Täglich Wiederkehrendes Abenteuer

So far, it’s been a good day.  First we went to a barber shop that’s about a block away.  They don’t take walk-ins, so I set up an appointment for Will on Thursday at 9:00.  I’ll be able to go with him to describe how he would like his hair to be cut and answer any questions the stylist might have.

Then we went to the gym to set up membership.  That went quite well and we’re all set.  Although perhaps Will needs more preparation.  I was a bit nervous about the gym, because the guy who gave us a tour a while ago was a bit difficult to understand.  Although, because another native guy was with us on the tour, I don’t think he was making much of an effort to be comprehensible to  us foreigners.

Then we went to the bank to get our electronic banking access sorted out.  That’s been a bit weird.  We were told it was free with our account, but she never mentioned any special set up we had to do; at least not that I heard.  So I’d been looking through the packet she gave us trying to find the data needed to login to online banking.  We need our account number, the bank routing code, and another “signatory” number.  Because I couldn’t find the “signatory” number anywhere in the documentation, we went to the bank to ask about it.  The very nice lady wrote it down for us and we went home to try it.  After entering the new number and hitting submit, it asks for a PIN.  We have PINs for our bank cards, but those don’t work.  Our PINs are four numerals when we need five digits for the online thing.

So we went back to the bank, but we were shooed out and told we would be able to take care of it on Monday.  This was on Friday; apparently the bank was closing early for reasons we didn’t understand?  So we went back today (Tuesday) and told a different nice lady that we didn’t have a PIN for online banking.  She asked, “so you’d like to pick it up?” and I said, “Yeah, I guess.”  Apparently they were ready for us, because she came back right away with a privacy envelope with our PIN in it and another number to use for transfers.  I haven’t tried it yet, though.

After that, we went to the train station to get some discount cards for train tickets.  That went very smoothly as well.  We have pieces of paper as temporary cards now, and the real ones should come in the mail within two months.

All of these interactions were in German, by the way.  I almost feel like I’m functioning almost like a normal person around here.  On Thursday, I might be meeting up with a possible conversation partner.  That could help a lot.