Registering at City Hall

Living in Nederland seems to be a lot of work. We not only have to apply for residency with IND (Immigration and Naturalization), we also need to register at the municipality. The VISA we got was only valid for 6 months. We were expected to get our resident cards within that time. It's very different from the US where your VISA is everything. Getting the resident cards is a lengthy process. It's even longer for JK. Since he's holding a TW passport, he also needs to get inspected for TB (Tuberculosis). Basically taking some chest X-rays at some place. I, on the other hand a Canadian passport holder, despite that I was born in Taiwan, don't have to get TB checkup. Up till now, we finally received a letter saying that we will receive notifications from IND in a few weeks to inform  us to obtain our resident cards from some agency. (our health insurance company had been badgering us for this letter for a while.)

Getting registered was another totally different thing. We had to prepare for many documents and have them "legalized", such as marriage certificate, birth certificates (there's another story on that), etc. Luckily they only ask for Engels not Dutch copies for these documents. Also very luckily at the New York Dutch Consulate, the lady told us that we would need to get a more recent copy of our marriage certificate and get apostille by the California Notary public. We were able to get this all done while in the US. 

Getting registered means that we will receive BSN number (sim. SSN in the US). Only with BSN, we can apply for bank accounts, and with that apply for utility services (water, electricity, cable, internet). To register we must go to the Expat Center. It's like a service window for highly educated and professional experts. If you don't quality to be an expat you have to go get registered elsewhere. We didn't have our birth certificates when we went to the Expat Center, but we were told it was okay as long as we get them and bring them to the local city office within 3 months. Up till now, we were all told that they wanted birth certificates.

We received legalized birth certificates from JK's mom in a few days and we brought them to the city hall, but the city hall people told us it was not birth certificates that they want.With some lengthy checks and searches, we were told that they wanted our hu-ko (戶口). Yes, they said hu-ko, not household registry, hu-ko. Despite the fact that I'm Canadian and also the fact that in TW you lose your household registry if you leave TW for more than 2 years, they insisted that they wanted our hu-ko. Luckily both of us still have our household registry, but what about the people that don't? I can think of more than 5 people that were born in TW but aren't registered in TW on top of my head. This is just some very unreasonable rule. When we asked to see the exact regulation, we were told that it's for internal viewing only. We were still very confused with what exactly they want. At the time, the expert with registration in the city business mistook that we were from China (Thanks to the Republic of China title. Everyone is confused.) and that with Chinese there's a new rule that they only accept hu-ko and this new rule was only implemented this June. We received a call back from the city after they clarified with the "expert" that we're not from China that they still need our hu-ko. To top that, we received letters from the Expat center that they still need our legalized birth certificates.

Confused and baffled with what exactly they want, we asked many people: IND, the Netherlands Economic and Cultural office in TW, the TW Economics and Cultural office in Nederland and the municipality in TW. This is what we found: For TW, some city offices accept only birth certificates, some accept only hu-ko, and some accept both. With the new rule for China was that it was harder for them to get birth certificates, so they complained to the Dutch people to accept hu-ko instead. I can understand how in China it's hard to get official birth certificates or how easy it is to get fake ones. However, in China they also only accept single citizenship. Unlike in TW, the government allow for dual citizenships, and hence citizens can lose household registry if they leave the country for more than 2 years. Basically, it's unreasonable for the city people to ONLY accept hu-ko and not birth certificates for people born in TW. 

We went back to the city hall and tried to reason with them. This time we got a different representative. However, she again confused Republic of China as China and consulted the same "expert" for what they'll need. Once again, we were told that they require our hu-ko, but they were unable to provide us with any documentation stating exactly what they want. They also refused to follow the regulations we printed off their websites. Everything we found didn't say they only accept hu-ko. They also did not want to call and consult the people at the Netherlands Economics and Cultural office in Taipei. At least we weren't given a time constraint.

What we're gonna do now is to get English copies of our hu-ko. First showing them the scanned copies and making sure they will definitely accept them before getting them legalized.