is a little bit more complicated. You have to prepare the following documents:

1. A picture like for passport
2. A copy of the National ID card
3. A copy of spouse’s National ID card
4. A copy of marriage certificate
5. Copies of children’s birth certificates
6. Filled in Forms E-22 and E-22a, can be downloaded from ZUS website

Copies 2-5 are stamped by the employer that has to see the originals  to compare. The employer issues one additional document confirming the employment. All this needs to be brought to an appriopriate ZUS office so that it can issue the insurance cards. This takes about two weeks. During that time one can register at a family doctor’s practice and use the services based on the employment document.

So far my experiences with health care in Poland have been positive. I got conjuctivitis (pink eye) one Monday morning. My wife called the doctor’s office at 8 a.m, got an appointment for me at 9. We had chosen a family practitioner in the neigborhood, walking distance from our apartment (we still don’t have our car). I was seen at 9:15, got a prescription and bought the medicines before 10. There was no copayment for the doctor visit, but I had to pay about 50% (I think) for the medicines.

School age children are automatically insured in Poland no matter if the parents have gone through the process described above. My daughter got an ear infection one Saturday before we had a doctor. My wife first tried to find a private doctor (outside of the ZUS system ), but it turned out that the correct thing to do was to call number 555 and find out where in town there is an ENT specialist on duty that day. She got an appointment in about two hours and that was it.

ZUS costs 9% of salary before tax. This is calculated for practically all payments from your employer, including, to my surprise, things like relocation cost reimbursement. With the income tax (no deduction for relocation costs as well) this means that if your employer promises you the reimbursement of the relocation costs it really means that you will get back about 60-70% of what you spend.

The container arrives

So, finally the container arrived, two weeks after the first estimate. It was first processed in Gdynia by the customs, but the real processing took place in Wrocław. We didn’t have to be personally  present at the customs office as it was handled by the DTA customs services agency  and  we just waited for the stuff to arrive at our apartment. It took about four hours in Wrocław to process the shipment, then some three hours to unload it. The only problem with the customs was the wording on our declaration where we stated that the things had been our property for more than six months. They wanted us to correct that so that we also state that we used the stuff for more than six months. My wife provided them with the corrected declaration the next day. I have a fealing that the customs officers just felt obliged to find some problem.

The moving company that served us on this side of the ocean was the Polish branch of ABC Ricard  Worldwide Moving. The truck that brought our container was unable to go through the gate of our apartment complex. I thought this might be a serious problem, but they just parked some 300 meters away and brought the boxes on a small van. An hour later another van with additional two people joined them to speed things up. There was no extra charge for this additional work. I can definitely say that I recommend this company.

I couple minor things went missing in the whole ordeal – my sons soccer ball,  two kids sledges and the table legs. While I didn’t care about the ball and the sledges, the missing table legs were quite annoying. Fortunately two days later the ABC Ricard branch manager called me that they found the legs and will be shipping them overnight. They had been put in some corner of one of the vans and forgotten. We should get them today.

Birth certificates

There are three things that need to be set up for kids born abroad and moving to Poland. The first thing is to assign them a registered address (zameldowanie). The second is to get the PESEL numbers for them which  are similar to the social security number in the US. Finally, they need Polish birth certificates.

Zameldowanie

Zameldowanie is needed for birth certificates or perhaps the PESEL numbers, which are assigned when the cerificates are issued. The crucial dependency here is the signature of the owner of the place whose address you assign to the person. This means that you either own some apartment or a house or someone else agrees to sign the documents. As being registered at an address gives certain rights to the registered person it is not possible to get such signature from a landlord if you rent an apartment. In my case my parents agreed to register me and my kids in their house. My wife is registered at the place where her mom lives. Normally also PESEL is needed to fill the application for zameldowanie, but after some meditation over the nature of circular dependencies in Polish regulations the clerk decided that PESEL is not necessary. The documents to prepare are:

1. National ID card of the parent. I had just received it at the same office.
2. The child’s birth certificate or passport. As I was told this is to prove that I am not trying to register a non-existent person. Or something like that.
3. The application with the signature of the owner of the place where you want the child to be registered.
4. Some document confirming the ownership. Since there is no one document like the car tittle in the US it is best to take a couple of documents in hope that the clerk will like one of them. My father had to drive back home to get the document that the clerk said would satisfy her.

Birth certificates and PESEL

After having the kids registered as living at my parents house I went to a different section of the (equivalent of) the Town Hall to apply for their Polish birth certificates. There was a special office for getting birth certificates for Polish kids born abroad, apparently this has became quite common. The clerk there dictated what I should write on the form. The cost was about 80 zł per certificate ($30). The documents she sked for were:

1. My ID card. This is needed practically for everything and not always can be substituted by passport.
2. American birth certificates with sworn translations to Polish. I had to leave both the originals and translations for the archive.
3. I don’t remember if the clerk asked for certificates of zameldowanie, but for sure the registered address needed to be written on the application form.

