Lohnsteuerkarte

OK, so far things have gone reasonably smoothly with paperwork associated with living in Germany, at least from the German side, for the record US-NIH gave me a lot of trouble however. Today I went to the Rathaus (town hall) to register my wife so I can get a new tax card (Lohnsteuerkarte) with a lower tax bracket. I took a registered copy of our marriage certificate, our passports and our Anmeldung (registering our residence). The woman at the Rathaus said that I need a translation of the marriage certificate first and that I get this from the Amtsgericht (courthouse). I walked to the courthouse, asking directions along the way in German (I was a bit proud of this). Everyone there was very polite, but first of all it took a long time to find someone to understand what I wanted, then a woman explained to me that the courthouse does not do translations and she didn't know why the Rathaus sent me there. Apparently translators are private and I have to find one and pay them to "officially" translate the marriage certificate. Then she got someone else to come talk to me, who spoke English very well, and he explained that the translator needs a certificate to show that the marriage certificate is accurately translated and a further certificate for the certificate (no kidding) that the first certificate and the original marriage certificate are not fake. (Why you can't make a fake certificate of the certificate I'm not sure.) Then, if only he had stopped there, he went on to say that unlike in my situation, some "isles in the Atlantic that are part of America have a fire that people dance around and then the chief says that they are married" and that "this is not acceptable in Germany." And something about how many judges in America are not really acceptable as judges in Germany and that how did they know who this judge was that married us. (He pointed to the clerk of courts stamped signature...?) I was very surprised and uneasy at his arrogance, but kept quiet. He went on to say, but since I was married in a courthouse (apparently he thought the record I showed him said this somehow) this was not a problem for me. I said "what if I wasn't married in a courthouse?" He said that a church was also acceptable. I knew to keep my mouth shut at that point; he was no one to me. (We were married outside by a *Unitarian* of all things.) So apparently the state of Germany will charge me higher taxes if I can't prove an "acceptable" marriage ... indoors ??? I will try to fly low under the radar with the translation and take that back to the Rathaus, but if in fact American law is not good enough and my marriage of 11+ years turns out to be a sham we may have to jump over the border to Denmark some weekend to get officially married according to the local culture. I'll keep you posted. G (male) has already offered to be V's bridesmaid and we can release fruitflies at the wedding! --unless this somehow nullifies the marriage under German law, who knows?

By the way, while walking form the Rathaus to the courthouse I overheard some more Plautdeutsch. "Alles Clour" rather than "alles clair" in "high" German. Like the kids, I am slowly accumulating some local dialect, another post about that later.

The Missing Bag

Around the Grosser Ploener See

More number trouble

Here's another one to add to my earlier post on number differences. I write my fours with a closed top, but apparently here in Germany all fours have open tops. At work this was mistaken as a seven (with the cross bar) where the ends happened to touch and "corrected" to a seven. Now I am trying to relearn to write fours with open tops and in the meantime we have ordered preprinted stickers to label the stocks. The irony is on the printed stickers the numbers are exactly the way I write them, one as a line (1), seven without a crossbar (7), and four with a closed top (4), but this doesn't cause any problem because they are printed ... ?

M had a great day at Kindergarten!!!

I fully expected everything to work out well for her, but it is nice to see that it did. She made a friend (Lela?, something like that) and they hung out together the entire day. V took her to the toy store after school and M got a sports car. I went home for lunch and waited for them. T got home first on his bike and told me they were coming. I met them part way and M and I snuck up on a family of geese with new tiny, fuzzy goslings that were out grazing next to the lake. They were enjoying the froggy weather today. M really enjoyed seeing them. Then it was back to work for me.

M is off to Kindergarten!

She was so excited she hardly slept last night, which made it difficult to get her up this morning. Her kindergarten is very close to T's school (and her future school) so they can commute together in the mornings. It will be total immersion German, they do not speak English, which is good and will help prepare her for school.

Flensburg

Deer Tracks?

On my daily commute walk to work I noticed some irregularities in the concrete blocks on the sidewalk. Many of them just look like chips or bubbles in the concrete but some are suspiciously similar to deer tracks. These blocks are poured elsewhere and brought in. I wonder if they are accessible to deer at night as they are drying?





Here is a fresh track in mud for comparison:

Painting M's Room

We started painting M's room with the bright pink color paint that she picked out. Here are some results so far.

