an early morning visit to the ausländerbehörde yesterday. despite the best of intentions i arrived huffing and puffing at the office of my designated bureaucrat on the third floor of the ominous cuboid structure on friedrich-krause-ufer - a full five minutes after my scheduled appointment. having been subject to a teutonic brow beating before here for exactly this transgression, i flinched and cringed as i knocked and opened the office door. the guardians of the great german bureaucratic system have the strange (to this ausländer anyway) habit of working behind closed doors, expecting visitors to just knock once and then throw them open at the previously scheduled moment. coming from a land where you wait for someone to answer the door after knocking, i can never escape the feeling of being rude and intrusive. though that may be exactly the point, to throw the petitioner off balance at the very start of the process and have them realize what a meddling, annoying interruption to the proper flow of paperwork he or she really is! why the nerve!
despite those fears my entrance into the inner chamber was uneventful and, after handing over my thick wad of paperwork, all carefully collated and triple checked for completeness, i was given a number in the high three digits and told to go wait in one of the buildings many waiting rooms. i double checked which waiting room i was being sent into, since greater men than i have disappeared forever into the office's labyrinthine bowels when they wandered off in search of the wrong room number. once comfortably perched on the extruded plastic found wherever people are forced to wait upon their fates, i whipped out the readables and hunkered down for the long crawl. before i could delve into a report on the secret sex life of the pink iguana, however, my attention was drawn to a familiar drawl drifting through the waiting room. it came from a tall gentleman, who, as it turned out, was a pastor from illinois trailed by two young americans. i snickered inwardly as he, complaining of their more-than-an-hour-long wait, walked off to investigate the delay. moments later he returned, bloody and beaten by the merciless tongue lashing of one of the bureaucracy's cerberii.
i stared blankly into the iguana's beady black eyes as i eavesdropped on the pastor's conversation with another american sentenced to our purgatory, the latter an 'artist' who joylessly enumerated the advantages of living in berlin as the pastor attempted to steer him into a discussion on the fate of his eternal soul. the pink iguanas were looking ever sexier in their rocky sun-drenched garden of eden as the artist, the pastor and one of his young charges proceeded to exchange the dreary pleasantries that pass for conversation whenever americans run into each other outside the tsa's security perimeter. just as i though i could take no more and was thinking of obscenities to shout from atop my extruded plastic perch the bell rang. i looked up to see my high three digit number blinking yellow on the board, efficiently directing me to the appropriate room number. a few minutes later, after a bit of bowing and scraping and parting with a fistful of euros, the pink iguanas and i were cheerily wandering down friedrich-krause-ufer, away from the bureaucrats, the artist, the pastor and his charges - our sweaty fingers clutching our passport, inscribed with a residence/work permit now extended into the grey mists of 2011....
2011! So futuristic!
I'm worried that after my trip in May I won't want to leave...maybe they'll give me a visa just for the heck of it. I'm a Jew after all; Germany owes me a solid.
Posted by: erica | 11 March 2009 at 22:05