A year ago, today…

From January to June 2024 I was in New Zealand, on an international research stay at the University of Auckland. Here I am chronicling our experiences as a modern family moving abroad for 5 months by looking back at what happened exactly a year ago. Please scroll down for the most recent posts!

👉 we got serious about the preparation for our stay in New Zealand (15 Aug)
👉 we were starting to get a headache trying to figure out which visa we should apply for (28 Aug)
👉 we finally applied for a visa for New Zealand (16 Sept)
👉 we finally got the visas!! (24 Oct)
👉 we found a school for our oldest (phew!) (31 Oct)

🌏 A year ago, today… 👉 we got serious about the preparation for our stay in New Zealand (15 Aug)

Many of you know that I have spent almost half a year in New Zealand earlier this year. It was a fantastic experience to be on such a ‘short term assignment’, moving the family, settling into a new country and experiencing normal life there. Time has simply flown, and I was left very little time to make sense of all our experiences. And that’s what I’m going to do now, in this new series of posts entitled ‘A year ago, today’, in the hope that it might entertain, inform and inspire.

👉 So if you are interested in the experiences of a modern family moving abroad for almost 6 months, then make sure you keep an eye on this page!

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 The idea of going abroad as a family was something my partner and I had talked about many years ago already, but we decided to wait until the kids were a bit older and would be able to remember the stay. A few years ago, we already talked to our respective managers, announcing that we would want to go in the first half of 2024, when our oldest would be in the semi-final year of ‘folkeskolen’. We felt that would be the best fit since there would be no exams yet. And happily, the mother of the kids was also very supportive of our plans, enabling us to bring them along for half of our stay.

📚 So this time last year, the basics were all set – we had decided on New Zealand because it was an English speaking country, which would make it easy for the kids to settle in at school, and it was always my dream to go there (again). Our specific destination was Auckland, where I would be visiting professor Snejina Michailova, whom I had met a few years earlier at a conference. We are both very interested in the role of host country nationals (or locals) in international business and had started working together. So I couldn’t wait to spend almost six months in New Zealand!

✍ While we had already done some preparations, like figuring out how long exactly we wanted to be in New Zealand and finding a house, we now needed to get serious about our preparations. The main thing I was getting nervous about was our visa. We were in the process of renewing the passports of the kids while still figuring out which exact visa we were supposed to apply for. But I didn’t worry too much – after all, the official had told us that there would be plenty of time if we submitted in September!


🌏 A year ago, today… 👉 we were starting to get a headache trying to figure out which visa we should apply for (28 Aug)

A visa for New Zealand was one of the most important items on our to do list, and it turned out to be much more complicated than we thought. Earlier in the year, we had selected two potential visa options, either the Visitor Visa or the Specific Work Visa, but we kept returning to that one key question that we didn’t quite know the answer to: would we be working in New Zealand or not?

💻⌨ 📞 On the one hand, the answer was ‘yes’. We were not going on holiday; we would be working remotely for our Danish jobs in New Zealand, and I would be visiting the University of Auckland. On the other hand, the answer was ‘no’ since we would not get any income in New Zealand. At one point in the spring, we did find a page on the official website that said that remote working was allowed on a Visitor Visa, so that sounded like the best solution. Unfortunately, that page was soon afterwards removed again, and, when we called, the immigration officer was not able to tell us whether it was allowed or not.

📘 📚 📖 In the summer, we also realized we were getting in trouble with the school for the oldest. We had approached the in-zone high school, and heard they were full and did not have space for another international student. When we then approached schools outside of the zone we would be living in, they were telling us that, if we apply for a work visa, the children would be considered domestic students, and the in-zone school would have to take us. The additional advantage would be that school would be free and we wouldn’t have to pay the international school fees (this also makes you appreciate free schooling in Denmark!). So then the Specific Purpose Work Visa would be the right way to go.

🤷‍♀️🙏 And I was just thinking – it would be so helpful if we could connect with another academic in the same situation. There must be other academic visitors to New Zealand who could shed some light on what visa they applied for. Unfortunately, the university could not help with this, and also my posts in some expat groups on Facebook did not reach anyone. So we were really wondering what to do…


🌏 A year ago, today… 👉 we finally applied for a visa for New Zealand (16 Sept)

It took a while, but we got there in the end. What really helped us was that our future landlord put us in touch with the current occupants of the house we were going to rent in Auckland. She was also an academic visiting the University of Auckland and brought her partner and children. So we decided to copy their approach, and go for a Specific Purpose Work Visa.

📧 Finally, we had everything prepared for the submission of the visa application. I was applying for a Specific Purpose Work Visa,  and my partner and the children would go for visas dependent on mine. I had an invitation letter of the University of Auckland, and we had prepared a signed letter from the mother of the kids giving permission to bring the children to New Zealand.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 The fact that I was planning on bringing my bonus-children with us presented an unexpected issue when I was filling out the visa application for them and was asked whether I was their ‘mother’ or ‘adoptive mother’. No third option of ‘stepmother’ (or bonus mother – the term I prefer)… I had been wondering how Immigration New Zealand defined a ‘family’, which was not very clear from their website. In the end, we decided to go for ‘adoptive mother’ and included a letter to explain our specific family situation.

And then we crossed our fingers!!


🌏 A year ago, today… 👉 we finally got the visas!! (24 Oct)

The past month was quite nerve-wracking because the visa process took much longer than expected. The immigration officer had told us in April that there would be plenty of time if we submitted in September, but I guess that’s not necessarily the case when you are a modern family. We were an unmarried couple of two different nationalities with two kids who were not the biological kids of the main applicant, so I guess that set off some alarms in the immigration office.

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 So we spent a lot of time proving the relationship between me and my partner, and between me and my bonuskids, who live with us 50% of the time. It was a lot of work but also fun to, for example, look up pictures that went back all the way to the start of our relationship.

✍ We also needed to officially document the mother’s permission to take the kids to New Zealand, so we had to go to a notary. That stressed me out a bit, because the notary in our town only had time early December, and that would be way too long to wait, since we planned to fly to New Zealand in January. Happily, we then found a notary in Copenhagen where you could just come by and wait until it’s your turn. Phew.

🙏  In the end, the visas all came through and we bought all our flight tickets. Next step would be to arrange the schools, which would turn out to be the real headache…


🌏 A year ago, today… 👉 we found a school for our oldest (phew!) (31 Oct)

Now that we had the visas, it was time to arrange the schools for the children before the summer holidays would start in New Zealand (which is around mid December). We had already been in touch with the local schools, and the intermediate school for our youngest was soon confirmed. One thing off our list 😅.

🙅‍♂️ The local high school where our oldest should go, however, had said ‘no’ already in summer because we would be there only for a short time and their school was full. Once we got our visa, we tried once more, but they still said ‘no’. We did approach the Ministry of Education at that point – we found some information on their website that they are able to intervene if necessary – but we never heard back on our e-mails.

🙆‍♂️ So we decided to go further afield to a school that had responded positively to us – there is also value in the feeling that he would be welcome at the school – and we soon got the confirmation that he would be able to enroll as international student in the school. Our son would have to take the school bus and we would have to pay international student fees but we were happy to do that to make sure he could go to school while we were in New Zealand. So we breathed a sigh of relief!

🙋‍♂️ We were also very curious how our son would find this school since it was wildly different from his current school. Where in Denmark he was in a very small school with only 20 students in his year, the school in New Zealand would be about 25 times bigger, and there would only be boys (2700 of them). And a similar sized girl’s school next door. That would be quite the experience for him!

😃 So we were very happy to have found a school and that all was now in order on that score – or so we thought…