A Guide on How to Make the Whole Process Less Stressful
The NIE, an akronym everyone who stays in Spain for a longer period of time, should know. The Número de Identidad de Extranjero is used for the identification of foreigners that would like to live and work in Spain. When you‘re living in Spain you quickly realize how important it is to own this number to do pretty much anything bureaucratic like opening a Spanish bank account, filling in questionnaires at the doctor‘s office or even for buying your monthly metro ticket – they‘re asking for the NIE all the time.
I had heard a lot of things about the application process – some of my friends had to wait in line in front of the offices for hours because stations took only 10 applicants a day. That‘s why I was really happy that Katharina, my contact person at Sí-internships, offered to make an appointment for me online. That meant that I knew exactly when I had to be there and that didn‘t have to deal with the uncertainty of not knowing whether I‘d get the number that day which made me approach the whole NIE thing way more relaxed.
I had to wait for my appointment for about 6 weeks – and then the day came: Once I arrived there everything went quite fast (at least I thought so in the beginning). At first, I was assigned a number and, after a short while, one of the employees called me to her desk. I carried all my documents with me and thought I’d be done within a couple of minutes. But then the process got a little messy as I had to print out more documents to be able to pay the 10€ administration fee at the bank. After the struggle got real for a bit everything worked out fine in the end and I held the longed-for paper with my own NIE on it in my hands!
Although it was kind of a stressful experience I was also kind of proud of myself because I was able to communicate in Spanish with everyone involved. All in all, I was so thankful for the service of Sí-internships as they helped me a lot by guiding me through the preparation of all documents and by explaining the whole process to me.
