Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on February 4, 2010.

October, and two months in Germany when a high school friend emailed to tell me that he would be in Frankfurt for the night. My mother would be arriving in a few weeks, but this would be my first visitor since moving.

We met at the train station and headed to a pub. I don’t remember where we went or what we drank, but I will never forget how, between drinks and pubs, we came past the Cole’s house. “Let’s go in for a second,” I suggested, excited at the chance to show someone from back home around the set of my strange new life. “I’ll give you a quick tour and we can use the bathroom.”

I showed him the stainless-steel kitchen and the pink-chaired dining room. “Can you believe these chairs?” I asked pointing at the plastic-backed, pink-velor upholstered seats surrounding the long wooden table. “Janet had them specially made.” Lodged in the (plexi?) glass chair backs were fake pink feathers. I had never seen such ugly chairs in my life, and it hurt my head when I thought about how much Janet had probably paid to have them custom made. They seemed to scream “I want you to find me avant gaurd and edgy,” but the execution was sloppy and tasteless, just like the stainless steel faux antlers she’d commissioned for the stairwell we were now walking up.

On the second floor we met Janet and Jens. In bathrobes. Lurking. Angry. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Who is that?” Jens yelled. “No strangers in the house!”

“What?” I shook my head no. This was news to me.

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.” The yell had become a threatening bellow.

“You never told me that before. Besides, this is an old friend of mine. I’ve know him for seven or eight years. I just wanted to show him where I live, he’s not staying, we just wanted to use the bathroom…”

“NO STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE.”

Eyes wide, we turned and scuttled back down the stairs and out the door.

“What the hell was that about?”

“Apparently I”m not allowed to bring friends over.” So much for the affectionate monologues Janet held when she was in a good mood about me being “part of the family.”

The next morning Jens found me in the kitchen. He wanted to talk. “It’s very important that you don’t bring anyone into the house.”

“Ok, that’s fine,” I conceded, “But it would have been nice if someone had told me that before embarrassing me in front of an old friend. I’ve known him for years. He wasn’t just some guy that I picked up at the disco. And he speaks German, so he understood everything you two said. You didn’t exactly make him feel welcome.”

“Well, maybe I should tell you a story. I used to be in banking. A few years ago I was hired to run this bank, and, well, once I had a look through the books it seemed clear that something fishy was going on. I called the police. Twelve people went to jail, and I get worried sometimes…”

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up the speed dial directory to show me the first number. “That’s why I have the police on my first speed dial. For a while we were worried that someone would try to kidnap the children. I’m sure you don’t know what it’s like to walk down a dark street and fear for your life every time you see another person coming in the distance, but that’s how I feel every night.”

Sure, Jens. No woman has ever felt that before. I nodded, wondering why a man with so much to lose would hire a complete stranger to drive his Porsche and take his 4-year-old twins to the park. Maybe I had been hired to kidnap them, Mr. Jens, ever thought of that? And even if I hadn’t been, what was one apathetic, underpaid au pair going to do to stop someone who did?

“Now I can’t get a job in the banking world anymore,” he admitted sadly. “I’ve been working for Janet’s father ever since.”

Later I Googled the case in search of more details. I had Googled the family name before coming to work for them, but without banking-specific keywords I hadn’t found anything about the Cole’s dirty little secret. There wasn’t much to find, but there were a few articles about a sketchy court case involving suspected embezzling, a tattling CEO, and some leniently interpreted Swiss banking laws.

After that, the drama of daily life in the Cole house started to seem absurd, hilarious. A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, live-action afternoon soap broadcast right to my living room, dining room, bedroom, and kitchen.

A lot of Click Clack Gorilla readers want to know more about moving to Germany.  About to take the same journey themselves (or trying to match dreams with realities) they (you!) write to me with questions about visas and salaries and job oppurtunites.  I’ve done a FAQ about moving to Germany to answer all of the questions about how I got here and how I got a visa and a job and a place to live.  And here comes the FAQ for the folks who want to come over to teach English.

How did you find a teaching job?

I came back to Germany after a two-month visit to the States, and I started throwing resumes at everything that moved.  Which is to say that I looked up English-language schools in the yellow pages and sent a resume and cover letter (in English) to every single one.  In a big city like Frankfurt, that turned out to be somewhere between 20 and 30.  Two called back: a language school at which I got an interview but no job and inlingua, where I taught for some time.

Before returning to Germany I also had a lead on a job at a start-up language school that I also taught at briefly, but which turned out to be a waste of time with more classes canceled than taught (and paid for).

What kind of experience do you have?  Do I need a TEFL to get hired?

Attention all native English speakers with a college degree: you will not need TEFL, or any other certificate, to get hired.  You need to be personable and a meticulous speaker of English.  Seriously.  That’s all.  (While this is probably not true for every language school, it seems to be true of all the franchises.)

