Germany does a lot of things really well but they truly excel in three areas: beer, the Christmas season and bureaucracy. While they can brew beer with the best of them and turn Christmas into a magical landscape of Christkindlmarkts, Germans have turned the creation of bureaucratic red-tape into an art form. Over my two months here I have gotten a crash course education in the implementation of bureaucracy into every aspect of German life and now I'd like to let you in on my own personal Odyssey.
One of the first things I had to do upon arrival was register at the Berlin district office in which I resided. Of course I had yet to find a place a to live (problem number 1) and hadn't opened the necessary German bank account (problem number 2). The catch 22 was that you can't open a bank account without being registered at a district office. Luckily after waiting in line for an hour the Treptow-Köpenick district office official took pity on this poor foreigner and allowed me to register.
Of course I moved a week later and had to re-register at the Charlottenburg district office which meant waiting in line for three and a half hours for Frau Schwarz to look at my form, stamp it twice and tell me I was free to go. Here, I must pause and explain the Germans´absolute obsession with stamps. Every official document (of which there are many) has at least one official stamp, if not two or three. Of course the document is not official without the various stamps and one has to run all over the place to get the appropriate stamps. It´s complete madness and often, for me, chaos as I run all over the place trying to figure out what I need and where I should go all the while trying to decipher the German bureaucratic vocabulary in which inevitably all the words are at least 20 letters long.
But I digress...After assembling an armada of necessary paperwork-proof of earnings, proof of employment, proof of health insurance, proof of district registration, a letter from my employer, special biometric pictures-I went to the Ausländerbehörde today to finally get my visa. I was lucky enough to have an appointment (made three months in advance out of necessity) but there were tons of people waiting in insanely long lines to plead their case to the German government in hopes of remaining in Germany. It truly felt like something out of a Kafka novel. There were waiting rooms all over the place, filled with people endlessly waiting for their number to be called. I walked down endless hall after endless hall in an effort to the exact office. It's a good thing I was twenty minutes early because it took that long to figure out where in this maze of a building I was supposed to be.
I thought I was home free once I found the office but no. Apparently the appointment that was made said I was applying for a student visa but the fact that I have a scholarship instead of a place at a German university was apparently a big problem. I had to wait outside the office for twenty minutes while the official made all sorts of phone calls and repeatedly sighed heavily. Apparently she got the go ahead to simply change my visa from student to scholarship because an hour and a half later I exited with-TA DA-my visa! It feels good to be legal and to be done with this part of the bureaucratic process. However I have a feeling that there will be more hoops for me to jump through at some point before I leave. I anticipate at least a couple more hours of waiting, sitting on hard plastic chairs in some public office waiting room. But when it comes down to it as long as they let me stay in Germany, I'll keeping jumping through their hoops!
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