Read your lease against your flight home.

Paste the contract, add the months left on your tour, and see which clauses keep charging you after you have gone.

Where this leads

Living here — Almost everything that goes wrong during a tour arrives the same way: a German letter with a deadline nobody reads. We tell you what it says and what it needs.

A letter arrived and you cannot read it — Four kinds of official notice look alike and mean completely different things. The expensive mistake is not reacting wrongly — it is not reacting at all.

Traffic fines — Work out what you owe, whether a ban is in play, and what happens to your USAREUR license.

Letters to your landlord and utilities — Four German letters you cannot write yourself, each with a deadline that counts. A defect not reported in writing gives you no rights at all.

Things that work differently here — Fifteen rules that carry a fine, a deadline or — in one case — a criminal record. Not culture shock.

Your contract is not in Germany — Guided entry in the language your invoice is actually written in. You have an Italian invoice and an English form.

Related

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