German Bureaucracy - 17.9.12

No shofars today, but it was a new start for me.  My internship has officially started.  It was kind of a slow start, though.  I got up and went to the train station to buy a monthly pass, but the Hamburg transportation system won't sell you a Monatskarte unless they put it in a little envelope with a passport picture in it.  Oh, and of course they don't accept my BYU ID card as proof that I'm a student.  So I had to wait until a photography shop opened, pay for four passport pictures, and then pay the full price to have them put a ticket that doesn't have my name on it into an envelope that also doesn't have my name on it, but it certainly has my picture and a serial number.

I finally got to Kaltenkirchen and I found my office. My coworker Ralf gave me a tour of the office building aka his house. The office is in the top floor, and it's quite nice. We went over the schedule for the next few weeks, he made some phone calls, and I installed a bunch of software on my work computer. When his kids got home from school, we all had lunch together. I took the train back to Quickborn and registered my residence with the government and got a little piece of paper with a stamp on it. Hooray!