My personal English-classroom-door-opening qualifications include my BA in English Lit and a few years spent tutoring college kids in writing at my college’s writing center where I ended up the head tutor of the ESL division during my senior year.  See?  No teaching certificates, no relevant degree (though it may have English in the title, I promise, being able to analyze a novel will get you nowhere in front of a business English class), and no real teaching experience.

Do I need to be able to speak German?

Absolutely not.  In fact, since most language schools encourage the trial-by-fire method (aka teaching students only in the target language for ultimate furstration, I mean absorption), you will be strictly forbidden to speak it.  Although I occasionally bent the rules with true beginners and students who were utterly lost on subjects of grammar, which was admittedly helpful.

What was the job like, day-to-day?

Most English classes, particularly those of the business English variety, are held before or after office hours.  Which means you’ll usually have to get up early for an 8 o’clock class, and then will have the day free before teaching a second class at 5 or 6.  This irritated the hell out of me—I prefer to get all of my working out of the way at once instead of having it drag me out of bed far too early only to spit me back out after an hour and a half with eight more hours to feel anxious about my next class.

Once in a while I taught daytime numbers that involved four hours with the same group of apathetic adults.  And those irritated me even more.  My favorites were one-on-one classes where I would either go to a student’s home or meet her in a cafe and spend the hour and a half chatting, correcting, and role playing.  You’d be amazed how many people are interested in practicing small talk.  Usually classes were in student’s homes or offices, but once in a while I would teach in the company’s classrooms.

At inlingua, teachers are supplied with all the course material, so all you have to do is figure out a vague lesson plan and follow the dotted lines.  It’s a method that leaves a lot of room for both laziness and creativity.  (And also means you can teach someone how to talk about accounting in English without having a clue about accounting yourself.)

Was it hard to make ends meet?  How much do you get paid? 

Not at all, though of course you should remember that I am a pretty lo-fi person.  I was a very dedicated dumpster diver at the time, though not because I didn’t have the money to buy food.  My main expenses were my apartment (300 euros/month including utilities), health insurance (126 euros/month), and beer (a beer in a bar in Frankfurt is expensive at between 2.50—if you’re lucky—and sky’s the limit, which is why I usually bought mine at the supermarket and drank with friends in the park).  I worked about 20 hours a week and had money to spare at a rate of 18 euros/teaching hour (a teaching hour is actually just 45 minutes).  But!  Don’t forget that as a freelancer, which is how most English teachers are billed, have to foot their own insurance and taxes, so we are talking a pre-tax number here.

Pros?

A sweet hourly rate for talking to what usually turned out to be very interesting people (and seeing their homes and offices) and a lot of free coffee.  Every day was totally different, which kept things from getting too ho-hum.  Oh, and when a student cancels a class same-day, you don’t have to work, but you get paid anyway.

Cons?

Weird hours, Saturday classes (four hour blocks blarg!), dress code, apathetic students.

Do you still teach English?

Hell no.  While I loved teaching one-on-one lessons, I don’t have the energy to stand in front of rooms full of apathetic adults who expect to learn English and be entertained on a regular basis.  I much prefer freelance writing, where I don’t need to be “on” ever and can work at home in messy hair and dirty pajamas.

If any of you have any more questions, include them in the comments and I’ll answer them there (and include them in future FAQs).

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on January 18, 2010.

When Janet wasn’t behind her desk, she was wiping the stainless steel counters in the kitchen. The illusion of activity. Wipe the counters so you don’t feel guilty about paying someone else to wipe the toilets, the floors, the windows, and her children. Before lunch, I could often be found behind one of these counters drinking espresso after espresso in preparation for the afternoon of play. Anna would be behind the stove preparing lunch, and Janet flitted around sponge (or coffee) in hand.

That afternoon, we were talking about vegetarianism. I had come to Germany a vegetarian, which Janet seemed to find shocking and exotic. I had gone vegetarian about a year before, after reading Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation. I had been reading La Ninja’s PETA magazines since I was eleven and was horrified by the images I saw there, but I had always been partial to meat and had never felt like any action I could take would mean anything. Schlosser’s final chapter gave me a little pat on the back and said “Individuals can change things.”

So I decided to give up meat, to try the “vote with my dollar” approach to protest. I didn’t like the way animals were treated throughout the factory farming process, and I didn’t like the way that the humans working in the slaughterhouses were treated. Classic reasons for going vegetarian I suppose. But there was something else that bothered me even more so: a feeling of disconnection. At the grocery store I could buy a piece of beef in a sterile Styrofoam bed and never be even remotely reminded, or connected to, the fact that this plastic-wrapped piece of flesh had once been a part of a wet-nosed cow. I didn’t see anything morally wrong with the concept of eating meat, but I saw something terribly wrong with being so disconnected from the life that gave me life.

