Red tape, Red heros

In the battle with bureaucracy, I'm taking a beating. It'd be easier to be mad at my adversaries if they were rude and curt and unhelpful, but they're not. They're people who (very kindly) direct me kilometers out of my way when I ask where the town's registration office is; signs that proclaim (without malice) inconvenient office hours; workers who tell me (using the polite form of address) that they need not just my health insurance card, but also whatever papers came with it (?!); a bureaucratic process that requires a background check on me that will take 1-2 weeks. Actually, I am kinda upset about the last one. I don't think I can open a bank account until I have the paperwork from them, so everything else is on hold until that point. Since I had a residence permit in Heidelberg, they have to have the office there send my file here or something. Technically, I'm not even supposed to work yet since my visa still says "tourist," but I'm not planing on telling anyone, so I should be fine. I just want to get all these forms and offices dealt with, but it looks like that's not going to happen as soon as I'd hoped.
Anyway, enough of the complaining. My first days here have been good. So far I've done a lot of walking around, a lot of sleeping, and a little bit of classroom observing. I've sat in on three English class periods so far--all 9th grade, but all with different teachers. It's interesting to see how the different teachers handle the class, and in what language they conduct it. Everything has been primarily in English, though the teachers, to varying degrees, resort to German for clarification or allow/not allow questions from the students in German. Hopefully soon I'll get to see some other grade levels!
In my last post, I mentioned living in a residential area and was thinking as I walked around it some more, I should probably clarify what I mean by that. If you're imagining American suburbia, you're way off. If you're imagining downtown Lawrence or inner-city Chicago, you're wrong too. The residences are all large apartment complexes. I walked to the outskirts of Greifswald and found some real houses one day, but apartment living is generally more common in Germany and seems to be particularly so where I live.
The state I'm in, for those of you not so well-acquainted with German geography, is in the former East. Back in the DDR-days, my mentoring teacher (a Greifswald-native) told me, everything was gray. She showed me a picture of an apartment high rise that looked figuratively very cold: no flowers, no trees, no people, no colors. Now they seem to be making up for lost time. Greifswald--especially my little high-rise area--strikes me as very colorful. The apartment buildings are painted brightly: sometimes just the trim is painted, sometimes there are murals, sometimes random geometric shapes, like the four large somewhat-overlapping squares on the front of my building. The school across the street has a large smiling sunshine on its top right corner. The street is lined with trees of the reddish orange berry-bearing variety. Most balconies have a box filled with flowers or some other sort of decoration. In that respect, the DDR-legacy has vanished.
Also gone is the teaching of Russian. Though we are geographically just as close to Russia as to Spain, the school I'm at dropped their Russian program and substituted Spanish.* A couple of the teachers commented to me that they're "actually" Russian teachers, but are now teaching English or French. Quite sad, I think, to stop teaching a language just to distance yourself from the people who speak it.** Or more accurately, the political system once used in the country of the people who speak it. Politics, politics.
The place where you do still see a little bit of Russia is in the street names. I, for example, live on Makarenkostraße, named for a Communist writer/educator. Nearby are streets named for Dostoyevski and Tolstoy. There's a Karl-Marx-Straße somewhere, as well as a whole bunch named for people I learned about in the Weimar Republic class I took in Heidelberg: Rosa Luxemburg, Walther Rathenau, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Thälmann. All socialist (or at least social democratic) heros of the post-World War I era. It's cool to see street names like this, because they're an interesting contrast from the Martin-Luther/Goethe/Schiller/Bismarck trend you see elsewhere in Germany.
I'm meeting the English teachers at a restaurant tonight to discuss my schedule for the following weeks, so I suppose I'll get ready for that. Maybe try to see if they have any advice on speeding up the bureacratic process. You don't suppose the workers at the foreign registration office could be bribed with cream puffs, do you?
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* Not totally clear on when, but it seems to have been more recent than reunification (1989).
**U.S.A. universities, German programs, ca. 1918