2 years in Germany, impressions after moving from New Zealand

Almost 2 years since my wife and I moved to Germany from New Zealand. I want to describe the impressions and several life hacks, useful at first. All this can be found on the Internet, but rarely in one place. Perhaps, in part, everything will be too specific for Munich / Bavaria. The text is long!

How does the relocation happen if there is already a working contract with a German company? First, a special visa is obtained at the German Embassy, ​​usually valid for 3 months. It is advisable to immediately receive the same for the whole family - they say, then it is more difficult to do. An embassy employee asked my wife for either a certificate of basic knowledge of the German language or a university diploma. It seems that nothing was required from me except a passport and a contract. The German embassy in downtown Wellington is just lovely. No queues, the employee on the mobile phone calls back and asks when it is convenient to call them.

Immediately upon arrival in Germany I had to fill out a bunch of tax-related questionnaires. There are three key things.
1. Church tax. If in the questionnaire in the column “religion” you put “Orthodox” (Muslim, Jew, Catholic, etc.), then a certain percentage will be removed from the salary and given to the church. You can get baptized, get married, mourn, take communion, etc. at a discount or for free.
2. Medical insurance. In practice, the choice is small - private or public. If you are a lonely young healthy programmer who does not plan to live in Germany for many years, then private will most likely be better and cheaper. In other cases, you need to think a lot. The difficulty is that private insurance is not so easy to get rid of. To change from private to state, you need to lose your job. The state costs% of the salary, and for this it covers the whole family. Private is worth some money from each member of the family. The amount of money depends on the state of health. If the client has private insurance, doctors do “ku” twice. This is usually expressed in greater usability of honey. services. The services themselves are almost the same.
3. Tax class. If there is a spouse, and he [a] is not yet our [e] l [a] job, then somewhere in the questionnaire you can put the default figure of the “tax class” and pay substantially less taxes.

A freshly arrived person will certainly be impressed by the huge selection of optional insurance policies. It is strange that many use them. For example, insurance against losing the key to the entrance is popular. Or from the accidental spill of two liters of yogurt on an antique carpet at a party. According to local advertising, there are 82 million reasons to insure in Germany [lives].

The question of finding housing is definitely very specific for Munich, so I will not describe it in more detail. I was only surprised that in Germany there is a registration! Particularly wonderful is the presence of a residence permit combined with the absence of apartment numbers - the names of residents are used instead. For registration at the place of residence I had to personally come to the passport office with a piece of paper - proof that there is where to live, and a residence permit was printed in a couple of minutes. In general, everyone loves paper. My wife had to present a passport even for the first time to eat in the student canteen - the LMU student card was not enough. In New Zealand, we quickly lost the habit of carrying a passport somewhere. And there is nowhere to wear it those 9 months of the year when you are wearing a T-shirt, shorts, slippers, a cap, and two layers of sunblock.

Within 3 months of arrival, you need to get a permanent (if large salary) or temporary residence permit. It took us half an hour to do this. It was just necessary to go to the kraisferwaltungsferat for the Netherlandslassungerlaubnis. It was such a smooth transition to a story about the delights of the German language. The German language at the beginning of training is much more difficult than English, thanks to the complex grammar. But the pronunciation is easier. However, the work does not give time to take the language seriously, so my personal success is not impressive. I can only read Bild (a newspaper like MK) without a dictionary or Süddeutsche Zeitung (a more serious newspaper) with a dictionary. The best way to learn German from scratch if you have time to do this full time is a couple of months at any commercial courses for beginners, and then 2-4 months at courses for passing DSHin any decent university. I know very many who have learned the language in this way, and very many who have not learned in much more time, using all other methods.

Because we live in the center, it’s more convenient to move around the cityand the surrounding area by public transport and bike. A single ticket for all zones to the nearby suburbs costs 62 euros for a month, and a student one - 47. Even there are no turnstiles in the subway, not to mention trains and buses (Muscovites, envy). Instead of turnstiles I meet controllers. It is necessary to present a travel card on average no more than once a month. Sometimes I notice how the controllers take a fines of 40 euros on the spot from the gaping rabbits, or ask for the home address to send an invoice for it. They say that in some other lands, controllers are more common and constantly atrocious, finding fault with penny errors in tickets. I go to work every day for 10 minutes by train, plus 5 minutes on foot. On average, once a week, the train is 5-10 minutes late, and people around grumble about what the country has brought toDeutsche Bahn this figlar P.J.

The local railways have a fairly favorable rate at which you can ride for five days in Bavaria and partly Austria / Czech Republic. This “Bayern Ticket” costs 27 euros. Unfortunately, it only works on slow trains. German fast trains are our Peregrine Falcons :). Usually they are quite empty, so I do not recommend paying extra 6 euros for booking a seat. But a couple of times I was so economized - the ICE train was full, as in a train near Moscow at rush hour. If the train is very delayed, you can get some compensation for every full hour. Therefore, in my experience, if they are late, they are late for 55 minutes, 1 hour 55 minutes ...

Although there is no urgent need for this, I wanted to be able to ride the famous autobahns. German rightsvalid until the copyright holder crashed to death and have no expiration date. This is convenient, so it was useful to exchange New Zealand for German. It’s simpler and much cheaper to first get rights that are converted to German (for example, American or New Zealand) than to do them from scratch. We had to pass the theory and sit out for five hours on compulsory first aid courses. CTP still, damn it, expensive without local experience! After obtaining local rights, it was not easy to find a small car with an automatic transmission. The Germans are very fond of manual, but without demand it is bad enough with the offer. But you can find.

I was also surprised at the need to pay not only for TV (this is in many countries), but also for a computer as a radio. Many acquaintances of the Germans do not pay, because it’s hard for enemies to prove that you have a TV and a computer. I decided not to take any chances and monthly I am getting poorer by 15 euros. It was especially annoying the first year when I still did not understand what they said on the radio and television.

Shopping The choice of everything, especially ready-made food and rags, of course, is more than New Zealand. In just a year, you can get used to that on Sunday _nothing_ works. Naturally, I buy everything that is possible online. I was unpleasantly surprised by ordering books and pieces of iron on Amazon.com. Everything came quickly, but I had to pay German customs. Now I use Amazon.de. There is almost everything the same, sometimes (very rarely) it is even cheaper. If there is no book on Amazon, then you can order by ISBN in any large offline book.

The last few months I saw on the internet a lot of news and discussions about Muslims and immigrants in Germany, for example, of Turkish origin. I personally have not met this problem in Munich. On the contrary, for good lamb or quickly, cheaply and tastyly dine on a weekend meal in the Turkish region. German restaurants also provide delicious food, but there are problems with “fast”, “cheap” and “Sunday”. Companies of Turks in public places annoy me no more than companies of Chinese, Russian or Latin Americans. Maybe this is so good in Munich, or I just don’t understand something.

Police. They are everywhere! As a rule, they walk and ride in two, often a boy with a girl. I did not see how they work. Only at OktoberfestI noticed a couple of times how they helped drunk completely drunk in an ambulance. In New Zealand, I liked it more — they were not visible, and in Munich, when they were in the service, they were tense.

There are a lot of interesting things around , but so far I have spent a great vacation in NZ. The south island is really super . Sorry to fly for a long time.

PS Dear more experienced residents of Germany. It is possible that somewhere in the text I made mistakes. Please let me know in the comments!
PPS I have some details in LJ.
PPPS I do not write about work, because I work for an American company, not a German one, and therefore I know almost no German working specifics.