driftingaway

Hello all,

We arrive in Abu Dhabi on 24th August, and our possessions are now in the hands of a relocation service.

If I give the signal to ship now our stuff will arrive a couple of weeks after us, which would obviously be great.

However, they're suggesting there would be high fees if our stuff arrives at dock and we haven't got our residence visas by then.

Any thoughts? Is there any kind of 'temporary visa' we could show customs instead, or will we simply be tourists until that bit of paper gets issued?

Wife's company has just said that they hope visas will be ready on our arrival but might not be - I presume she will still be allowed to work if not because her school term starts a week after arrival!

Thanks!

Bluelionesse

When your wife arrives at the airport she should pick up what used to be called a "pink slip", provided by her employer, which allows a 60 day visa to be stamped into her passport - she then has to have her medical and do all the paperwork stuff and 60 days is normally enough time to do it in. Once she has the residency, if she is sponsoring you, then you can start the medical and paperwork process.

When you arrive at the airport with her you will get a 30 day tourist visa and it is very likely that you will have to do a visa run to Oman to get a second 30 days.

Her visa could be processed super fast or it could take almost 60 days so what your shippers are saying is right, better wait til things processed before they send the stuff. We are out of Ramadan now so things will go faster than they would have last month, but August/September is peak recruitment time so I would expect the relevant government offices to be particularly busy.

driftingaway

Thanks very much - as I presumed, then, best to wait.