FollowIt’s a nice bright morning, and I popped up to the village for a coffee and some shopping while Val did her German class. By the time I got home the postman had delivered an ominously thick envelope from the immigration office in Bern.
Sure enough, it contained a sheaf of forms to fill in. We have learned that it pays to deal with this stuff as quickly as possible, so our plans for the afternoon were abandoned. We spent an hour getting all the necessary information together, and set off for the council office in Lauterbrunnen, where we handed everything over. The process is entirely paper-based, so everything has to be laboriously photocopied and sent back to Bern. At no point was a computer employed. You might think, in a country where more than a quarter of the population are immigrants, that the authorities would make the process a bit slicker. I couldn’t possibly comment.