It takes about a week for the birth certificates to be issued. They can be picked by any person from immediate family, if the authorization for that person is written on the application form. In my case my father will take care of that. The PESEL number is assigned when the certificate is issued. Once my kids have their PESELs  I can start the process of getting the health  insurance for them.

assign them a registered address (zameldowanie

Container is about to arrive to port

The container with the household is to arrive to Gdynia during the weekend September 12-13. It is supposed to be processed in Gdynia  for transit and then transported to Wrocław where the real processing will take place. The documents I had to prepare were as follows:

1. A document certifying that I am registered at an address in Poland. This has to be a permanent address. Registering a permanent address may be a problem if you don’t own an apartment or a house in Poland.
2. A copy of the National ID card. I got it at the last moment on Friday. This required a trip from Wrocław to Lublin as the card has be applied for and received in person.
3. Documents that confirm that I was staying in the US for 12 months before moving to Poland. I provided electricity bills for last 12 months.
4. Documents that confirm my intent of permanently moving to Poland. I provided the work contract and the rental agreement. The customs also require having a permanent registered address, which should be in the city you intend to live. In my case it is not the same: I plan on living in Wrocław, while my permanent registered address is in Lublin. The requirement of having a permanent registered address makes no sense for people who are relocating and has no basis in regulations. The customs officials still require that though.  We will see if my address in Lublin is sufficient to avoid problems.
5. A list of stuff you want to claim as immigrant’s personal and household effects (mienie przesiedlencze). This should not be too sketchy or too detailed. I got an example from a friend that I followed.
6. The authorization for the customs agency handling the case to represent me.

One can find information on the web that any documents submitted to to the customs need to be translated by a sworn translator and any copies should be notarized. Translating the bills from point 3 above cost me about $200, but it turned out this was not needed. You may want to check before spending money.

The customs in Gdynia needed only scans of the documents, while the originals were provided to the agency in Wrocław.

The car problem

I got an e-mail from Krzysztof Jucewicz from “FIZ” Sp. z o. o. (the company that is the back end of usaautosystems.pl site and handles the car shipment) that told me that because of lack of a car to fill up the container  I need to pay for for ROR (Roll on -Roll off, outside of a container) transport which costs additional $400. Another solution he suggested is to use another company’s service that would bring the container to Chojnice (about 100 miles from Gdynia) and then pay 780 PLN ($280) for transporting it to Gdynia to the workshop to have it modified. This smells bad – the cost of ROR is typically less than half of the container for which I have paid. I am trying to hope that this is not the beginning of the standard moving fraud where the moving company demands more and more money using the fact that they have the stuff. In response to the news I suggested that I will pick the car in Chojnice and arrange the modifications by myself. This is entirely possible as I can drive the car on Massachussets registration in Poland for 30 days. The only problem is to get some insurance agent to come to the customs office to get the liability insurance which may be a little bit more difficult in Chojnice than in Gdynia. We will see his response.

Update 09/09/2009: I got the answer from Jucewicz that he is OK that I pick the car in Chojnice and pay smaller comission. So it looks that my fears were unfounded for now.

National ID card

So, I am in Poland now.

The first thing to do is to get the ID card. Poland does have a national ID card that is pretty much necessary to have if you live here. In particular it is necessary when dealing with customs once the container arrives to Gdynia. It takes up to three weeks to get it, so the big question is whether the stuff arrives before that or not.

To obtain the ID one has to show up in person in Urząd Miasta and submit the following documents:

1. Three pictures. The pictures are kind of special, “left half-profile”, different than what is required for passport. In Lublin there is a photo service located in Urząd Miasta. The set of four costs 28zl ($10). Don’t forget to shave in the morning, this picture stays with you for ten years.
2. The request form. This can be downloaded from the Urząd Miasta site of the city you want to live in.
3. The previous ID. In my case that was the booklet-style ID from communist times.
4. Marriage certificate may be needed unless you married in the city where you request the ID. It is better to have it just in case.
5. The receipt confirming you have paid 30 zl to the Urząd Miasta account.

So this is the official list. However, when I came to the office the clerk wanted to see my passport as well, so I had to go back home and come again. There is also some tricky part with “zameldowanie”. In Poland everybody has to register his/her address with the goverment. It is a really annoying remnant of communism. In my case I didn’t unregister my address when I left Poland in 1994, which technically is a misdemeanor, but it simplified things somewhat when I was applying for the ID. It is not that easy to get the address registered as the owner of the dwelling you live in has to sign the form. If you rent, forget about it. I don’t know what happens when you don’t have a registered address.

Renting an apartment in Poland

My wife went to Wroclaw to look for an apartment we can rent. I turned out that almost all advertisements we looked at were from real estate agencies. To actually look at the apartment one has to pay a fee of about $10-$20, which is strange, but acceptable. However if someone decides to rent it the fee for the agency is one month rent which in our case is about a thousand dollars. I think this is outrageous.

Shipping the household

I shipped the car on Tuesday. The usaautosystems.pl representative could not guarantee a specific date for pickup, so I gave them a range between Monday 03 and Friday 07. They called me on Monday that someone will show up on Tuesday around noon. I got another call at 11 on Tuesday and at 12 the guy knocked at the door. What was susprising was the he didn’t know where he should he take the car to exactly. He also didn’t know what documents he should take from me. After a call or two the destination was cleared up, and I was pretty sure that only the title was needed.  He didn’t give me any official receipt, just wrote a couple of words on a sheet of paper. I checked his driver’s license if it agreed with what he wrote and gave him the keys. He loaded the car on a trailer with two other ones that were already there. All that was in a typical Polish improvisation style – the guy was Polish. He was even planning to make a similar move later this year, so we chatted a little bit why one would want to do something like that. I felt less crazy after that.