Ausweis m identity card, passport; (Mitglieds~, Bilbliotheks etc) card,
Long after having been stamped through customs, my passport is still an essential part of my life in Germany. You need your passport to buy a cell phone, set up an internet connection, and open a video rental account. You need a passport if someone becomes suspicious of your foreign credit card or just the fact that you are trying to charge a card at all in what seems to be the country that the credit card industry forgot. And you will definitely need ID at the grocery store if you accidentally pick up the German beer equivalent of wine coolers (although a wine cooler is a perfectly acceptable drink here. Curious.) Yes, the drinking age is 16. No, that doesn’t seem to matter if you show a serious lapse of judgement by buying something that doesn’t adhere to the Bavarian Purity Law. Your suitability for consumption will be weighed.
But it’s not all take take take. The German authorities are also so kind as to give you some additional identification to flash at post office clerks and train conductors. First, you have to register at the local residents’ office with the correct forms filled out in triplicate and a copy of your lease. You are not allowed to cross out mistakes . You are not allowed to write in lower case letters. Your form must be filled out in German. I practiced writing Kanada with a “K”. You are not allowed to register on Wednesday or Friday afternoons, or Tuesday or Thursday mornings, or any day between the hours of 12:30 and 2PM, when the office is closed for lunch or for the rest of the day if it is Wednesday or Friday. The city’s website also advises not to attempt to contact the office on a Monday, when traffic is high.
However, as it turns out, those warnings were all just talk. That must scare enough people into coming in on the half days to balance things out, because I registered first thing last Monday morning with ease. It required only the 6 or 7 minutes it took me to figure out that the large stainless steel box built into the wall by the office was not a temperature control panel but actually printed little numbers and then a short wait among a roomful of very sedate applicants who were quickly dispatched. The lady crossed out a bunch of information on my form (former address – not in Germany, doesn’t matter) and scribbled – in lower-case script (Canada without a K?) – in between the boxes. Then she stamped and signed it. This scratched out, scrawled-over piece of paper was now my official German identification form.
This new identification is required for a number of specific things. I have to produce it in order to get a bank account. I might have to carry it around with me while using the free one-month transit pass that Stuttgart’s transit system awards all newly registered Stuttgarters. The local video store wants to see it, too. It’s highly sought after and possibly irreplaceable, but I have to truck it around with me all the time and it is very quickly starting to look terrible. More terrible, I mean. Luckily, it’s printed on extra-long A4 paper (the European standard), so there is an extra inch or two I can cut off if the edges start to look too ratty. I’ll just have to make sure I get a video rental card first.
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