Do you have a permanent residence permit in Germany?

I asked a lawyer from Duesseldorf who assisted me in my work permit problems two years ago.  I asked him if I, with a permanent residence permit, could live and work in another EU country.  Here’s his answer…

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A long-term resident may exercise the right of residence, for a period exceeding three months, in a Member State other than the one which granted him the status, subject to compliance with certain conditions laid down in this proposal, including:

- exercise of an economic activity in an employed or self-employed capacity; or – pursuit of studies or vocational training; or  other purposes.

However, a Member State may limit the number of residence permits if, at the time of the adoption of this Directive, limitations for the admission of Non-EU Member Country nationals are already set out in existing national law. At the same time, for reasons of labour market policy, Member States may give preference to Union citizens.

The above conditions do not concern employees posted for the purpose of cross-border provision of services or providers of cross-border services. When the application for a residence permit is lodged, the competent authorities in the second Member State may require the presentation of certain documents (such as the long-term residence permit, an identity document, an employment contract, documentation with regard to appropriate accommodation, etc.) and evidence of stable and regular resources and medical insurance.

The family members of the long-term resident may accompany him to the second Member State or join him there on condition that they already formed a family in the first Member State. If this is not the case, Directive 2003/86/EC on the right to family reunification applies. The second Member State may refuse applications for residence only where there is an actual threat to public policy, public security or public health.

In the case of public health, the Directive allows Member States to require a medical examination in order to certify that the persons in question do not suffer from any diseases that are the subject of protective provisions in the host country. It also provides for a series of procedural guarantees such as the statutory period for examining applications for residence permits, the arrangements for notifying interested parties, redress procedures and the conditions governing expulsion.

As soon as they enter the second Member State, long-term residents enjoy all the benefits which they enjoyed in the first Member State under the same conditions as nationals. Long-term residents living in the second Member State will retain their status in the first Member State until they have acquired the same status in the second Member State.

If they so wish, they may, after being legally resident in the second Member State for five years, apply to be considered as long-term residents in that Member State. As a general rule, the first Member State is obliged to readmit, together with their family members, long-term residents whose residence permits have been withdrawn by the second Member State.

Denmark, Ireland and the UK have reserved the right to deviate from these rules.

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I have no plans to work and live abroad (if away from Germany means abroad in this case) but it was a topic discussed a couple of days ago.

This could be a big weekend.  Maya is coming into town, it’s a holiday friday, there is live reggae on thursday, a long weekend ahead of us. I’ll getcha an update when one warrants it.

Audible.com

I came upon audible.com, a website for buying a downloable copy of audiobooks, something I have been marginally into for the past 5 years but it’s been picking up speed in the past two years.

I gave my credit card number.  I have two weeks to cancel for free.  In exchange for signing up, I get to download one free audiobook.  I almost got a Richard Zacks book called The Pirate Coast that is amazing but I decided I wanted something new so I chose: For Liberty and Glory, a book about Washington and Lafayette and their lives during the Revolutionary War.  It’s like twenty hours long and I could have it for free.

If I decide to not cancel in the next two weeks, my credit card will be charged $14.95.  For those 15 dollars (which will be charged monthly), I am given an audiobook credit.  Surprise surprise, an audiobook credit is basically always worth one audiobook.  First off, that’s a good price for an audiobook but also the ones for sale seem to be cheaper than others.  I might just get one more audiobook for the 14.95 but we’ll see.

I just spent the last 90 minutes (before Audible) organizing a bunch of work papers, saving some time later in the semester putting order to life.  It’s amazing if you organize before things get under way, you have a much better chance of having an influence on the direction things go.

I also cleaned the bathroom, took me a half-hour.  I tried to think of Franziska telling me that cleaning is therapeutic.  I didn’t agree with her last night and I still don’t but I at least see her point of view.  Still though, it was defintely my turn and I did it.  I also had a small workout, did some lesson plans and now, finally, at 3:49pm, in the hammock and about to listen to Robin’s news on the Howard Stern show.

Current News

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090426/ap_on_re_as/as_pakistan

This is an article about the Pakistani military attacking insurgents outside Swat Valley, their recent, government-backed peace plan where the government would institute Islamic law in exchange for peace.  With the reports this week that the insurgents were making their presence know in the neighboring districts of Buner and others, many were wondering what the government was going to do about it.  Now we see that they are trying to maintain the peace agreed to with the insurgents and to not accept their insolence to dare step on the agreement just months after it went into effect.