T had a great day at school!!!

I showed up half an hour early and waited outside the building. While waiting I noticed a liquor store across the street (a big difference from the US). By fifteen minutes after he was supposed to get out there were a lot of kids waiting around outside and walking off but no T. I walked around and saw some kids playing in the playground behind the building. I walked into the playground (BTW - security is very lax compared to the US, this morning the doors were unlocked and we walked right in with no one to stop us) and I saw his backpack by itself on a bench. I scanned around and sure enough, he was in a cluster of four kids playing on a big basket swing. I watched quietly and they seemed to be talking with him and using lots of hand expressions. After a few minutes one of the kids noticed me and pointed me out to T, then he came over. They all said "bye T...," then the larger group of boys that were playing soccer nearby called out lots of "bye T..." as well. I was amazed that so many kids knew his name. He was happy when he came over and I asked about the day. He said he made 9 or 10 new friends today, he wasn't sure because there were so many! He said that he learned some German words and listed them off "nine means no, ja means yes, bitte means thank you (actually I'm pretty sure it means please but I wasn't going to argue), moin moin means good morning and moin means hi (he's learning Plauttdeutsch!), and so on ... I cautiously asked if anything bad happened and he said he didn't like gym. Why? Because you have to change clothes. Whew ... I'm glad that was as bad as it got. School seems to be less brutal here then in the states. I asked about homework and he showed me his math work and so on. I asked what he wanted to do and we went to a store in town to look at lego sets. I told him to pick he wanted out one and bought it for him to celebrate his first day at school. Then we walked back home and I went back to work. I hope things at school continue as well for him. This was one of my biggest worries about moving to Germany and now I feel much more relieved.

T is at his first day of school in Germany

We got up early, V fixed us breakfast, and T and I walked to school. He was very nervous but brave and held control as we walked to the school and tried to be upbeat. I am very proud of him. We went inside and found his room but no one was there (the lights were off and T said it felt "creepy"), so we walked around and found where the kids waited outside behind the building. I was talking to his art teacher inside the door and T was outside for a few minutes with the other kids. When I got out he said they were making fun of his name. We sat on a bench by ourselves in the playground for a while and the other kids played and stared at us. When it was time to go in the kids were running up to the room, grabbing a bag, and running off. We waited for a while and his teacher didn't show up, then we followed the other kids and found his teacher. She said she forgot to tell me that they have PE in the gym as the first class today. T didn't have any clothes or shoes to change into, but she said he could just wear his socks. She told him to follow two girls there (she doesn't teach gym, another teacher does that we haven't met). So that is where I left him. He was too shy to look anyone in the eye but held himself together and followed them quietly. I went back to his room and dropped his book bag off there. I am proud he was so brave but very worried for him and hope his day is not too bad. Gym class is a hard way to be immersed into school in another culture/language, but perhaps this will get the hardest part over with at the beginning. I will meet him when school lets out and see how things went.

T and M are registered for school

The publics schools opened today after Easter holiday. This morning we walked to the school, met the headmistress and signed T and M up. T got to meet his teacher. She is young and speaks English very well and seemed very nice. T will start his first day tomorrow, from 7:30 am to 1:05 pm. M doesn't start until the fall but we signed her up anyway, while we were there and had the paperwork. M had already started public school in the US, but here kindergarten is separate from the school system so she doesn't start until first grade.

After visiting the school we walked to the paint store and bought several liters of a pink paint that M picked out for her room. She got to see it mixed up and pushed buttons on the mixing machine to start it. Then we stopped and grabbed sandwiches and hot drinks at a bakery. The people who worked there remembered us and were very patient with our attempts at ordering in German. T made his order in German and they asked it back in English to verify, but didn't know some of the words in English, so we were both learning from each other. There was a customer in there that asked V if we were from Finland! -- I can't imagine why they thought we might be Finnish, perhaps my beard, the kids blue eyes and our accent...? Another customer also recognized us from before and told us about the card system the bakery had to get free drinks if you make so many orders and get stamps on the card. I thanked him and then he went to the front and talked to the workers to tell them to give me a card, without my asking, then gave me the thumbs up before he left. I was a bit embarrassed because they were so busy with other orders.

