Registering in Germany

There is a procedure in Germany where you must register with the town that you live in. They must have your name, address, marital status and religion for their records. When you move town, you unregister there and tell the next town.

Now as much as I keep asking "why" this is necessary and I keep getting the answer (mainly from locals and government workers) as "Because it is law", to me, this still isn't enough of a reason. Especially, why do they need to know what religion I am. I'm told that is for taxing purposes (you pay a tax to your church here), but I still find it a little intrusive for the government to be tracking my religion. I also was told, that its a good way to find me if the government needs me from this information, its how the German government can track me down 'if they need me'…. 

The only other reason I could find was stated on a random website that:

"Registering is also necessary for getting power, water, phones etc hooked up and correctly billed. While these folks do not demand to see proof of registration, they do all tie their records together once you are signed up. As an example, if you buy a pre-paid mobile phone ticket, you must give an address and, if that it not registered, the pre-paid phone will not work!"

But that still doesn't quite answer why..? Then the government needs to know your water, power and phone usage also depending on where you live?

I'm sure there are people out there who actually have the facts, and good ones as to why the government needs this exact information for every movement in your life - that are less conspiracy theory sounding that what I have stated above - and feel free to post that reason below, but it would be nice if everyone knew this reason rather than just telling me "because it is so". 

Side note: This "because it is so" is a common answer to many of my questions.

German language watch dog

Here's something as an english speaker that I've never really thought about as most of our language is stolen from a mixture of everyone elses… seems the Germans need to watch out for their language preservation so that English won't creep in too much! The Germans have a watch dog who actually award people with titles of 'worst language offender'! See the attached link...

http://www.thelocal.de/society/20110827-37213.html

Meat Meat, all we Eat!

I read somewhere the other day that if the whole world ate meat at the same consumption rate as the germans, we would be completely be out of stock in 2-3 months and not be able to recuperate. Honestly, this does not surprise me. 

I am still bewildered when looking at a traditional german restaurant menu, it contains different meat products that are usually accompanied only by sauerkraut or potatoes. Where do they get their vitamins from? Did I miss the memo of how high in Vit C potatoes are?

I have to admit, sometimes there is spinach in cream that you can get (or green sauce as they call it), onions and red cabbage where you might just gain those all important vitamins - but honestly, how many children grew up thinking those were the vegetables that you would rather leave on your plate and forgo having desert/tv/staying up late just so you didn't have to eat them?

To be fair, I did just do my research and found that sauerkraut does have health benefits (http://www.sauerkraut.com/benefits.htm), but that still doesn't sit well with my inner 7 year old sitting at the dinner table refusing to eat that 'stuff'.

Here is a picture of a dinner I recently had in Frankfurt. This is at the END of the meal when we could no longer eat any more meat and this platter was originally piled 3 times higher than is what is seen here. Contained pigs stomach, knuckle, steaks, ribs and shoulder (and some kind of joint we couldn't determine). Yes that is a bowl of sauerkraut in front of it as the accompaniment to the giant meal of meat.

And a few quick snaps of Frankfurt main square as we walked through taken on my crappy phone camera whilst some riot/protest was going behind us on that strangely didn't even touch the news.