I did it. My journey has come to an end.

The experience was amazing. Having seen so much of the city and getting to know all these people made me see the variety of the wonderful city of Berlin. Now, it has come to a close.

Oh no I’m not leaving Berlin! No, I only just finalised the process of moving here on paper and finding a permanent place to live.

I got you there, didn’t I? Honestly though, what I wrote above is not that far from the truth. In the next couple blogs, I’ll be sharing my experiences from signing the contract for my new job until now, a day after I moved into my permanent place of residence.

This first blog will be mostly about the paperwork involved, and, as you might have guessed from my first blog, German authorities are quite the sticklers for detail and papers.

So, where to start.

Step one, registering with the city of Berlin

I was told that, when I get to Berlin, I have about 20 days from the day of arriving, until the moment I need to have myself registered in Berlin or I’ll be considered an illegal worker and some nasty things will happen to me (or at least my tax rate). Turns out, it wasn’t 20 days; it was immediate. The rest is in my first blog as mentioned, so the Bourne Identität adventure (where I play bootleg-Jason Bourne) you can read there.

However, I will now introduce you into the following Kafkaesque situation regarding with regards to finding a place (that isn’t a cupboard under a staircase in the same building of an up-and-coming IPA brewery founded by three totally promising art students who will, like, change the beer-game, at the edge of Marzahn).

• To get a permanent room anywhere, you need a credit report,

  

  called SCHUFA report (that isn’t me yelling it, that’s the actual name). This privately held company gets to check the history of your bank account and see if you don’t owe anyone €13.739 for brony miscellania (if you don’t know what Bronies are, look it up, it is a wonderful part of the internet you have to read about to believe). So far, things make sense.

• However, this bank account has to be German, which could be an issue if you are, you know, not German. Due to all kinds of difficult regulations, even if I wanted to give access to my Dutch bank account to show my SCHUFA buddies what my piggy bank looks like, they aren’t allowed to.

10 points for the person who can see the next problem coming.

• You guessed it! To have a German bank account, with nearly every bank, you need a German address. Congratulations, you’re screwed.

So how to break this cycle? I went with N26, a German banking startup that allows you to register on a Dutch address, pretty much the only one that allows such a thing. Additionally, to back up the fairly useless SCHUFA credit score I would get, I added eight years of proof that I had paid my rent without delay (called Mietschuldenfreiheit, which gets you triple word value in Scrabble), along with my contract, a letter of intent, a copy of my passport, my last four pay slips, a lovely cover letter and my DNA sequence.

With this majestic stack of papers, I would be welcomed in the arms of German landlords as I had shown be fiscally responsible. That last part obviously didn’t happen, or I wouldn’t be writing this three months later, but I’ll talk about that in the next blog.

However, we’re not there yet. The whole reason why the German government wants me to be registered somewhere, is so I can get health insurance which is paid nearly in full within your income tax and before your net salary. This means that after getting your registration done in Germany, you have to get health insurance. Okay, fine, I can do that. After having to explain 16 different people how to spell my name (and that includes written text, still getting it wrong), I got word that they would put in a request for a Tax ID, or Steuer ID. This in turn had to come from the national pension registration office. Because, you know, that makes total sense.

In the next Berlin blog I’ll talk a bit more about the actual applying for rooms and all that, but now that I’ve settled into my new place, I intend to diversify the blogs a little bit with more about tech, entrepreneurship and all that. Please leave a comment and tell me if you have questions about Berlin or if you have something you’d like me to cover or explain.