What happens in Vegas does not happen in Germany!

Once Alex proposed we decided we would do the legal part of getting married now and then next year have a renewal of our vows and have a ceremony/reception for family and friends. We thought it couldn't be that difficult to get everything ready here in Germany in order to get married - how wrong we were! We had to go to the local Town Hall office (called Bergeramt in German) and give them my birth certificate, Alex's birth certificate and find out what other papers we needed to submit. So Alex went there first and got a list of what we needed. We got everything together and went for an appointment to submit everything.

This is when the bureaucracy started. First, they not only needed my birth certificate, but they needed one that was issued within the last 6 months, so we had to request a new one from the U.S. Then they needed this document called a Family Book for Alex - which of course he did not have. So he had to send off a request for it and was told it could take 6 weeks! Fortunately, we got both my certificate and his Family Book a lot sooner than 6 weeks and took it to the office to submit. Then they tell us that they needed my birth certificate translated into German! Seriously, there were 10 words on this document, and I really think anyone could have figured out what was what in any language. The worst part was that the lady in the office for approving our papers was about to go on holiday for 3 weeks, so we had that day to get it translated and back to her that day. How fun that day was for us to walk around in seriously hot weather (with me pregnant, everything feels 20 degrees warmer than it is) trying to find someone who could do an official translation that day.

We finally found someone and got everything turned in - thank God because I was loosing my composure, which normally I am the composed one calming Alex down - he didn't know what to do with me. :) I have to say this much about getting married in Germany – this is not a Vegas experience! When you get married here, it’s for keeps. After a couple of weeks, we got our approval from the authorities to be married. We rushed down to the offices and set up a date to make us a legally married couple. We wanted to do it before the baby came and we wanted to do it on the 14th of a month. We met October 14, 2005 so the 14th was our date of choice. We found out July 14th was available and went with that. We were told we had to have a translator for me, so we asked our friend Stefan to translate for us. Then we were told we had to have a witness, so Alex's dad served as our witness. We had everything in place finally!