Landed / bureaucracy

I feel quite settled, as it is now. Apart from a room and a language course, I now have such things as a bicycle, which counts as a primary life requirement for a Dutch person like myself, and internet access, which also counts as such, even for non-Dutch people...
Friedemann, son of my dad's friend Reinhard, and I both wanted a second-hand bicycle, and therefore set out to buy them. Having found a shop with reasonable prices, and both having found a bycicle in there, Friedemann managed to get a discount of 10 euro's per person, in return for a promise that he'd tell everyone that it was a nice shop ;).
I also have internet access, as mentioned in another post, and even a German bank account. I have found out that paying with debit card, as I was very much used to at home, is not that widespread as a practise here. Also, here they use a signature as identification, rather than a PIN-code. Which of course does not speed up the whole procedure, since it means you have to wait for the receipt to be printed, etc. Which in turn explains why people don't use it that much over here.

I have fulfilled all the bureaucratic requirements for living and studying in Heidelberg for a year, and I managed to do all of them on one day :). I had prepared myself for a day or more of walking from one bureaucratic institution to another, with Kafka's Schloß somewhere in the back of my mind. I had read that I needed to get an exemption from the health insurance obligation, which I would need for my immatriculation, which I would need for my bank account. Now my problem was that I wanted to get a local public health insurance, since it was cheaper than my Dutch one. So there was a very nice circle: I needed a bank account for my insurance, which I needed for my immatriculation, which I needed for my bank account, etc.. But everything turned out to be quite fine: at the bank they didn't even ask if I was a student, but just gave me a student's account, and then the rest came quite easily.
The only nasty surprise was that I could not end or suspend my Dutch health insurance, because it apparently comes with being enrolled in a Dutch university and getting stufi... So I had to quit the German insurance again :(.