At the time I was certain I would eat meat again one day (a day which arrived in 2011). It was largely an exercise in appreciation, in reconnection to the real (and by that I mean physical) world. Could I have killed a fish? A cow? A pig? I didn’t know, but these were things I wanted to think about before eating another hamburger.

Back in the kitchen, behind the stainless-steel counters, Janet was telling me about an article about various kinds of vegetarianism that she had just read. “Apparently there are people called vegans who don’t eat any cheese at all,” Janet informed me, shaking her head. “I couldn’t imagine that. No cheese!” She shook her head again.

The night before I had finished reading Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus and had decided that as a vegetarian, I was doing a pretty half-assed job at boycotting the meat industry. Who do you think owns the milk and the cheese companies? I had never thought about it before, but—big surprise—it’s the same companies factory farming meat. I had been kind of nervous about breaking the news to Janet (part of your payment as an au pair is room and board, so I needed to inform her). Here was my chance.

“Actually, I was thinking that I would like to become vegan,” I said quietly, looking into my espresso.

“WHAT?” Now, I don’t like to use all caps much in my writing, but this was an all-caps response. “Are you serious?” She was obviously agitated.

“Yeah, well I just finished reading this book, and well…”

“Oh my god, I can’t believe this. Did you hear that Anna? This girl is crazy! No cheese! None!”

“It doesn’t have to be a big inconvenience. If we’re eating something for lunch that I can’t eat I can cook something for myself.”

“What about milk?”

“No. No dairy products at all.”

At that moment, Jens came into the kitchen. It was the rare afternoon that he joined us for lunch. “Jens, Nikki just told us that she’s going vegan.”

“ARE YOU FUCKING CRAZY?!” He actually said that, exactly that, in English. When I tell you these stories, I’m translating all the dialogue. Just imagine little subtitles playing under people speaking German as you read. Except for this moment, which he both translated and yelled. I wasn’t expecting it to be such a shock, but the Cole’s couldn’t imagine their lives without cheese or apparently even sharing a roof with someone willing to go without it.

Those of you who have been reading for a while will remember the au pair chronicles—a serial about how it is that I ended up in Germany and what it was like spending 10 months au pairing for a insanely rich family in Frankfurt am Main. Well, I’ve been busy writing new installments to share with you during operation whirlwind baby. But since a hell of a lot of new readers have become regulars since I first began the series a year ago, I thought I would start by re-publishing the series thus far—both to buy me baby time and to get everyone caught up before continuing the saga. You can find an index of the entire series here. This segment was originally published on January 15, 2010.

“We’d like to see you in the office, Nikki.”

Jens had called from the stairs and turned back as abruptly as he had come, startling me out of the book I had been reading in my room. Flashback to high school, middle school, elementary school: getting called to the office was never a good thing. I scanned my memories of the last two weeks. Had I fucked up? Not that I could remember. The twins hadn’t even behaved particularly badly.

I put down my book and hurried down to the office where Janet was waiting behind her desk, her husband seated on the couch across from the door.

“You guys wanted to see me?”

“Yes we did. We thought it was time for you to start driving.” Up to that point Janet had always driven to the kindergarten. I came along and brought the twins inside while she idled on the curb outside. Once I took over the driving she could get back to doing more of whatever it was that she was always doing behind her computer, and I would have another few centimeters of independence.

Driving sounds good, I thought. Images of the family’s cars flashed through my head—Porsche, Fiat, Ferrari, Mercedes, Mini-Cooper, BMW—followed by images of myself, wrapped in a blanket and bleeding from a head wound as police and EMS workers bustled around me in slow motion and I contemplated the 100,000 car I’d just totaled. My forehead wrinkled. “Wait. What am I going to be driving?”

“The Porsche of course,” Jens cried, springing up and putting on his cap. “There isn’t anything else.” He tossed me a key ring with one black key attached. “Let’s go for a test drive.”

A typical stereotype of German people is that they are auto-philes, and Jens was the embodiment of the stereotype. He collected cars, had Mr. Walters meticulously wash and wax the collection regularly, dabbled in amateur car racing, and had adorned the walls of his sitting room—a niche of leather couches and untouched coffee table books outside of my bedroom—with framed photographs of famous car racers. All in all, I think it would be safe to say that he spent more time with his cars than he did with his children.

Now, sitting in the passenger seat of the Porsche and obviously excited, Jens was telling me to pull out of the garage and asking me about the cars I had driven in America. We drove around the block a few times, and I parallel parked in a narrow space near the twin’s school, thanking the gods of fortune that I had learned to drive on a stick shift. “So far so good,” Jens said as I slid into the spot. “Let’s go on the autobahn.”

The autobahn, contrary to popular belief, does occasionally have a speed limit, though these limits are much, much higher than those generally found beside American highways. We drove a few exits out of the city, and Jens urged me to go faster and faster.

“Come on! You’ve got to see what this baby can do!” This, the man who was supposed to be testing whether I could safely transport his children to kindergarten and back. When our exit came, I slowed. A little blue Peugot was coming up behind us, and I was going to let it pass before merging into the exit lane.