I think this is a good thing.  Many of the insurgents I think want to establish a place for them to live and have their crazy, Sharia law then fine.  Since the (War on Terror) thing began after September 11, 2001, this Swat Valley Accord was one of the first instances of a kind of settlement with the “terrorists”.  We cannot allow them to flout one of their first peace treaties just 100 km from a nuclear arsenal.  These people are going to have be shown that now that they’ve actually sat at a table and come to an agreement like civlized people, they cannot just go on with their silly little plans of destroying the world as we know it because of God.

Weirdoschenko lives!

How many bowls and plate can you find?

Well...

A song about torture

found at andrew sullivan’s website.  The guy is singing words from the Jay Bybee memo from 2005.

Like normal people

The last two mornings I have gotten up at 7am to go to work like normal people.  I decided I don’t like it too much.  I liked waking up at 8:30am in San Francisco  or Obidos, Portugal or well, it can be here of course but tomorrow I get to sleep in until 8:30am and I’m already super stoked about it, 9 hours before I even go to bed tonight!

Oh yeah, some more stories from the retired people who were alive during WWII.  One of the women as a 7-year old having to run in an air-raid shelter with hundreds of other people in Stuttgart and when she came back up on the street after the bombing, the whole street was on fire.  There was only rubble left by the time they made it back to the building where they lived and they could find one white plate in tact.  It used to have a gold trim on the rim but it was just burnt black.  The other woman lived in a village so there was no air-raid shelter and so she and her parents had to run out into a field and lie down and hope for the best.  She said she can remember seeing the bombs falling on a city some kilometers away and the bombs looked like cherries on fire as they fell.  They both received care packages from America after the war.  The first woman got a pink dress with a brown print and she wore it everyday for a couple of years until she grew out of it.  Both care packages had powdered milk and powdered egg in it and one of them had cacao and a little chocolate.

The first woman said that her mother owned a hair salon and at night Jewish women would come in to have their hair cut and that even AFTER the war, Jews had to hide in barns and go from barn to barn each night and how their neighbor hid Jews.  The parents didn’t think the kids knew but they did.

I told them to write down some more thoughts about their memories because they were fascinating.

Happy Earth Day, by the way…

Sunday Sound

The sign says you can cut your own flowers

One of my favorite songs by Chris Robinson, Sunday Sound, and today on our way up into the Black Forest, this was our view, all the while a professional soccer game was happening on the other side of the river.  And just as we started sweating, we got there, had a salad with spicy beef strips and some schnitzel.  A great afternoon.

Wierdoschenko

See how many bowls, plates and glasses you can find!

So as the hail begins coming down hard, I want you to see what we found in Wierdoschenko’s room yesterday. The picture doesn’t do it justice but just take a second and check it out…

I’ll get to that

I couldn’t think of a subject line for line so I”ll just get on with it.  After a couple of weeks as a “Strohwitwe” which translates to  “electricity widow” but means being a bachelor because the old ball and chain wasn’t around finally came to an end last night.  The last time that Franziska and I had seen each other was March 29th in San Francisco.  We’re quite the jet-setting couple no doubt.  We’re off to Israel next month.  Anyway, just in keeping with how it’s been the last couple of weeks, she got up at 8 in the morning and like a dream whisped herself from my room and I won’t see her again until tomorrow night most likely! Her parents are here with her and they are having some quality family time, something I can definitely understand seeing as that I live 6,000 miles from home.

I ended up waking up with her and was actually jogging by 9:30 this morning.  The weather is not nearly as good as it has been the past 2 weeks but it was plenty good enough to go jogging.  This is going to be crucial for me to get back into the habit of exercising.  Ok, when it’s raining I won’t go jogging but the weather is more or less always going to be warm enough now and also, I have some weights here and know enough to do a workout if necessary but I am also signed up at good ole’ Fitness Studio California again, at least for this month and next month before Israel.

After jogging, I enjoyed a smoothie with banana, frozen mango, papaya and berries, milk and apple juice.  I’m still in the process of putting as many of my cds onto my hard drive and external hard drive.  I’ve been doing this for about a week now and have put on about a hundred new cds.  It’s great because I’m putting myself in a position where I don’t really need to buy any cds for awhile.  I’m sure there may be the occasional impulse or need (new Black Crowes, Ryan Adams, et al.) but let me give you an example.  Right now, I’m putting on a live Pearl Jam show from 1998 that I actually attended in July 1998 at the Fabulous Forum in Los Angeles.  The next cd up is Louis Armstrong.  This is time consuming and my laptop hasn’t enjoyed the prostitue-like abuse the cd drive has taken but getting all this on the two hard drives means that when I move someday, I won’t really have to deal with most of them.  I’ll probably have a little street sale and sell them for 2 euros or something.

