On Tuesday a co-worker, A, was going to go fishing for herring after work and invited T and I along. We went to a coastal town east of here called Neustadt (New City). A had found a "secret" place and the herring season was just beginning. People around here seem to love herring. We (expats) have a joke about Denmark just over the border. The food variety there is endless, you can get herring any way you like it (which is true, I've never seen so many variations on one theme). Here a favorite snack is "rollmop", which are raw picked herring fillets rolled up in a ball. So T and I went with A to Neustadt and just as he was pulling into the harbor we saw the banks along the inlet from the ocean lined with people fishing for herring. His secret spot wasn't as secret as he thought. A put on his herring rig; it's a "ladder" of hooks with a butterfly weight at the end. We found a small gap in the line and he showed T how to cast it out and reel it in. T did very well. He cast it out many times and didn't hit anyone standing next to us or tangle the lines up (I would have been terrified of tangling all those lines if I was casting). I was careful not to touch the pole when the line was in the water because I don't have a fishing license (yet). A brought two poles so he and T fished for a while. The herring started biting after 7pm as the sun was setting. T reeled one in and was very excited about it. We got the hook off and put it in the cooler and were covered in scales. They have large scales that come off the fish easily but seem to glue themselves to your hands. Every now and then T went back to the cooler to look at his fish some more. They only got one more after that and we packed up at about 8:30 and headed back. A says in the next couple weeks they should start biting more and is thinking of going back next week.
Wednesday morning I went to the foreigners office to renew our visas early. V and the kids are flying to the US and will be away when the visas expire, so I wanted to have everything current for their return. (I had trouble last time at the airport flying to Germany without a return or through ticket and had to show them my work visa to get the tickets.) It was very easy this time because they already had all the paperwork from last year. Essentially I just paid the 90 euro fee and they printed the visas and stuck them to the passport pages. When I double checked them I was pleasantly surprised to see that they were good through 2012! So I won't have to repeat the process again for a few years. I'll probably need a replacement passport (mine is running out of pages and expires in 2012) and have to get a new visa for that before the visas themselves expire.
Then, this morning, I went to a car insurance office to ask about getting insurance. Things work very differently here. You can buy a car, and drive it home, before having insurance from an insurance company. There is some special plate you put on it first and you can use that for a short while before getting insurance. In fact, we can't even get insurance until we have a car, because the rate depends on the type of car (models with higher accident rates in the year before have higher insurance rates, and newer cars have lower rates). I also found out that the German insurance is good in countries outside Germany. So we don't have to worry about getting additional insurance if we drive over a border to a neighboring country. One frustrating thing is we start off with a very high rate, 133% of the "standard" (asking around most people seem to have less than 100%, A for example is at 45%). This is because we have no driving record in Germany, so it is like we are new drivers. I asked if we could get a lower rate if we got insurance records from the US to prove that we have been driving for years without accidents, but the guy said that it wouldn't help because it wasn't in Germany (I have heard mixed things about this). At any rate, even at 133% plus gas, it will be much cheaper, and faster, then what we are currently paying to take the kids to school on the public bus.
I feel like things are finally starting to come together as far as the official paperwork side of living in Germany, it took a year to get this far, but I think things will be easier from here as we get the most important and most difficult parts out of the way. Really the hardest part of all of this so far was the problems the school created for us. Even getting the car and drivers license is directly related to that, but now resolving the mess with the public school is all falling into place. I am feeling very optimistic about the next few years.
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