“What the hell are you doing!??!” Jens shouted, slamming a hand down onto the black dashboard. “This is a Porsche. The Porsche always goes first. Hit the gas, cut them off!” This, the man who was supposed to be testing whether I could safely transport his children to kindergarten and back.

Was he serious? Was this a test? I glanced at his face, and his eyes said “serious,” “obsessed,” and “possibly insane.” I sped up and left the little blue car behind us.

This is part two of a series about how, in another life, I was an au pair. You can read part one here. An index of the whole series lives here. It was originally published on December 28, 2009.

Left

I spent my last week in America painting rooms in the house that my mother had bought that summer. During my sophomore year of college she had moved to upstate New York, and I hadn’t been back to my hometown since. Who was left there to visit? My former piano teacher, but was he still alive? My ex-non-step siblings? There must be someone left there who I once knew, but who?

My college friends went home for the summer at the end of each school year. I went to visit my mom in New York and my dad in New Jersey, but home had already become a relative concept. Home was where my books were, where ever I was, in whatever apartment I was staying in at the time. There was an apartment-above-the-garage outside of Saratoga Springs where I spent a summer working as a live-in part-time babysitter for three sweet, dull accountant’s children. There was an apartment-above-the-garage in Vermont with my freshman-year roommate and her family. There was a series of boxy white-walled rooms in college dormitories.

My senior year of college, I had moved into an apartment downtown with two friends. The bedrooms were barely bigger than the mattresses on their floors, but the kitchen, dining room, and living room were spacious, high-ceilinged. Our landlady was an eccentric junk-sculptor who spent the summers in Saratoga and the winters somewhere in New Jersey. During the summer the scent of her chain-smoked cigarettes seeped through the wall I shared with the one-room shanty she had tacked onto the back of the house.

During the winter we had peace and the junkman sculpture looming quietly from her little porch. We also had the “jungle” mural she’d painted on every wall of the smallest bedroom. Green streaks smeared the walls, flames (or parrots?) adorned their crowns. A monkey sprawled directly above the bed, arms reaching, eye sockets two empty brown gouges in the plaster ceiling.

Now I was moving to Germany where I would live with the family I’d be working for. A dangerous arrangement no matter what the job. But I didn’t think about what I was doing. I painted, and at 3 am the night before my flight I packed: clothing and supplies laid out on the bed and hastily thrown into two suitcases. I wasn’t leaving home. I was taking it with me. When the concept of home stopped being a static, unmovable place, I got to know it as something flexible and moving: something I could have as much of as I needed as long as I didn’t try to nail it down.

We drove out to Newark, I got on the red-eye flight to Frankfurt, one-way ticket in hand, and I woke up in Frankfurt am Main.

And so another week of Fastnacht (aka Karnival aka Fasching aka German Mardi Gras) begins.  Today is what folks ’round here call “Altweiber” which literally means “old woman” but refers to one of the opening Fastnacht celebrations.  Basically if you’re a lady you’re allowed to cut off the tie of anyone you find wearing one.  And as much as I don’t really get into this holiday, that sounds like fun to me.  (Note to self: get some wild hoard of activists together to storm a tie-heavy office full of people doing evil things next Altweiber.)

Usually I avoid the city like it’s been infested by plague victims when Fastnacht comes around.  As a holiday, its main focus is getting huge crowds together to listen to bad music in cheap costumes while consuming as much beer as possible.  Many aspects of this are appealing.  But not the crowds, dear cod, not the crowds, who are, depending on your timing, in various shades of really fucking drunk.  I don’t like big crowds, and I like them even less when they are drunken and dressed as circus clowns.  A lot of people really really like this combination, however.  Which I guess explains why you get the crowds in the first place.  It also explains why nine months later, there’s usually a little baby boom.

Fastnacht, like pretty much every holiday I have ever heard of, has roots in some sort of pagan-y celebration of something or other.  I can’t remember what (the Beard told me this morning) and having just spent the morning researching this exact subject for work, I can’t be bothered now, on my time off, to actually look into the facts.  In Mainz the event also has a strong “fuck you French occupiers” tradition, which means that the government gets mocked a lot during Fastnacht (and another point for the holiday!).  Oh and Mainz is one of Germany’s three Fastnacht capitals (the others being Cologne and Düsseldorf), which means that if you live down town and are a Fastnacht Grinch, you are totally fucked.

Rose Monday (also known as Peanut’s due date, and dear sweet cod do not let her be a Rose Monday baby) is another big day in the festivities.  There’s a parade that I’ve never seen, and an even bigger crowd than the one I encountered this afternoon around the Fastnachtsbrunnen (the Fastnacht Fountain—that’s how much Mainz loves this holiday) when I—against my better judgement—went into town to take a few pictures for a blog for work (some of which you are seeing on this post, others of which you can view there).

