The Saustrup Family Blog

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. This was the case in Shakespeare’s Hamlet but it also applies to the immigration office. After waiting almost eight weeks for a generic visa questionnaire, it finally arrived on Friday. It was returned Saturday morning, complete with 20+ pages attached, documenting our relationship.

The questionnaire itself was 4 pages, will questions like “Is the applicant your wife?” closely followed by “Is the applicant your fiancée or girlfriend?” They also wanted the exact dates of our previous meetings, and wanted to know if I could cover any expenses including the return ticket. I already informed them of this on the initial invitation - which is required to get a visa - but apparently that wasn’t enough. They wanted evidence of our relationship.
Continue Reading »

We’re hoping to get married on 3. May, but there are many pieces to this puzzle. Many dates that depend on each other, including Nina’s arrival in Denmark. Her visa hasn’t been issued yet, so we’re getting rather frustrated with the immigration office.

I think the original waiting period was initially around six weeks when she filed the application on 1. February, and this Friday we’ve been waiting for seven weeks. I’ve been calling them every Friday and all they can tell me is that they haven’t processed anything yet, and they need to send me a form which I have to fill out and return. This form can’t be sent from the immigration office, until their in-pile has reached a level where they feel they can process new forms. They can’t say anything about this level or when they might reach it. The only information I was able to squeeze form them last Friday was “two weeks is probably a little naïve” and “the waiting period is now 8-9 weeks”. Great.

Continue Reading »

We want to do a wedding video when we’re getting married, so we considered various solutions for this. Still photos seem more important, but a nice video would be sweet too. A professional video photographer will easily set you back at least 2000 euros, and on top of this some of them have the nerve to charge at least 20 euros per burned dvd.

I can get my hands on a couple of video cameras - including a rather nice professional Sony HD camera - so at the moment we’re counting on good friends to help us out with the filming. With 2-3 cameras rolling during the ceremony and during the party, I’m pretty sure we can at least get enough usable raw footage to make a neat montage!

Sadly these guys are on another continent, so hiring them is not an option:

I bought a wedding dress three days ago. Whoa, it feels so incredibly weird. And nice, at the same time. You know, I am not a “dress girl” at all. I can’t remember when was the last time I wore a dress or a skirt. So the whole idea of buying a white (!!) beautiful (!!) dress (!!) was a bit scary.

I was postponing my visits to wedding salons. I was telling myself I will have enough time in Denmark for this. The truth is, I was a bit worried that I would not look nice in a dress, at all, since my physics are far from that of a photo model. Anyways. I gathered my courage and went to the salon last Monday. The second dress I tried on was “mine”. I didn’t even look like a merengue! So I paid for the dress and left it in the salon for fitting. Probably it was the fastest wedding dress shopping in the history. First shop visited, second dress tried.

Continue Reading »

I believe that at some point, everybody goes looking for their roots. For me, this happened when I found my family name in America. Some people practice old school genealogy and go through rows and rows of dusty books with public records. Lazy people google.

My mother’s name is Sørensen, a very common Danish surname. Finding any people with this surname is not a complicated task - the phone book has a rather large section with them. Finding anyone that I’m actually related to, is somewhat more complicated and requires actual work, and let’s face it - I’m a bit lazy. My own surname comes from my father’s side, and is a lot more interesting in this context. Where there are over 79.000 hits for Sørensen in the Danish online phone books, there are only 49 for Saustrup.

Continue Reading »

When some people talk about long distance relationships, they usually mean something like a couple of hundred kilometers. Maybe even miles.  Traveling back and forth between Århus, Denmark and Saint Petersburg, Russia puts that in perspective. It’s more than 10 hours from door to door, and it can be rough.

It was a lovely couple of weeks though and rest assured - we’re still very happy and we’re still working towards a life together under the same roof. I travelled light when I went there, so on my way home I had room to spare. I brought home some of Nina’s things, so we had a little less stuff to drag to Denmark once she gets her residence permit. It might sound silly, but having some of her clothes in my closet and her shoes in my hallway feels nice.

Really nice.