Matias had a task at school today, where the students were asked to design their dream castle. Matias based his castle on Castle Rising, a medieval castle we visited a number of time while living in England. He added some South African influence to the design, and his castle comes complete with barbed wire – for extra protection, you know.
Heikki and I went to the solicitors today, to sign papers on our new house. The transfer won’t take place until 1st of August, but we need to do these things ahead of time, especially so since we’re going to be away from here for so many weeks.
There were many papers to sign and initial (a South African trend is that you need to put your initials on each page and each modification, so not just at the end of the document) and thus the signing took us well over an hour.
We kind of knew this before hand, but didn’t really take it in before: to be able to remove the house-money from South Africa, all the money needs to come from abroad AND we must declare this at the time we transfer the money here. We did tell the bank that the money we transferred here a couple of weeks ago is for the purchase of a house. Now we must make sure that we pay the mortgage off with foreign money, too! If we use our salaries to pay for the mortgage, we can’t ever take that money out from the country - even if we move out of here permanently ourselves. Yet, thousands of foreigners are buying houses here all the time, and that’s partly the reason for the houses being ridiculously priced compared to the local salaries.
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