We just received word yesterday from my Swiss employer that our visas were approved and are ready to pick up at the Swiss NYC embassy. In total, the visa approval took only about 5-6 weeks and was 100% painless, which is about half the time that we were told to expect it should take and not similar at all to the difficult stories I had heard from others who went through the process. I had been talking to a fellow coworker who had just moved from the US to Switzerland and she experienced a lot of delays with the process, so we decided to learn from the difficulties she went through by: 1) applying in person to the NYC Swiss embassy right after my employer applied locally with the Geneva authorities and 2) requesting a visa start date of September 1st, even though we likely will not travel until the week September 17th just in case there were delays in the process (expats have three months to enter the country once your visa is approved). Now that we have visa approval, we just send our passports to the NYC embassy so that they can put our visas in and send them back and then we can book our flights. Wow, this whole moving abroad thing is actually becoming more real (and scary and exciting!) by the day!
 |
| So I definitely need to brush up on my French, but from what I can interpret, this excerpt of the letter says that our visa application has been accepted! |
As a footnote, in case anyone is interested in the details - visa approval only allows you to enter the country and then once you enter you have to register for your work permit and then wait 1-2 weeks for it to arrive and THEN you can finally figure out what kind of permit you received (L or B). It is more likely that we will receive the more restrictive L permit but we won't know until we arrive. The L permit is more restrictive for Ryan to gain employment, but it is still better than not having any permit at all -- hence the whole "we got married" part :)
