A 24 year old German!!!
Officially, if you stay overnight somewhere in Croatia, your presence needs to be registered with the authorities. Therefore we had to give our passports to Darinka, the owner of the apartment, so she could take them back down to the Tourist Office and register the fact that we would be temporarily resident in her apartment for the next ten days.
When our passports were returned, inside each of them was an official slip of paper. Both slips were entitled in ‘Crenglish’, (a language very similar to ‘Czenglish’), ‘Temporary of Permanent Residence’!! But apart from that, the one issued for Sybille was completely accurate. However, when we examined my ‘Temporary of Permanent Residence’, we descended into howls of laughter. Whilst they had got the day & month of my birth correct, they had put my year of birth down as 1985 thus making me only 24 years old! Overnight, Croatian bureaucracy had taken 33 years off my age and given me back my youth.
But whilst I was pleased with being made many years younger, I did not appreciate what else they had done. My country of birth was stated as ‘Njemacka’, the Croatian name for Germany. Croatian bureaucracy had turned me into a German!!!!!!
Eventually we decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle to go down to the Tourist Office ourselves and point out their error. Instead, Sybille just enjoyed being married to a young 24 year old fellow-countryman for the following ten days!
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