At that point in her career in Germany, Molly had completed five years of continuous work in the Potsdam and Berlin region and--according to German law at the time--should have had the right to ask for a two or three year visa in her own name (i.e. not in the name of an employer or particular company as is on my own passport in Wiesbaden.)
The Visa Office in Brandenburg's Potsdam simply lied in 2004 straight to Molly's face. These Potsdam visa officials claimed to Molly, "No, you are not eligible for a multiple-year visa and will never receive that right as a free-lancer.
Humbled by this bold-faced lie (at what later became Potsdam's Integration Office), Molly paid for another one-year visa and then never returned.
Luckily, the next year, 2005, Molly found herself, instead, working in Bavaria outside Munich. Molly lived and worked most of the time within site of the German Alps in the Allgau region that year. The region was a place where not too many Americans or Canadians around. Moreover, there did not seem to be any pent-up hostility towards Americans or Canadians there.
As the time came for Molly to renew her own work visa, that particular friendly local visa bureaucrat stared at her passport in amazement and asked, "You were eligible for multi-year visa over a year ago. Why didn't you apply for a multi-year visa and save yourself some money?
Molly tried to tell that Allgau civil servant that the Potsdam office had said she wasn't eligible. This honest bureaucrat simply looked at her in astonishment, and was surprised that Molly had accepted the lies of the Potsdam civil service and visa office a year earlier.
To make a long story short, that very same helpful Allgau civil servant obtained a multi-year visa for Molly within a two week time period "in record time.
Molly was blown away.
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