I spent all morning psyching myself up so i could have a telephone conversation in German with a lady i've been trying to contact about translating my birth certificate for a reasonable price.
German?
I knoooOoooow! Who would have thought i'd have enough guts to bust out questions and be all fancy in a language i was once so scared of.
And thanks to google, i also found out that the lady also teaches a yoga class once a week and the course starts tonight.
So i figured i'd kill two birds with one stone and squeeze in that i was interested in trying out her yoga class AND that i needed her to translate a document for me. In hopes that she would be willing to lower her price to do a notarized translation.
Not because i was being a cheap arse but the other week i had ventured out into the city looking for a translation office. They quoted me a whopping 108.59 Euro! Which is ridiculous seeing that it is for something so small that i'll probably never really need, except if i were having a baby or was planning on getting married in Germany - which in both cases, are not in the near future.
But i had read online that some places translate documents into German for as little as 30 Euro, so there was no way i was going to pay over 100 Euro for a dinky-looking piece of paper.
So after scribbling down grammatically correct German sentences this morning, the lady finally picked up. She lives a few streets down from where we live, so finding the address later is no problem.
My appointment is at 3pm and her Hatha Yoga class is at a different address further down the Rhine at 7:30pm - which i plan to go to by bike.
But the reason for all this hassle began when i registered here as a resident a few months back. For some reason the guy who had keyed in my information had selected the wrong country as my place of birth, even though i had clearly mentioned where i was born.
And the document that one receives to show proof that one has registered, only states the city, so how was i suppposed to know he made the mistake? And it wasn't until a few days later did they realise their mistake when their system wasn't recognising the information.
So because of their mistake, i have to fork out my hard earned money to get my birth certificate translated.
How lame!
But to make it even more confusing, the person who had done my passport at the Dutch embassy in Kuala Lumpur spelt Manila with a double L [apparently that's how the Dutch spell it], so it's no wonder Germans are confused.
Just so you know, my country of citizenship is not the same as the country that i was born in. My father is Dutch and my mother is Singaporean.
Yes, my life is a bit complicated.
Oh well. That's how the cookie crumbles.
I guess that means i'm be going to Yoga class tonight... alone because J has to work late tonight.
German?
I knoooOoooow! Who would have thought i'd have enough guts to bust out questions and be all fancy in a language i was once so scared of.
And thanks to google, i also found out that the lady also teaches a yoga class once a week and the course starts tonight.
So i figured i'd kill two birds with one stone and squeeze in that i was interested in trying out her yoga class AND that i needed her to translate a document for me. In hopes that she would be willing to lower her price to do a notarized translation.
Not because i was being a cheap arse but the other week i had ventured out into the city looking for a translation office. They quoted me a whopping 108.59 Euro! Which is ridiculous seeing that it is for something so small that i'll probably never really need, except if i were having a baby or was planning on getting married in Germany - which in both cases, are not in the near future.
But i had read online that some places translate documents into German for as little as 30 Euro, so there was no way i was going to pay over 100 Euro for a dinky-looking piece of paper.
So after scribbling down grammatically correct German sentences this morning, the lady finally picked up. She lives a few streets down from where we live, so finding the address later is no problem.
My appointment is at 3pm and her Hatha Yoga class is at a different address further down the Rhine at 7:30pm - which i plan to go to by bike.
But the reason for all this hassle began when i registered here as a resident a few months back. For some reason the guy who had keyed in my information had selected the wrong country as my place of birth, even though i had clearly mentioned where i was born.
And the document that one receives to show proof that one has registered, only states the city, so how was i suppposed to know he made the mistake? And it wasn't until a few days later did they realise their mistake when their system wasn't recognising the information.
So because of their mistake, i have to fork out my hard earned money to get my birth certificate translated.
How lame!
But to make it even more confusing, the person who had done my passport at the Dutch embassy in Kuala Lumpur spelt Manila with a double L [apparently that's how the Dutch spell it], so it's no wonder Germans are confused.
Just so you know, my country of citizenship is not the same as the country that i was born in. My father is Dutch and my mother is Singaporean.
Yes, my life is a bit complicated.
Oh well. That's how the cookie crumbles.
I guess that means i'm be going to Yoga class tonight... alone because J has to work late tonight.
2 comments:
Oh I'm so jealous of this yoga class! I hope it turned out to be fun :)
Yea, it was pretty good. =)
My muscles in my back and shoulders are still sore though. =(
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