Up on the hill where our community is located, you could go an entire Fastnacht without realizing that the holiday is even taking place.  (For this I am thankful.)  On the bus that took me down into the center of town, there was a lone fool in a colorful hat (no bells gracing its peak, but a disco ball).  I began to worry that there might be nothing around to photograph, which makes me the biggest Fastnacht fool of all.  Off the bus I began to see more wigs, more hats, more painted faces.  And by the time I had gotten to Schillerplatz and the fountain, I was surrounded by lady bugs and cookie monsters and monks and witches and pirates and clowns and every animal in the encyclopedia.  Mario and Luigi were there, as well as a woman wearing a model of the Mainzer Dom (cathedral) on her head.

Several hundred people were packed in between a large stage and city hall, singing along to the Fastnacht songs being played (lip synced?) on stage.  But the crowd was manageable (not like it will be on Rose Monday or any evening this weekend), perfect for costume watching.  From my perch on the crowd’s rim I watched a group of bears smoking cigarettes while a walking barrel and a large bird stood with heads close together in heated discussion.

So you moved to Germany. It took you a while, but you mastered the language. You understand all the words that your friends are saying, but you still don’t understand half of what they say; because you didn’t grow up in Germany, when people start talking pop culture nostalgia, you don’t have a fucking clue.  When you were a kid (you being me, growing up in the United States) you watched Sesame Street, The Smurfs, and Rainbow Bright.  And so did they.  (Though they called them Sesam Straße, Die Schlümpfe, and Regina Regenbogen.)  But they also watched Sandmännchen, Sendung mit der Maus, and Löwenzahn.  (Say what?)  Which brings us to Peter Lustig.

Peter Lustig is probably Germany’s most famous (fictional) Bauwagen dweller, made famous by his role as moderator on the children’s show Löwenzahn, an educational number where Peter, more or less, explains how the world works in 25 years of episodes.  He’s Germany’s answer to America’s Mr. Rogers.

In the very first episode (which you can watch in three parts, here, here and here) Peter trades in his house for a Bauwagen (being pissed at the noise caused by a new airport and after discovering that the usual travel trailers are inflexible, too small, and too expensive), which he buys from a building company, parks in his friend’s Schrebergarten—a rented garden plot, where, I might add, it is actually illegal to live full time, though I do know some people who do it—then fixes up using scavenged materials.  As if that didn’t make the show interesting enough, Lustig ends every episode with a direct look in the camera and instructions for kids to turn off their televisions and go outside.  Even the opening sequence is full of radical imagery: a dandelion (dandelion=löwenzahn) growing up through a crack in the pavement, a saw cutting into a television.

Of course, for the English speakers reading, the most interesting thing about Peter Lustig is probably his Bauwagen.  Which is why I wanted to share a few pictures of it with you here.  It is currently sitting in the Babelsberg Film Studio Lot, where folks touring the studios can get a good look.  I love the old-chair stairs (visible in the photo above), and I’ve had fantasies about a similar roof terrace as well.  I haven’t watched much of the show myself, but what I have seen has been full of interesting ideas for re-purposing household objects for Bauwagen and tiny house living.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Peter Lustig was personally responsible for the existence of a large number of Bauwagen-dwelling adults in Germany today.

Episode two, Ein neues Zuhause (A New Home), finds Peter trying to figure out how to make such a tiny living space work for him.  The neighborhood kids come by to tell him his house is too small, and he tells them about all the folks around the world who live in tiny houses.  (Watch it here.)  If they can do it, so can he.  (And this in the early 80s, long before the “tiny house movement” began to roll.)  If you want a tour of his Wagen, almost finished, as of the second episode, click here and start at 0:45.  You’ll see the chair steps, a toilet in an armoir, a carpet used as an awning, a glass cabinet as a bay window, and a number of other “lustig” innovations (hardeeharharhar, “lustig” means “funny” in German, fyi).

Funnier yet is what the Beard told me about Peter Lustig this morning.  At the end of his 25-year career as moderator for the popular children’s show (today the show has a new moderator), Lustig admitted to interviewers that he can’t actually stand children.  Fans everywhere were horrified.  “Children should watch the show and have their fun, but I don’t like having them around me.  Like all adults, I am of the opinion that children are sticky or disruptive or loud.  I’m no fan of children, that’s a misunderstanding.”  I was amused.  What irony!  You can’t expect an actor playing a part to be the part he’s playing in real life, after all.  But whatever he thinks about children, at least he had a pretty neat Wagen.

Photos (cc) static_view (top) and honma (bottom)

Friday morning on my way to the Mainz customs office, I would have looked like a raving lunatic had anyone else been around to see me. “God damn fucking assholes,” I muttered loudly as I hobbled down the empty street leading through an industrial park to their offices. “Holding every damn package anyone sends to me while I’m pregnant. Because walking is just so much fucking fun right now. God damn bleeping bleepity bleep bleeps.” Why the customs office doesn’t just open the damn packages they confiscate, look at them, and send them on I will never understand. The stereotype that Germans are an efficient people may ring true in many cases, but it is never, ever true when it comes to the country’s bureaucracy.

