Registration

One of the legalities of settling down in Berlin is that we are supposed to register at the local district office. This is supposed to be done within seven days of arrival, but we were too busy with Christmas markets to bother with that.

So we went to the local district office today, taking our passports and 'rental contract' with us.

When you think of a German Government office, this wasn't what came to mind.

Inside we asked at lady at what looked like an information desk about where to go. She didn't speak any English but we were pointed through.

Further down a crappy hall, there was a crappy set up and some other bloke that we spoke to. He only spoke a 'wenig' (little) English but printed us off a waiting number ticket and instructed is to go up to the first floor.

Here we had to wait in the waiting room, eagerly watching for our number to come up.

Half an hour later our number came up and the TV screen indicated that we needed to go up another level and report to some room #205.

At room #205 we got the fortune to get another non-English speaker. Nordine gives this lady a combination of English and German and get the point across. Nordine is doing pretty well with the German so far - more confident than me in giving it a go.

We hand over our documents but the lady isn't happy with them. She had to call a colleague over to help. This   new lady spoke English and said they couldn't find the registration of our landlady. As we didn't know our landlady's address we couldn't help out (everyone has to register, including our landlady). Without these details we couldn't register.  Frau No-English made us an appointment to come back next week with the correct details.

Nearby is a second hand store called Humana. We had no idea how big this place was, turning out to be five floors of second hand goodness. We went through the whole shop and saw some interesting stuff, mostly interesting in a bad outdated way. The main attraction today was how big this was and getting a chance to be in one of these huge Stalinist buildings, located on a boulevard that was the pride of the former GDR, Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee).

Back at home we sent emails to our landlady to get the registration problem sorted out. She has been helpful and explained the issue (use her maiden name) and that it took her and her husband three times to get registered when they had to do it! Our landlady provided some information for us to take with us next time which hopefully will do the trick.

With that sorted we took Barney out for a walk to the East Side Gallery. This is the largest preserved expanse of the original Berlin Wall. It runs for over a kilometre between our local Warschauer Station and the Ostbahnhof stations.

We picked the West side of the wall to walk along, which is probably not the best side. Its just mindless graffiti on this side. However it is a nice walk along the river Spree. 

Once we got to the end, there were lots of tourists there (well for this time of year it was a lot). They seem to just stand around, confused and in the way.

Even though it was a lovely shiny rain free day it was still bloody cold, especially on the fingers and the three of us were happy to get inside.