Paper Wars

Did you know that every time you move in Germany, you have to register with the Bürgeramt? Apparently it's so the government can keep track of you and make sure that you are paying your taxes. Within two weeks of moving, you must schedule an appointment (no walk-ins) and give proof of your new address. Not too difficult, honestly. I really didn't think it would be a big deal.

Until Adrian and I went to the website and discovered that there were no more appointments available for the next two months! After calling a help line, we found out that the only thing we could do was to constantly refresh the webpage in the hopes that an appointment magically appeared. After two hours of anxiously checking the calendar, one finally opened up! We immediately snagged it and then tried to complete the necessary paperwork. Unfortunately my knowledge of the German language consists of counting to eleven and asking where the toilets are, and although Adrian speaks German, he is not as familiar with the complicated and highly specific language of bureaucracy. Thanks to Google Translate, we finally discovered that we could request an English version of the document when we arrived for our appointment.

We arrived at the Bürgeramt at our designated appointment time and waited for our number to be displayed on the television screen at the front of the room. When our number appeared, we passed through a door and made our way into the office section. An efficient, but friendly, woman chatted with Adrian about our situation, asked to see a copy of our lease, and provided us with a stamped form that apparently approved our registration. As we were leaving, she asked Adrian if we had registered with the immigration offices yet. Confused, Adrian told her we hadn't, since we were told our visas (which obtaining was a whole different bureaucratic nightmare!) were sufficient. She then gave us the address of the immigration offices and said that we would need to call and make an appointment in order to verify that we didn't need to make an appointment to register with them.

We left the Bürgeramt offices, crossing one bureaucratic task off of our list only to add another, and headed to a bank around the block to open up a German bank account. Opening up an account in the States is not terribly difficult - you walk in and someone pulls you over to a little side office and you immediately open an account. That is not the way in Germany. We spoke with a lady at the bank, who told us we would need to make an appointment for the following morning in order to open an account, which we did. While we were waiting for our paperwork to go through, the lady at the bank taught us the German term for "red tape" -- "paper war".

So instead of winning the paper war in a single day, we completed two tasks across the span of two days and added another future appointment to our list. But, we are now registered and have a bank account. We may have won this paper battle, but we have yet to win the paper war.

And... we're back!

Hello again!

The past couple months have been a bit of a blur. Not in the normal way of “wow - doesn’t time go by so quickly!”, but an actual blur. When I was accepted into a graduate program at OSU and Adrian got a job at Denison University (his dream job!), we thought we knew how the next couple years would go -- I would go to school and become a teacher, he would become a professor, we would find a little house in Columbus, get a puppy, and eventually start a family. But then, Adrian got an opportunity to live in Berlin for a year and it threw a monkeywrench into our carefully constructed plans. So instead of any of those things, we decided to extend our twenties by a year and move to Germany!

And so we packed up our little house in Clintonville, Adrian finished and defended his thesis, and we hopped on a plane. I’m currently sitting in our new flat overlooking the banks of the Spree drinking a mug of tea, and looking forward to the adventures that are sure to come in the next year.

Stealing from my own Instagram...

I am going to try and do a significantly better job of documenting our life here than I did in London, so stay tuned! Hopefully Berlin Mary is a bit more disciplined than London Mary...