wartezimmer

This morning I had to go to the local tax office...My first head to head encounter with European Bureaucracy.

When I first arrived in Munich, I 'announced' my address and religion. I marked Roman Catholic because I figured it might help with the forthcoming visa app. I later learned that this flippant move would cost me an extra 3-9% of my forthcoming taxable income. So today we went. 3rd floor, a fluorescent room without an attendant. A little box with a button that you press in order to receive a piece of paper with your number. So you sit down and you wait looking out at the train yard, this stupid (albeit) real plant in the corner that seems to large, these metal benchseats, the people beside you whose only imaginable function is to delay your reaching the man behind the door and eventual flight to wherever. A half hour passes. People come go. The faces are now less familiar, fresher.

Suddenly my turn. H. is with me since i only speak ein wenig german. The official seems annoyed by my dumbness despite the fact that we have taken this fact into due consideration. He asks for my passport, whether I've been baptized (I lie or rather H. lies for me) he says we can go to the first floor in the next building in order to claim the error and we will maybe avoid the 30 euro fee. We pass the foreigners' office on the way over, its foreboding lines reminding me of the challenges further ahead. the faces and smells ... but luckily this is not our intended destination today. We continue to the burgersboro. Another box, room plant window and set of homo sapiens sapiens. This time there are four possible rooms and four corresponding signs displaying the currently recognized personnumbers. When the number changes a green light flashes next to it and an arpeggiated major chord of sine waves plays out, slightly detuning as in their decay. We reach the woman behind the door. Same questions different responses. Friendlier. I toy with her colored pencils and look at a child's drawing of a cat on her wall. She prints out numerous pages, fiddles with her silver sparkle ring and eventually asks me to sign a statement. I sign it proudly, in defiance of the peculiar and grotesque orthography emanating from my open passport.