In which I rant about my Visa

The Cowl is well and truly finished now and I've been happily wearing it to work everyday.  It has turned bitterly cold in Berlin.  Well, not bitterly, but cold.  Cold and wet and a few times this week I've thought that perhaps I wouldn't ride my bike to work, but I have.  Mostly anyway.  I've made a semi-deal with myself that if I can ride my bike more-or-less everyday until I go on holidays in mid-November then I've "done well" and can ride the tram to work without feeling guilty when I get back in December.  But I'm getting slightly off topic.  The point is that the Cowl is finished and I've been meaning to take a photo of me wearing it so I can post some photos this week, but the self-portraits just aren't cutting it this week and Matthias is away.

How's your week been?

I was asked recently what bothered me about German efficiency.  The honest answer would be nothing really.  It's one of the nice things about living here.  But given that the comment was essentially an open license to whine, allow me to tell you about my Visa situation.  The German Auslanderbehorde (immigration office) superficially pretends to be another cog in the efficient German beaurocratic wheel.  Yet in reality it is one of the most unfriendly governmental departments I've ever had to deal with.  The Berlin headquarters are huge.  In what one would think is the interests of communication, it assigns countries to particular departments according to the countries official language.  Australia get bundled up with the US, New Zealand and several dozen African countries.  Turkey gets its own department.  There's another department for the former soviet states etc etc. The joke is that noone who works in the respective 'language' departments speaks that language.  Everything is in German, which would be fine except that really it's not.  At one point while waiting for my Visa in January, Matthias translated a sign which explained to everyone (in German) that if they needed a translator they should bring one along as there was no in-house translation service.  It would be funny if it wasn't so tragically unfriendly and, perhaps, a mirror reflecting how Germans really feel about immigration.  Actually it would probably be funny if it wasn't happening to me.

The Auslandebehorder also has no telephone number. And it's website clearly requests that you don't show up "unannounced" but receive a writen notification of your appointment time in the mail.  Rather helpfully it provides a fax number and an email address so that you can request an appointment.  Four emails and two faxes later I'm still waiting for a response.  In the end, I know that I'm going to have to turn up and wait in an endless line to be eventually told that I should have emailed them for an appointment and the next appointment time is two months away, at which point my Visa will have expired and I'll have to start the whole process all over again.  So I'm frustrated and a little sick of German xenophobia.  Incidentally, many Germans don't actually consider me an immigrant which apparently makes them feel comfortable about mouthing-off  while I'm in the room about how immigrants are really only interested in  sponging off the government.  When I point out that I'm an immigrant who doesn't speak German very well and for all intensive purposes hasn't really assimilated into German culture yet, they look at me as if I'm stupid and say something along the lines of "we mean the other immigrants". Yeah, right.

But enough of my rant.  I'm feeling much better now that I've vented.  Thanks for asking.  Oh, and have a lovely weekend.  I'm planning on celebrating the Austrian National Holiday with Goulash and Austrian white wine imported for the occasion. Yep, Matthias and I are the "good" immigrants. Definitely.

The pictures are completely unrelated.  I was mucking about with exposure and focus on my way home from 'Eat, Pray, Love' at Potsdamer Platz.  'Eat, Pray, Love' is one of the worst movies I've seen in a long time.