*clutches heart and hyperventilates* DAS ENDE ist noch nicht vorbei

I was gonna buy a ticket to some little multi-band "Tribute to Die Ärzte" event her in Berlin, sounded fun. And so I check out the Badeimster page to see if there's anything official about it, they list DÄ parties and whatnot sometimes

And what do I see? DIE ÄRZTE HAVE ANNOUNCED A NEW TOUR FOR 2012!!! With ticket sales starting in 2 days

*makes whimpering noises at the thought of almost having missed this*

For those readers now confused, Die Ärzte (die beste band der welt ♥) are a German punk-rock band that I've been a great fan of for ten years now* and they always have GREAT concerts. And the Berlin concerts in particular tend to sell out in 0.2 seconds or something like that.

Well. We can't have that, so at midnight on the appropriate date I'll be F5-ing my computer like mad.

But! There is a cloud on the sky - my debit card was refused when I tried to buy the "tribute to DÄ" ticket, for unclear reasons. There's money in the account and my login works spiffily... but I think that because the German website isn't equipped for our fucking Swedish credit card e-security measures, the bank refused the transfer. Can't have that >_> If worst comes to worst, I'll ask my sister or someone to buy the tickets from Sweden and just fork over the money, but first I'll try to solve it here. Deutsche Bank apparantly has offices in Sweden too, so after my visit to Burgeramt, off I go to see if I can get a EC-card. Hopefully, those work online. Or I'll just have to pay for a credit card too, I need to be able to order online tickets and stuff!

But still...

OMG DIE ÄRZTE ARE TOURING WHILE I'M IN GERMANY YAY YAY YAY!!!!

*It was slightly odd to realize that, since it is now exactly ten years since 9/11 and I sat in a living room in Erkner watching what happened on the screens, that means it's been ten years since my first time living in Germany

The Return of the Dread German Bureaucracy

a.k.a. The Exciting Sequel to DM Trying to Register as a Resident of Berlin. Subtitle: The Rebels Exchange Student Is Victorius!

So, today after some online research and preparation, ( off I went to visit my third third Citizens Office... )

Feeling emboldened by this sucess (btw this paperwork has cost me a total of 4,5 hours of waiting, some phonecalls, four subway tickets [of which 3 were basically wasted] and considerably aggravation) and some pizza I bought in the subway and put away in record time, I decided I'd attack the next hurdle to a free and painless life in Germany: Getting a bank account and an EC-card.

( Because whoever said VISA works everywhere, lied )

*phew* I feel much better after this tl;dr whine. Although I thought it was supposed to take three months before you got to the "raarh stupid foreign customs why must you be so aggravated"-stage.
Ok, this is a bit of a hyperbole. I know Swedish government agencies can also be painfully slow - after all, I had a delightful five-hourish wait for my new passport this summer - but at least they are doing their very best so that you never actually have to park your butt in their offices, so I'm not used to quite this level of aggrevation. Not quite.

* obligatory whinage of Swede used to do 99% of government contact electronically/by phone now follows: OH LORD WHY CAN'T THE WORLD START USING OBLIGATORY NATIONAL ID NUMBERS ALREADY