Presenting ourselves

As it turns out if you plan on living in Italy for an extended period of time you must do "the presentation."  This requires that you present yourself at your local police station, they fill out by hand some legally binding documents, throw some stamps on them and call you official.

Technically if you are out walking on the street you can be stopped at any time and asked to see your documentation.  This never happens though.

So we show up at our allotted time at 9:30am.  Fortunately we have Elissabetta, who is an Italian who works at Josephs law firm to help us.  She is in charge of making sure we get all of our paperwork in order so that everything is legal.  She meets us there.  She then proceeds to have what seems like a longer than should be conversation with the police man guarding the door, who apparently doesn't understand what is going on and doesn't want to let us in.

After several times going back and forth, he finally gives in and gives us some directions to where to go.  Then we sort of wander down the hall up the elevator and down another all until we find the correct room.  That has several men at desks sitting around who as far as I can tell are there for this very purpose.  Why the downstairs guys didn't seem to know these fellows existed is beyond me.  So we sit down, the friendly man pulls out our forms and proceeds to fill them in by hand.

Filling in official paperwork by hand is a continuing theme here, so you can look out for it in the future.

Luckily at this point everything went very smoothly and quickly.  We were out of there in about 10 minutes, and officially registered.

Funny enough Joseph was already in the system from when he was a missionary and the man asked him about it.  Based on the way things went down I was very surprised that they had a system sophisticated enough to track someone over time.