On official paperwork

I tried to be as thorough as possible on my visa application but still had to do some extra steps after submitting, waiting for several weeks without hearing anything and finally calling to check on its status. I found that just politely agreeing to everything they asked was the best approach. They could be quite gruff- seeming to someone who's used to friendly American customer service, but they truly are just efficient and don't have time for anybody's b.s.

The most important thing if you're applying for a student visa, it seems, is that you can prove you can afford to live there without working. I had to kind of flub this one a little bit because my parents tried submitting their bank information and a statement saying they were going to support me, but apparently they don't make enough for the Swiss Embassy to consider them capable of supporting me. Switzerland requires a bank account in the visa applicant's name with a minimum balance of $20,000. After being here a while now I sort of understand this--they like to keep jobs in Switzerland for the Swiss as much as possible. Also, it's just damn expensive to live here. So my Dad transferred the money in, I took a screen shot and submitted it to the Embassy, and once the visa was approved he took the money back out. Shh...don't tell anybody.

The other thing that we found you kind of have to fake some stuff to get is the residence permit. To apply for an apartment, you need to have a residence permit so you can tell them what class of visa you have. But to register in Basel-Stadt and obtain this residence permit, you must have a valid address in Basel where you can receive mail. We really tried hard to get around this without lying, but found it impossible. Juna had a fellow music student who allowed us to use his address (which meant he also had to draw up a fake contract and sign it saying we were subletting from him) and we received mail there for, to be truthful, way too long. 

There was a 50 franc fee for registering, a fee just for moving to Basel (our German isn't good enough to figure out exactly what that bill for 200 something francs we got in the mail said), a fee of about 20 francs for de-registering (our current place is now in Basel-Land, a different canton) and yet another fee for 100 something francs for moving to our new canton, Binningen.

The lesson here is that in Switzerland there's a fee for absolutely everything (public toilets, tap water in restaurants, trash labels, TV tax), but as long as you pay the fee, you won't have many problems besides being broke.