"Papers, Please"

Some, but not all, of my papers. In Germany, you are nothing without your papers.
You need papers to do stuff and you get papers for doing stuff.
Save them all. 

Long ago there was blog that showed flat lay photos of objects people would grab from their home if it was on fire. They photographed their most important, prized possessions – the things they couldn't live without. 

They were mostly designers, so the items they'd save were typically designer-ish: sunglasses, laptops, and hard drives. An awful lot of handguns appeared in the careful arrangements because, well, it was an American blog.

Put in the same situation in Germany, I would grab people before possessions and then I would grab my papers, all my important papers, because you are nobody in Germany without your papers.

When you arrive to Germany, you must register at the city's civil office. They give you a paper, an Anmeldung, that says you do indeed live where you say you live. You will need this for everything. If you lose it, no one will believe you exist, because they don't know if you really have a home. There's no paper to prove it.

You will sign a contract at your job. You must hold on to this. Your landlord will want to see it. And to get your Anmeldung, your landlord must give you a copy of your rental agreement. So, you can't get one paper without the other paper. 

You will show most of these papers when you open a bank account – you won't remember which papers you need, so you will bring them all to the bank, just in case. 

You will need the bank account to get paid by your job and pay your landlord. You will get papers from both: payslips and invoices. You must save these papers to prove people pay you and that you pay people. You may need your bank papers for later, but you don't know for what, so you keep them just in case the need arises.

As you bank with your bank, they will print out records of your transactions and mail them to you. You should keep those papers too, because, well, you might need them when someone official asks for them.

Did you keep those pay slips I mentioned earlier? Good. You need those papers to file your income tax statement. You will need more papers for your taxes, like receipts, statements, and bills of sale. 

After you file your taxes, they will send you a statement stating what they did with your tax papers. Keep that paper too. You should also keep a paper copy of your original tax return, just in case someone official asks for it. 

All these papers go somewhere. A box or a binder or somewhere safe. Because if you move, you will need to prove it with papers at the civil office and update your Anmeldung (remember that important piece of paper?), after you get new contract papers from your landlord.

If you renew your work permit, you need to go to the Pension Office and show a bunch of your papers to get another piece of paper that proves you've been paying into the pension fund. If you're like me, and they recorded you as a woman, they will correct that error in the system and give you a piece of paper saying that a piece of paper has been sent to someone upstairs who will correct that error in the records.

If you lose your job, you will go to the job agency and register as a jobseeker. In order to do this, you will need most of your papers. Make sure you have every single one of those papers. Your EU Blue Card comes with a piece of paper too big to fit in your wallet. It stays at home safe. You might forget that piece of paper and will have to return the next day with all your papers and that little piece of paper to get registered, for which you are given another piece of paper, for your records.

And so, if I am unlucky enough to see my home burn down, I will get everyone out and then run back into the inferno to rescue my papers, because what good is a laptop, disk drive, sunglasses, or a handgun if I don't have my papers in Germany.

The Strange Places of 2017

The first week in January is a week of looking. Looking at the work inbox in amazement that so many people were sending emails over the holidays. Looking at the window at 4pm to see the sun has set long ago. Looking at the year that went by before looking at the year ahead.

Here are some (not all, that would be a long blog) highlights from the year that was 2017. 

Soaking in the Cave Bath at Miskolc-Tapolca. 

We started the New Year in Miskolc-Tapolca, where we visited the famed Cave Baths. What stuck with me on our trip was our Lillefüred visit. It was a foggy, cold day – cold enough for the lake to freeze, so we could walk out onto it. 

Again and again, when we came for family visits to Hungary, we returned to the country's beautiful east side for hikes, wine drinking, and heritaging. 

The view from Füzer Castle.

Kata's Christmas gift for me were tickets to a Düsseldorf hockey game. I'm a Canadian cliche, but I'm okay with that.

Great seats, too.

We ventured into the Netherlands twice this year, to Rotterdam and a great road trip to The Hague, Haarlem, and Kinderdijk. It might have to do with my Dutch heritage or that every bar and cafe offers cutting boards with meat, cheese, and deep-fried nibbles to snack on as you drink your beer, but I feel like I can't visit that country enough.

When the sun comes out in Rotterdam, you get out.

Our time in Canada always feels brief, so I pack the schedule with friend and family time, and the getaway so Kata can discover my homeland. This year, we made it to Ottawa, where we were easily able to combine Discover Walks with some family time with the locals.

Family time = Photo Time 

I had a month without work and a freelancer friend in Hamburg had some time on his hands. We met halfway between our cities in Bremen for a mid-week getaway. Bremen is an old Hanseatic city, with a lovely Gothic old town. But it's also a student town with a energetic artsy vibe. We discovered this because the only good bars open on a Tuesday were the student drinking holes, which we frequented.

The entrance to Art Deco Street.

The oldest guys at the student bar always take the most selfies.

Kata and I discovered the Eiffel National Park. I wanted to write a longer, stand-alone post, but I couldn't find a story, theme, or thread for 200 words. I'll get to it later, but it's a wild, big, beautiful corner of North-Rhine-Westphalia. 

Walking around old lava.

Watching a friend get married, twice, in Toronto and Paris.

Well look at that, holding up the bar well past last call again.

