What’s new in Berlin
Women’s Day
March 8 is Women’s Day, and it’s a public holiday in Berlin. Unfortunately, it falls on a Sunday. In Germany, public holidays that fall on a weekend are “lost”: they are not moved to another day, and you do not get a paid day off.
Digital freelance visa
The Berlin immigration office has digitalized the freelance visa application process. Instead of dumping your documents into a general mailbox, they now ask the right questions, collect the right documents, and track your application in their system.
These digital forms reduce wait times and prevent lost applications. They have worked well for the Blue Card and the work visa.
Residence permit downgrade
The immigration office is issuing residence permits as passport stickers instead of plastic cards, citing budget issues. This is unlawful, and it creates problems for immigrants when opening a bank account or accessing digital services.
New citizenship departments
The departments for citizenship applications have slightly changed. S1 only handles Syrians, S2 now handles Afghans, Iranians, Iraqis and Russians, and S5 now also handles Belarusians, Georgians, and Moldovans.4
If you already sent your citizenship application, you don’t need to do anything. You might just get a response from a different department.
I have updated the departments on my citizenship wait times page.
What’s new on All About Berlin
Open source
All About Berlin is now source-available. The content, templates and backend are available on GitHub. I hope that this will encourage others to contribute fixes and updates.
I had wanted to do this for a long time, but I did not want to compete with unauthorised copies of my own work. This has happened anyway with ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, so I have decided to make the code public.
Tools for tenants
I created a lease notice period calculator and a termination letter generator to make it easier to end your lease.
Public holidays
I rewrote my public holidays guide. It automatically calculates and shows public holidays for the next 3 years. It also shows which public holidays fall on a weekend.
What I learned this month
The DHL app rocks
You can pay for postage with the DHL app. For letters, you get a code to write on the envelope. For packages, you get a QR code to show at the Paketshop when you drop off your package.
No printer, not stamps! It accepts many payment methods, and does not even require an account. A rare win in the land of inconvenience.
The weird thing with Apotheken
In Germany, you can’t buy ibuprofen or hay fever medicine from dm, Rossmann or budni, only from an Apotheke.
There are three categories of medicine in Germany:
- Prescription medicine (verschreibungspflichtiges Arzneimittel)
Sold by an Apotheke, requires a prescription from a doctor. This includes most “serious” medication, like antidepressants and stronger pain killers. - Pharmacy medicine (apothekenpflichtiges Arzneimittel)
Sold by an Apotheke without a prescription. This includes medicine with mild side effects like ibuprofen, antihistamines and mild ointments. - Over-the-counter medicine (freiverkäufliches Arzneimittel)
You can buy it anywhere, without a prescription. This includes medicine with no side effects like teas and oils.
Because of this monopoly on medicine sales, you must go to a different place to buy basic medicine, usually at an inflated price. Yet pharmacies are not rolling in dough; they’re closing in droves.2 No one benefits and everyone is unhappy.3
Online pharmacies are a weird development of this system. You can’t buy medicine from dm, but you can buy it from their website, because it’s sold by dm-med, an online pharmacy run by dm.
Then things get weirder. You see, online pharmacies can offer in-store pickup.1 You could buy ibuprofen on dm.de, and pick it up at the dm store. That would be perfectly legal. However, you couldn’t walk into a dm and buy ibuprofen, because that would be illegal.
Recycling woes
The German recycling system is mind-numbingly complex: paper, plastic, food, clothes, glass, batteries, lightbulbs, small electronics, furniture and old oil all go in different places. That’s on top of selling what’s still usable on Kleinanzeigen, or leaving it in a zu Verschenken box.
If you are moving out or just spring cleaning, you might spend a few weeks slowly distributing your old stuff to various bins scattered across the city.