« Utter pwnage | Home | A quiet weekend indoors »

Aufenthaltserlaubnis: I has it

So a month after the epic fail of trying to acquire a visa, I finally get it done this morning. It took very many hours and a small bit of panic on my part, but usually in conjunction, those two solve anything.

I turned off my alarm without remembering again. I think I’m going to start playing the two-alarm game, because I always wake up with my phone in my hand, which means I walked across the room, picked it up, deactivated the alarm, then strolled back to bed. That, or I’ve developed Jedi force powers in my sleep.

So I wake up naturally around 8am, which is when I wanted to be at the municipal building, at least 30 minutes away, maybe 45. So I toss on some clothes, wash up, and stuff the necessary paperwork into my bag.

Well, some of it. I couldn’t find my ultra-super-important document folder. Where I keep everything that doesn’t get me kicked out of this country. It’s usually in the top drawer of my nightstand (I don’t know what to call the piece of furniture, it’s a single-drawer thing with wheels under it), but not today. I look under the bed. In my wardrobe. On top of the wardrobe. Scour the archaeological layers of items on my desk. Under the bed again. Nothing.

I wrack my brain and remember that the last time I utilized it was when I had to provide proof of active student status to the housing agency, in order to qualify for housing there. I’d gone with Carl and Alex, and on the way home, it began to snow, so I asked to stick the folder in a backpack one of them had brought. Great! Now to hope they’re not in class.

I call Alex and plead through the fog of his grogginess that he look through his bag, or elsewhere in his room, for my folder. He informs me that it was for sure Carl who had the backpack, not him. My bad.

Call Carl, wake him up. He looks, finds it. Rock. I grab it, and I’m out the door, onto the tram, to the train station, to Marienplatz, transfer to the subway, then jogging up the steps to the Kreisverwaltungsreferat. (I love this language!)

The rest of the my stay in the building was more navigating through a building layout so disastrous, I made me wonder whether the architect had been on peyote the night he drafted it. I waited in a lot of lines, but didn’t have to pay the 80€ fee for the issuance of a visa, as I had my trusty letter from the German Academic Exchange Agency, saying “Get off his balls.”

Thank you, German government.

Oh, and to be clear, the word “Aufenthaltsgenehmigung,” which I know from the days of my internship with the honorary consul of Germany, I think is best translated as “green card.” That’s the word I used in my previous post, but of course isn’t the documented I was to be receiving. The word is totally 1337, though, slightly more so than what I did in fact acquire. The document they slapped in my passport says “Aufenthaltserlaubnis,” which approximately means “residence permit.” It doesn’t say even say “Visum” (the word for “visa”) anywhere on it, but I guess this is just how they do it here.

And that concludes today’s German lesson.