My parents came to visit Europe. This was a big deal, and a lot of fun.

Walking through Aachen with the Euro-Trippers.

And this happened.

Leaving Dublin, Seeing Ireland

Deeper and deeper we drove through the Burren...

We had a First World Problem: My employer discourages carrying over holidays into the new year, so I had a week of vacation time that had to used. This sparked a search for a reasonably-priced tropical vacation, which didn’t seem to exist for us. We moved our search north, then farther north, then more north and found a deal to Dublin.

Dublin was on our bucket lists of cities to visit, but we had always thought of it was a weekender. With a week, we could go further afield to the Cliffs of Moher, which meant leaving Dublin and spending a few days in Galway.

When we arrived in Dublin, we did some sightseeing – Books of Kells, pubs, the Temple Bar, more pubs. After a day, we felt ready to leave Dublin for a day trip into the countryside. We spread out a handful of brochures from the tourist office and started reading.

There was a long trip to Belfast and the Giant’s Steps and the spot where they film the King’s Road in Game of Thrones – this thing about places where famous shows or movies are filmed would come up often on the tours. There were trips to Howth, which seemed much greener than Hoth, and to Cork. We chose a trip into the Wild Wicklow Mountains.

It wasn’t a bad choice. We drove along the old Military Road– built by the British to catch Irish rebels hiding in the mountains and now bringing tourists like us to locations where they film Vikings and the ruins of the Glendalough monastery.

We had the monastery to ourselves, since other tourists avoid the soggy Irish cold for warmer places that we couldn’t afford to fly to. It was also, to use some Irish slang, a ‘Soft Day’ – it was drizzly and mild, not rainy and cold. It was the perfect day to walk about the Medieval monastery. The park was surrounded by the tree-covered walls of the valley and the monastery's stone ruins were often shrouded in rolling mist.

Glendalough's ruined stone cathedral.

A "Soft Day" is a good day for a Discovery Walk around Glendalough.

We drove higher into the mountains. Away from modern civilization, deeper into the peat bogs and heath. The clouds got heavier and the fog thickened, so the landscape seemed almost primordial. 

Out of the bus' windows, we see shallow trenches through the mist where the turf cutters once did their work. From here, they dug up the preserved bodies of kings sacrificed to the gods when crops had failed.

Then the sun cleared as we came to some stone bridge from some movie you didn’t see, P.S. I Love You, which was a big deal for most people on our tour bus. Seriously, it was selfie city.

Very happy people on some bridge some from P.S. I Love You movie.

After a return to Dublin, for more pubs and pints and potatoes, we took a train to Galway with a long list of tips for more pubs, live music, culture, and Discovery Walks from an Irish friend we know in Budapest.

Our mission in Galway was the Cliffs of Moher, so we stopped by the tourist office to book a tour the next day. The lady widened her eyes in surprise. “No,” she said. “The weather will be awful. They have flood warnings all over the country.” She gave us a look as if we should've known that – the Irish pay close attention to their weather. That day was the only day we could go so, hoping for some of the Irish luck, we booked the tour for what might be a flood day.

The rain lightened overnight, but it was by no means a "Soft Day." It was cloudy and it was raining off and on. But all the fog and clouds just added to the ancient, neolithic feel of the landscape we were driving through.

The Poulnabrone dolmen, a portal tomb older than the pyramids.

The name of this place was the Burren, and it was barren. The hills were covered with grey limestone with the occasional granite boulder left by retreating glaciers eons ago. It felt older than old. Overgrown stone ruins dotted the landscape. There were some farms, but we saw no one out and about.

Somehow, people have been eking out a living here for thousands of years. We visited an tomb that was older than the pyramids. When we arrived, our bus driver warned us that to avoid curses, we should not walk around it counter-clockwise or take any rocks with us.


It was windy and cold and rainy. So, while half the tourists stayed in the bus, a small group of us ventured out to the Poulnabrone dolmen. Once again, with the time of year, we had the site to ourselves... aside from the cows that chewed their grass and watched us as we walked around the haunting stack of rocks clockwise and snapped photos.

Walking on the Karst 

As we approached the Cliffs of Moher, the tour guide kept looking towards the ocean as he drove, pointing out the mist rolling in. He said we might not even see the cliffs. Sometimes, he said, the fog was so thick, you couldn't even see in front of you.

We got to the cliffs and, to our relief, we could see them. They might be majestic and awe-inspiring and completely Instagram-friendly on one of those rare sunny days in Ireland. But in the horizontal rain and the howling wind, with patches of fog rolling in, the Cliffs of Moher were one of the most beautiful things you could lay your eyes on.

They tower hundreds of feet over the ocean below, stretching on in either direction, like stone waves laid down vertically, one cliff rolling out after another in the distance,

In the rain, the ocean takes on a grey colour, which makes the green clifftops and black-ish brown of the cliff faces stand out even more. As you take it all in you see the layers of limestone on the cliff-face, the green mossy patches, and the little blips that are people standing at their edges.

Of course, I feel lucky. We would not have seen all of these wonderful things if we only went to Dublin for a weekend. If we hadn't had that week of vacation to burn, we'd have stayed in Dublin for a weekend and miss out on the rest of the country. I'll take a First World Problem if it means an incredible trip like that.