Ikea, the MOM and Banking

Morning is the best time to call back to the States -- so we did.  Bassinghall is being shown regularly which is a good start to that process.  MagicJack is working great and we've done a couple of video conferences on Skype.

This morning we took the MRT (subway) to the western part of the island to check out Ikea.  We found a couple of sleeper chairs that will work well in a guest room.  These will also be what we will be sleeping on in the condo before the shipment with our bed arrives sometime in the first two weeks of July.  Additional selections and urchase will take place later, once we know where it will go, i.e. when we have settled on a place.

This afternoon we completed the paperwork for our various residency passes and went over to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM).  The system was very well organized with multiple electronic queues for the various service counters.  We waited for about 25 minutes before being called up.  Everything was in order, but unfortunately it was too late in the day to actually have the passes issued in our passports.  So we will go back tomorrow morning (and get another electronic queue ticket) to complete the process.

Getting these passes are critical step to being able to open up local bank accounts and obtain credit cards.  The latter is important because our US cards collect a 3% service charge on foreign currency transactions.  The former will enable setting up direct deposit, etc. when Paul starts work on Monday.  We did some web research and talked to one of Raye's new contacts here (arranged through Gordy Fuller) about bank selection.  We visited the one that seems to be the best fit and got the list of stuff to bring with us tomorrow to open an account.

Our realtor continues to work on our top choice and will show us one or more other units in the same building tomorrow.