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All Aboard! Sending our worldly possessions across the Pacific to New Zealand!

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Kia Ora and Howdy! Its Madison here with Queen of the South Co . Here to bring you some tips and personal insight on immigrating and living in Aotearoa New Zealand. (As always, I am not a licensed immigration adviser, so this is just my personal experience, not official advice ;) Today I'll share my experience on loading shipping container full of our stuff and sending it across the pacific ocean.   If you're just dying to know every little detail of the ordeal, I'll be updating the post soon with more information. But for now, here's the Rodeo-Roundup of the specifications, costs and timeline: Specifications : Company: U-Haul Service: U-Box Internal Dimensions in inches: 95 long x 56 width x 83.5 height Capacity: 257 cubic feet Weight: Up to 2,000 lbs. (Ours was about 1,600 lbs) Timeline : Door to door - Just under 3 months (not including the time we took to pack it) Dropped of at our house in Austin Texas on April 4th, 2023 for us to start packing Picked up from our ...
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Moving to NZ announcement!

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 Kia Ora & Howdy y'all. It's Madison with Queen of the South Co . Today I want to share how I announced to my family that we were finally moving to New Zealand!  I sent this video of me playing Lord of the Rings on the harp to all my immediate family with the caption: "I've been working on the part at the end for a really long time."  They of course all thought I just meant some technical harp-maneuver, but it was my cheeky way of making them watch the last bit. This is the main Lord of the Rings theme, which holds so much weight and meaning for me and our journey to New Zealand. Don't worry - this wasn't a cold-turkey announcement! They knew since the beginning that we were trying to immigrate to NZ, but because of the borders being shut for years, I'm sure it seemed like it wouldn't ever really happen. I know I felt that way at times.  For us, getting a job offer was the golden ticket in.  So after hundreds of "no's", over a tho...
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Visa Photos - Immigration New Zealand

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Kia Ora & Howdy! It’s Madison with Queen of the South Co . Today I’d like to talk about a few tips and guidelines for your Immigration New Zealand Visa photo!  (as always, here's the disclaimer that I am not an immigration expert and am therefore not offering official advice :)  ***Scroll to the bottom for the TLDR! (too long didn't read) We’ve been living in New Zealand for over 2 years now, so it’s that time! We’re now eligible to submit our Permanent Resident Visa application! This visa is the last stop on the road to citizenship. One pathway of which is being a resident for 5 years (hot tip - you can submit the citizenship application in your 5th year at day 240 instead of 360!). But, regardless of which visa you're submitting, you'll need a visa photo.  If you're submitting physical, paper applications, you'll need to print the photos out. If you do print them, they need to be 35 mm wide x 45 mm high. However, we’ve done all of our applications digitall...
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