Ruine Neuschlag

It was a sunny morning and both T and I wanted to go out on our bikes. We started out no where in particular but happened to be heading north. There was a ruin marked on the map that I was curious about so we started heading toward it. It was quite a trip and I asked T several times if he was tired and wanted to head back. He said "are you kidding, I love riding my bike"! For most of the way we followed a nice bike path that was separate but parallel to the road.



Off and on the entire trip T would sing "Life is a highway, and I want to ride it all night long, if you're going my way, ...". We stopped and got some snacks at a gas station both on the way out and on the way back.

Most of the way to the ruin, T was up ahead of me and going downhill pretty fast toward a relatively busy intersection. He forgot about his pedal brake and the front brake wasn't stopping his bike so he veered into the beginning edge of a sloped rock wall which ramped him up into the air. I saw him fly up and over onto his side, the bike falling on him, and he skidding to a stop on the sidewalk just before the intersection. I jumped off my bike, shoved it toward the bank, and ran toward him. At the same time a truck coming the opposite direction saw what had happened and did a U turn and pulled up onto the sidewalk behind us. The man hopped out and asked if he was OK (in German). T seemed fine considering. I pulled his bike out of the way and sat him down to rest for a minute then went back to pull my bike out of the bank. T wanted to keep going but first I had him practice the pedal brake a few times to get the bike to stop quickly. I'm sure he won't forget it again.

Eventually the road petered out and we ended up following a muddy trail in a field. There are deer stands all over the place here and T made use of them as lookouts to see if he could spot anything.



In a cluster of trees we came to a ditch full of water and followed around it to a road to cross.



Then there was another, higher ditch, with a small cemetery behind it, and it occurred to me that this was part of the ruins defenses. There were many concentric rings, perhaps four or five inside each other, and each one got higher then the last.





Finally we were on top of the highest central part. We were much higher then the surrounding land but it was hard to get an idea of how it all fit together because the forest limited visibility. On the back side the fortifications were very close to a lake and spring flowers were blooming.



We eventually headed back




(by the way, this is the "Rotten See," I presume translates as "Red Lake")

and part way it started sleeting on us. The small frozen pellets stung. We got to the gas station and T got a lollipop that was half red candy and half white candy (it becomes important later). Then the sky cleared up and we continued back to town. Going through town there is a ramp over the train tracks and then a narrow quick turn to an underpass under the highway. T and I collided on the turn, he came up fast behind me, and hit a rock wall and flipped over the bike. When I got stopped and looked back he was face down and I saw red and white on the sidewalk under his head and thought his teeth were knocked out! But thankfully it was just the crushed up bits of the lollipop. T was again fine, but the impact bent the fender around the front wheel so it wouldn't turn and smashed the bell to pieces.
I straddled his bike over the back of mine so I could roll them both on my wheels and we limped on the rest of the way home. The first thing he wanted to know was when I would get his bike fixed so he could go back out on it.

T has a bike!

Because T is starting school soon, and is anxious about it, we thought we should do something nice for him. He seemed to really enjoy riding D's bike last weekend so we went to two bike stores in town on Saturday and looked at bikes. We found a used bike that looked about his size. It is very much like my bike; it has a hand brake for the front wheel, a pedal brake for the back wheel, a disengageable generator for the front and back lights, a "klinger" (with a shark sticker on it that T didn't like) and a frame for a basket in the back. I had them unlock it and T test drive it around and he really liked it. Next we went in and he picked out a helmet and had it fitted and I bought them for him. M was very jealous but we made it clear that she would get a bike when she learned how to ride one. V and M stayed in town and T and I went back to the apartment. I got out my bike (the first time I've been on it since I got back to Germany with the family!) and T and I went for a ride down to the park ... despite the rain. We got half way and I realized I had V's keys and she and M had no way to get into the apartment when they got back. We turned back, all the while me giving T pointers about cars and bike safety. When we got back to the apartment T wanted to keep riding so I let him ride up and down the road for a while then we went in. V and M returned much later and M had on lipstick! (V took her to try on makeup to get her mind off the bike.) T wanted to go back out so we had him wear a reflective vest and let him go. It made me very nervous and I spied on him from our balcony but he did very well with the cars and everything. After I couldn't stand it any more we called him back in.

The week in review

(bank, kindergelt, thought M was German, smoke alarm)