Thursday I had received a letter from the customs people. It said that they had a package of mine. It said I needed to bring along the receipt from my order to pick it up. It also said that I had 14 days to do so. Except the letter had arrived 13 days late. Which meant that if I didn’t drag my ass down to the office the following day, my package would be sent back across the ocean. I didn’t know what to get angry about first: the lateness of the letter or the fact that they had once again confiscated and demanded to see proof of purchase for a package that was a gift. Sigh.

It is at moments like these that one particularly enjoys the convenience of the custom office’s pick-up hours. A whole four and a half hours a day, beginning at 7:30 am, weekdays only. How does anyone with a normal job ever liberate their packages? It is on the way to the Mainz customs office that you start to feel like you may actually, for real this time, be in one of the rings of hell. The signs meant to direct customers into the office have been designed by demons who I can only assume enjoy watching the frustrated, angry humans circle their goal unaware from atop the neighboring buildings. With popcorn. In fact I give hell complete responsibility for all customs offices everywhere.

At the Mainz customs office, the signs that you thought were there to helpfully direct you to its entrance lead you in a circle around the building (right past the entrance, which is tucked away on a narrow, unmarked street), but never point into the tiny street that guards the door. During my first visit I circled three times before noticing two fellows smoking outside of a door down the unmarked street and decided to take a look. The unadventurous might end up circling the building for eternity.

Having been to the customs office three times since, I no longer fall prey to their misleading signs, and instead of circling their building, I cut directly into the alley that leads to their entrance. At least there isn’t a line at 7:30 am.

I handed the woman behind the counter the letter I had been sent about the package. “And did you bring your receipt?” she asked.

“There is no receipt. It’s a present from my uncle,” I replied.

“Oh, ok.” She wandered off with my letter to find the package. After a few minutes she returned and placed a small padded envelope on the counter.

I looked at the label. Uncle Sprinkles had dutifully checked “present” on the customs form glued to the outside of the package. “So why is it that packages that have ‘present’ checked here get confiscated?”

“Oh well, anyone can check ‘present’ on the form, can’t they. And this obviously came from a company.” My uncle sends his packages from the used book store he runs. When the address is written by hand the customs office doesn’t intercept them. But this time he’d put one of the store’s stickers on the outside of the package. Though I do wonder why anyone would think a package addressed to “The Great Bearded One and Gypsy Momma Nikki” would be coming from a company I don’t know. And if the customs forms on packages have become so meaningless that the customs officers themselves no longer believe in them, then what the fuck do we have to fill them out for?

“Well, he owns a used book store,” I explained. “But this isn’t the first package you’ve intercepted recently. Why do my packages keep ending up here?”

She explained about companies again, that they intercept anything that looks like an order if there is no invoice affixed to the outside of the box. That they intercept anything listed as being worth more than 45 euros (I had previously thought that the present limit was 100 euro, but I stand corrected). And they don’t give a damn if you check “present” on the form or not. Oh yeah, and sometimes they intercept packages just because. Just because they like to do random checks and spread as much of their own bad mood around the country as they can.

I left the building with my package, happy to have avoided paying any fees, but still too disgruntled to shake the bad mood. On the bus again, I opened the package to find a zombie movie and a Fahrenheit 451 t-shirt (from these people—aren’t they brilliant?). My mood improved slightly, before I remembered that I could have had the package delivered right to my door two weeks ago when it first arrived in the city and had instead wasted another morning getting to, standing in, and getting home from the customs office. At least now I knew the score. No business address labels, no gifts over 45 euros, and hand grenades for the snarky demons on the roof.

Photo (cc) flickr user nadja.robot

Blogging is a contradictory sport: simultaneously solitary—me, typing alone at my computer—and yet so social—with comments and e-mails coming in from the interesting folks—you—on the other side of this screen. A lot of aspiring expats have sent me questions about how I ended up in Germany over my blogging years, and today I figured that the time had come to put my answers out there in an easy-to-reach place. If five of you bothered asking, then I bet at least ten of you would be interested to know. At least.

These are the top four questions that readers have asked. If any more occur to you, feel free to ask them in the comments, and I will add my answers to the post.

How did you end up in Germany?

