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We have moved on from a waltz to a Thuringian Slide. There is now a good layer of snow on the ground, the temperature has dropped again, and even the Germans are starting to say it's cold. At the train station this morning, I saw a guy with skis, and he already had the shoes on, which leads me to believe that he will pop out of the train like some newborn baby and immediately ski to his destination. My only question is: where the hell is he going that he needs skis?!

 I didn't think it could snow at 27 degrees, that it might be too cold. I was wrong. And to those of you who imitate polar bears six months out of the year and snicker at my ignorance, I have this to say to you: You spend half your life living like Polar Bears. So there. And I know I am among you now, but I'm working out a deal to carry around my own personal sphere of summer, my tropical bubble, which no one else can enter. I have connections. I'll make it happen.

What's odd is my refusal to wear "normal" winter shoes like most people, stylish boots or trekking shoes. The cool kids of course insist on wearing their cool shoes, and they somehow manage to stay upright. I prefer my clogs. If people know me, they know I often wear clogs. I have six pairs of them now, and am quite pleased with them.  When I started slipping and sliding in my winter shoes, I decided to give the clogs a try. Couldn't be much worse, I figured. I was right. Actually, I was off by a few positivity points. The clogs function better. They have a better Profil, which I would simply translate as "tread" or "grip." Maybe we also use the word "profile."  I'll have to look it up. I am used to walking in them, so they don't bother me. I feel sort of silly walking around in them, but I realize, hey they're Danskos. They're made by Nordic people. They are warmer than my boots, easier to take off so I can warm my little toes, and don't leave me any colder than anything else I have in my closet. I'm sticking with the clogs, for now. When it gets touch-and-go, I'll see what happens.

So here I sit in the office, in my stocking feet, wondering what the day has in store for me. I am going to go to fencing at the new club tonight, if it's open. It should be. I am curious as to what the people are like.  Generally fencer's are a nice, albeit socially awkward/geeky/weird and eclectic group of people. A lot of engineers, teachers, lawyers, people who enjoy and revel in order.

I also still have to switch the power over to my name, which, I found out yesterday, involves yet another form, an Übergabeprotokoll, a form you're supposed to get when you get the keys to the apartment.  It states the exact readings for power, water, gas, all sorts of little details that I could really give a shit about. My agent forgot that. Or maybe he did give it to me, and I simply threw it with horror into the stack of letters, forms and official notices I have received in the last 6 weeks.  I hate paperwork, with a passion known only to people who love their automatic rifles so much, they go to bed with them at night. This means I chose the wrong country to live in.

Germans have more words for the term "form," (as in, "fill out this form"), than any other language I know: das Formular, der Vordruck (pre-printed form), Formblatt, Formularblatt, Formularseite, Fragebogen (form, questionnaire), Bogen (sheet of paper), Unterlagen (forms and supplementary materials). I'm sure I've missed some, and I omitted several compound nouns, which would make the list too long to finish in one blog entry.

I remember the first time I had to fill out a pile of forms (by hand, in triplicate, and this was only six years ago). I called a friend of mine, Nina, to come over and help me fill them out. We both sat there for an hour and a half trying to figure out what they wanted from me.  Like most Germans, Nina did her best, said it would be sent back in three weeks any way, because we'd forgotten to tick a box somewhere, and then we could fill them out again, hopefully correctly the second time around. The forms were for a job teaching at a junior high school, or it's rough equivalent.

All Germans melt down when they know they have to fill out forms. No one understands them. This is due to specialization.  They decided that only 1 percent of the population should really know what's being said, so that when people sign away their house or their first-born, they don't know it. It just makes the entire process easier for everyone. 

And it's not just legalese, like we have in the States.  This would make American lawyers curl into a fetal position and take to drink, more likely heroin. This is is nuclear-level bureaucracy, something that could be used as a weapon of torture.  Instead of waterboarding, we should should just plop someone directly in the middle of an administrative office in Germany and ask them to fill out those 2,000 forms on the desk.  They would sell out their own grandmother in five minutes.

When I got my job here, I had a couple of forms to fill out.  The person from HR sent the attachments with a small note: "Don't be frightened. It's not as bad as it looks."

I was frightened.

Here's what the final product looked like. Notice the whiskey bottle in the background:

And our time is up.