I also attacked a large pile of work papers I had to deal with.  I threw some out, filed some, coallated some to photocopy next week for the beginning of the semester.  It’s now an orderly in-tray for work.

I’m going to make some lunch soon and then do some typing this afternoon.  Writing has been going pretty well lately and I just wrote a crucial scene two days ago where the protagonist first goes to the Immigration Office to learn that he has to invest a million euros and employ ten people in order to stay…boy, that sounds familiar!

10 years ago today

Let’s go back for just a moment, all the way back to the Spring of 1999.  I was working in West LA a mile from my sweet apartment which was about 3 miles from the Pacific Ocean down Santa Monica Boulevard.  That evening, around 11:30pm, I woke up and had the most singular thought: “My body and my soul will never live together again.  This is the only life I get.”

These are not the kind of sentiments that sit well a month before someone’s 25 birthday.  I decided some big changes were needed in my lifestyle.  I needed to have a goal to work towards and push me to the next level of LIFE.  I took some notes that evening and the next day, what should I do, and then it slowly formed that I should travel around the US for awhile, get to see the country.  By that point I’d been to a few places in America, Hawaii, NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Fran, Vancouver, central California, Grand Canyon, Texas and Flagstaff, Denver, a bit of New England…I decided that I would need at least two months and I would do it in mid-October, exactly 6 months from that moment.  Some research on a slow internet connection got me to the conclusion that a month-long Amtrak pass would be in order. I think it cost like 435 bucks for the month, last-minute changes possible, and I had to go into Canada and use ViaRail for at least one day. I started in Oakland, going through Eugene, Portland, Whitefish, Minot, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Washington DC and ending in Savannah.  A couple of rides, some Greyhounds, and one more train got me home about a week before Xmas of 1999, just two weeks before the world was to come to an end with the 2000 Switch.

I’ve celebrated every April 14th since then.  Today has been one of the most interesting of the 10 times.  I had a meaningful conversation with Franziska about important things, about life changes and the future.  It wasn’t as intense and you’re imagining but it was an intense way to start the day.  I was going to go into the city and shoot some photos and buy some good meat to cook later.  I ended up going running along the river instead, living to Pearl Jam’s second album “Vs.” and it was weird going back to that place in college around 93 or so when the album came out.  I had a good run, really struggling, in different muscles this time because of hiking yesterday I think, and after showering I went down to the supermarket, taking some trash out, and then I bought two lamb cutlets marianated in an herb sauce and I steamed some carrots.  I cleaned my room, vaccuumed the living room and cleaned it up.  I typed up some of my novel and then went down to the bakery across the street and had a big piece of Black Forest cake and a large coffee with hot milk.  I sat outside in the sun and read about the history of Israel in my Lonely Planet guide.  Israel is going to be a big life’s achievement for me.  It’s a new part of the world and I have family there and there’s an inordinate amount of history and culture and great food.

Then I did some writing, first in my journal just to make notice of the day and to get the journal caught up and then I wrote 5 pages in my novel, the scene of going to the Foreign Authorities and being told that he needs to invest a million euros in Germany to stay.  That’s a tough, critical scene and I hope to read it to someone tonight and see how it went.  I would guess that I am about 40% finished with the book.  With some perserverance, I can finish it before the summer and use some time at home this summer to clean it up and then send it out to 10-20 places.  That’s one of my main goals for the summer and I think if I can develop a productive routine of work and working out and writing, and preparing for a multi-media event with some of my photography and some live music and…

But what about the change?  How does one decide it is time to change?  That very thing happened to me 10 years ago today but it’s not the most common occurrence.  And what do I want to change? And why?  I know, I know, a long journey begins with a single step.  I just want to have a better idea of what direction I want my journey to be before that first step comes.  And it’s difficult because the place where I’m at right now, in this moment, is clearly a peaking experience.  My life has basically continually improved since the day I met here.

I actually wrote two more paragraphs here that were lost in the internet somehow.  It ended with my goal being that I needed to create more cherries in my life.