This is where I would normally link to my au pair chronicles, which talk about my decision to quit my 9-5 job in publishing to take a job au pairing (ie nannying) for a family in Frankfurt Germany in detail. But I’ve currently got the whole thing down as I’m planning on finishing it (woot!) and republishing the whole thing as a weekly serial throughout the time when I’m going to be trying to figure out the whole “taking care of a baby” thing. So I guess I’m not getting out of explaining it again this time…

The story goes something like this: I graduate college with a degree in English literature. Two weeks after graduation I start my first full-time desk job. Said full-time desk job makes me fucking nuts. A year later—after breaking down in tears in a windowless grey meeting room over a pile of proofs—I decide to look for work abroad. I would have gone anywhere, so I started by looking at a lot of rather serious, scary jobs that I, in retrospect, am glad I didn’t get. On a whim I registered with an au pair placement agency and in two weeks I had an offer to live in Frankfurt with a family of seven. I accepted, quit my job, helped my mom move to a new house, and flew to Germany with a one-way ticket. (Despite the one-way ticket, I was expecting to come back after my year au pairing at the time, no plans of staying forever and ever then. I just didn’t want to have to commit to an exact date.)

Which makes the short, short answer to that question: completely by accident. I had never considering nannying before, and though I enjoyed the babysitting that I did occasionally, I wasn’t that into children. I just wanted a job that would allow me to be abroad and explore Europe. Au pairing was what fell into my lap, so an au pair I became. A German family responded to my application, so I moved to Germany. Au pairing turned out to be a huge pain in the ass, but it also was incredibly interesting and got me free trips to both Dubai and Cyprus, so in the end it was a pretty good score.

By the end of that first year I’d started to feel at home in Frankfurt, so I decided to stay and teach English.

How much money did it cost you to get there?

Because of the au pair job—which included room, board, health insurance, and visa organization—I didn’t have a lot of initial costs. I already had a passport, so I bought an adapter for my laptop (probably about 20 bucks) and a plane ticket (about 400 dollars I think).

After my year au pairing I went back to the US to travel for a few months, then returned to get my own life in Germany started. I stayed at my then-boyfriend’s apartment while looking for my own place and needed about 1000 euro (I think, my memory for detail on this one is a bit foggy) for the deposit on my apartment, as well as money (something between 300 and 400 dollars I reckon) to get me through that first month of apartment and job hunting.

How did you get a visa?

My very first visa—made out to “can stay and au pair for one year”—was incredibly easy. My host mother drove me around to all the necessary offices, filled out the forms, and paid the fees. American citizens—of which I am one—are allowed to stay in Germany for three months on a tourist visa, so I didn’t even need to do anything before arriving. I had my official one-year au pairing visa in my passport by November (I arrived in September).

My second visa was a bit more trying—I applied on the basis of having work as a freelance English teacher. If you’re considering doing the same, here’s what you’ll need (or what I needed in 2005): letters from your employers estimating how much money you will make working for them each month, proof of a bank account, a rental agreement (proving that you have a place to live and informing them of your rent costs), and proof of health insurance. If you only have one employer, you might still get through, but it is a really good idea to have at least two when applying for this type of visa (as otherwise the German government would prefer that the company hire you for real and pay into things like social health care and retirement funds for you). Many of my colleagues at inlingua, my main employer at the time, had only one employer and were given visas for six months. I had two and was immediately given a visa for three years.

Problems I encountered: the people at the Frankfurt aliens office are incredibly unfriendly and a lot of health insurance companies and banks don’t want to do business with you unless you already have a visa. Can’t get a visa without a bank account, can’t get a bank account without a visa. (Sparkasse, to name names, wouldn’t give me an account without one, but Dresdner, now Commerz did without blinking.) Which later became, can’t get health insurance without a visa, can’t get a visa without health insurance. (In this case I managed to convince the insurance agent that this was fucking ridiculous and to sell me a policy anyway.) Can’t get an apartment without a visa? Well, there I didn’t have a problem. My landlord was a frail old man used to renting to students, and he didn’t ask me any visa questions.

My advice to anyone trying to do this themselves is to get themselves down to the appropriate Amt and to ask for an application. Could be that requirements have changed since I went through the process, and it could be that each state has different hoops for you to jump through. Oh, and they really like it if you can speak German. (Bring someone with you to translate if you can’t speak German and can find a buddy willing to help. This will make them like you more.)

My third visa, as many of you have already read, is a “married to a German person” visa. That required a a good deal of paperwork (that then had to be expensively translated), but involved dealing with the very friendly Mainz aliens office instead of the “go home foreigners” aliens office in Frankfurt. So I might actually consider it the easier of the three. That visa is for three years, and if we are still married at the end of those three years, I’ll get a “stay in Germany forever” visa and can finally kiss the whole visa process goodbye.

Did you learn German before you went? Or did you learn it as you went along?

Before I moved to Germany I had already taken nine years of German classes (took it in high school and minored in it in college) under my belt. And yet I learned more German in my first six months here than in those nine years put together. So I’d say it was a little bit of both. During my first year here I also took some refresher courses at the Volkshochschule (VHS). Otherwise it was all trial by fire and practice, practice, practice.

If any of you have other questions about getting set up as an expat (or if I didn’t explain something in enough detail), leave ‘em in the comments, and I’ll add them to this post.

