A few odds and ends to close out this week.1. Paperwork Chase Race Standings:
We have a new leader in the race to see who has the oddest instructions for filing paperwork: Italy is the current front-runner. But that’s not to say that Germany hadn’t been giving Italy a run for its money in the “who-has-the-most-paperwork” race.  People here in Germany quip that there’s at least one form you have to fill for everything little you want to do here … and if there’s not a form, there’s probably a form to fill out to request one.

Truly, that’s only a slight exaggeration.

So, while Italy certainly had its fair share of the forms (anyone remember my TV Tax Tandems in Bolzano?), Germany didn’t seem all that far behind, and I would have said that they were about even when it came to finding unusual and/or odd ways to file paperwork.

However, today we got the instructions for how officially to tell the town of Bolzano that we no longer live there. There were several options listed for what you could do, including one that read something like this:

Option 2: You can use the electronic identification information on your residence card to access the system and submit your request to change your residency address that way.
At the moment this system does not work and thus this is not an option.

Now see,that’s a new one: telling me about a hypothetical option that I might have been able to use, which of course I can’t use because it isn’t really an option. I’m glad they listed that in the instructions. Very helpful.

Paperwork Chase Race: Advantage, Italy.

2. However, the paperwork that really kept me occupied all afternoon was trying to book the hotels and car rentals that we need for our U.S. trip in August. While not nearly as complicated as the airline stuff the other day, there are far too many rental car companies that assume if you are connecting to their site from Germany, you necessarily only want to rent a car in Germany. Which would be fine, except that manually overriding both the language and the default country selected for the site had an unfortunate tendency  to crash either my web browser or my computer. Really, I enjoyed the opportunity to constantly restart my machine and also to fill in the forms again, and again. Really.

Of course, it’s not just the web designers of these sites that make things more complicated than they need to be.

For example, one company’s rules stated:

Non-U.S. and non-Canadian residents are required to present a valid driver’s license and a passport from their home country. 

Now, Chris and I have German driver’s licenses, but U.S. passports.  So, does that sentence mean both documents need to be “from [your] home country”, or can I really just interpret it as meaning that the passport has to be from your home country, but the valid driver’s license can be from anywhere?

Yes, OK, maybe I’m over thinking this. But  I worry about these things: I used to teach Linguistics 101 to undergraduates who didn’t understand how a sentence like that could actually have two different meanings. Which is critical for them to understand if they are now employed as a bleary-eyed, underpaid rental car agency clerk who understands the sentence only one way,  and who thinks they can’t rent to us when we arrived at the airport in Orlando, because we don’t have German passports to go with our German driver’s licenses.

I’m sure you see why I worry about these things.

Anyway, finding that on the first car rental site mean it was on to the next company to check their regulations. Four hours of that kind of inquiry and investigation this afternoon ended with both of the cars cars booked for the August trip (yay!),  but with no more photos from Italy ready for posting. Ah well … life is all still an adventure, just sometimes not quite as exciting as others.

Hopefully more photos from Italy make it up on the blog on Monday. I’ll try to deny myself any more paperwork fun until after I get the next batch of photos organized. 😉

3. I do at least have one photo to share today – or rather, 3 variations of one photo. It’s another one I took yesterday here in Tübingen.  It wasn’t of the boat race, though. It’s actually just a quick test shot I made before the race began, in order to choose camera settings for the available light. Rain had started falling just moments before the race began, and since I’m a sucker for photos of rain drops, my test shot was of course not just of the river and the riverbank, but also of the rain drops on the water.

I experimented on the computer just by turning the photo this way and that, as is my recent wont. One thing I find striking when I look at the sideways ones is that I can’t always tell which way the perspective shift is headed, toward the back or toward the front. As I look at the image, the perspective seems to shift before my eyes. Intriguing. See what you think and have a nice weekend … see you back here on Monday!