Freizügigkeitsbescheinigung, anyone?

After a month in my new beau­ti­ful home, I even­tu­ally gave up and acknow­ledged that I will not be learn­ing Ger­man by myself.

I went for the stand­ard path: go to a school, take a course. Fol­low­ing the recom­mend­a­tion of many, I decided for the Volk­shoch­schule, and checked their web­site. German-only. And no, Google trans­late is not of much help.

I went phys­ic­ally to the school — these days this is some­thing bizarre, walk­ing to the place instead of doing everything online? — and using my close-to-null Ger­man⁽¹⁾ I man­aged to get dir­ec­tions to the actual lan­guage branch⁽²⁾ and join the queue («snake», in Ger­man) of mul­ti­col­oured anti multi-aged people wait­ing for information.

Well, once inside, I did a quick Ger­man test, and the teacher told me (in Eng­lish) the doc­u­ments I needed for the regis­tra­tion. That was basic­ally one: the Freizü­gigkeits­bes­chein­i­gung.

I get this all of the time: how am I sup­posed to get a grip on this lan­guage if the words are, like, 40 syl­lables long?

The next day was me in the U-Bahn going to the Bür­geramt⁽³⁾ and try­ing to read, let alone mem­or­ise, the 27-letter-word describ­ing the paper I needed.

Any way, all went good, and I have to add that — des­pite Ger­man people con­stantly com­plain­ing about their bur­eau­cracy — I was sur­prised by the speed of the pro­cess. The lady at the civic centre dis­covered that I was not registered in Ber­lin — I didn’t know it was compulsory! — and so she did my Anmel­dung⁽⁴⁾ as well. Total time, exclud­ing the «snake», of course: 5 to 10 minutes⁽⁵⁾.

Now I am offi­cially a Ber­lin citizen.

And, fol­low­ing this other post, here you have the fore­cast for the next few days. Quite a dif­fer­ent one.

Weather update for the next few days

By the way, I dis­covered days later that the Freizü­gigkeits­bes­chain­i­gung is a cer­ti­fic­ate of free move­ment of cit­izens of the European Union.

1. That is, basic­ally, ‘Ein Bier, bitte’, ‘Wo ist deine Schwester?’ and ‘Karl-Heinz Rum­menigge’. ^
2. That explains a few things: in my head, the whole school was a lan­guage school, thus mak­ing the German-only web­site a bit too extreme. Instead, they teach pretty much every sub­ject, silly me! ^
3. That Google trans­lates in Italian either as «civica uffi­cio» or «Bür­geramt» depend­ing on the cap­ital let­ter. ^
4. Regis­tra­tion. ^
5. Most of the time was indeed used by the Bür­geramt employee try­ing to spell my name and my birth­place. ^