One hundred and ninety seven years ago Sunday Andrew Jackson and company defeated some British folks in the final major battle of the War of 1812. What they didn’t know was that a peace treaty had been signed in December, and the war was already over. And so is life without instant digital communication technology. Sometimes you just keep fighting wars that have been over for weeks because no one has gotten around to telling you yet.

Two years ago Sunday the Beard and I got married at the Mainz Standesamt. You see, in Germany you don’t get married all at once, with the legal and spiritual/preferred bits glued together. You always go to the Standesamt first. Then you can get married in a church or a pretty beach-side castle later. Sort of takes the wind out of the second celebration though, in my opinion. And since we weren’t getting married for the usual reasons, we figured we’d have at it in one go. We told all our friends that the theme would be “exaggeration” and to come to the Standesamt wearing the most ridiculous costumes they cared to be seen in in public.

The result was a sight to behold. Our Platz-mates built us two shopping-cart chariots, which we brought with us in the bus on the ride into town. (We had been planning on taking the tractor, but a few legal details about driving tractors with trailers full of people proved too big an obstacle.) There were sequins and wigs and fake noses and silver wings and big hats. There were even four members of a Clockwork Orange crew, complete with jock straps and baseball bats. The people at the Standesamt didn’t seem to know what to make of the sight so early on a Friday morning (did you know it costs extra to get married in the afternoon?!).

I wore a borrowed, thrifted dress that my cousin mailed to me from the United States (she has a lot of neat dresses, so she showed them to me on skype, and I picked out my favorite), and the Beard’s entire outfit came from a free box. Except for the top hat, the goggles, and the doom stick; those were borrowed too. We both had long red sash/cape/scarf things that had been Mama Beard’s curtains in another life. I wore no make up, did my own hair, and the night before the ceremony we went to the sauna for a bit of that after-sauna glow. There was no planning to speak of, there were no invitations, and the only money we spent was on the paperwork fees required by the State for the event. My bouquet was made of dumpstered roses, garlic blossoms, and parsley. Oh and I think I bought a new package of pink hair dye.

The ceremony was…amusing. The man on duty for marriages that day really didn’t know what to make of us. It was hard to tell if we were pissing him off with the freak-show atmosphere or if he was having a hard time not laughing himself, but he treated us to an extra-long speech about togetherness and the sanctity of marriage. It was hard not to laugh in his face, which is evident in most of the pictures of the Beard and I during his harangue. “Try living with seventeen people and then get back to me about togetherness,” I muttered to someone during his speech. Maybe he was just a sadist.

The funny thing about getting married in another language is that I never said “I do,” which to an American-grown brain is slightly strange. Because I hadn’t spent my whole life seeing weddings in Germany on the tv, I didn’t even register the final question as THE question. “Ja ja ja,” I think I said, just trying to hurry him through his spiel. Whoops. The Beard had the foresight (well, native-speaker advantage) to make his yes a bit more theatrical and climactic.

After the ceremony we all poured out onto the street for confetti throwing and (further) champagne drinking. Someone who knows us very well even threw a couple of spring onions in place of rice. We mounted our shopping cart chariots and were pushed off into the cold of a January noon. A police car followed us for a while as we passed the train station and headed up the path towards the university, but eventually decided we were harmless and continued on their way.

Somewhere along the path leading up the hill to home, an elderly gentlemen stopped to ask us what the fuss was about. When he heard that we’d just gotten married he turned to me and wished me many healthy children. I told him to fuck off. I hate the assumption that the decision to get married and the decision to have children have anything to do with each other. It’s bad enough that we maintain a cultural tradition requiring the State’s stamp on love and committment, but to act as if that governmental stamp is a permission slip to reproduce? Not my bag. He walked away, confused.

Back home and packed into the house at the front of our Wagenplatz, several people got behind the bar (these are the moments when being involved in an autonomous space are incredibly convenient), speeches were made, and three vegan cakes were served (among other things that I no longer remember—all the food was brought potluck style and without prompting). I put on a 20-pound, sequined white wedding dress (courtesy of another friend and the flea market) for twenty minutes to round out the whole bridal experience before changing for a third time so I could spend the next fourteen hours dancing to rock and roll. It was the best party of the year, and by the next morning we’d both lost our wedding rings.

And for your viewing pleasure (don’t mind all the swirls and blank spots, the Beard likes a bit of privacy):

Before the wedding and just after cracking a wedding weizen beer while getting ready:

Trying to be serious in the face of a ridiculous speech from the master of ceremonies:

Official marriage smooch:

On the way home on my wedding shopping-cart chariot:

One of our three cakes, baked by friends, with a dumpster-dived marzipan coating:

Ah yes, and if you want to read something else I’ve written about our wedding, take a look at this: “tangled up in blue”. And furthermore, that title is from a song about the Battle of New Orleans, which I have had stuck in my head since I began writing this post.