More on Passport Control

Since Debbie asked and since my fellow US Americans always ask me similar questions when I am home:

Is that all you do when leaving/entering Germany: show them your residence permit sticker?
Yep, just show them the sticker in Germany and they will not stamp you in or out. One of my US colleagues here wouldn't bother to show the sticker and perhaps one-third of the time they didn't notice it either and would stamp her. To me that wastes valuable passport space, so I'm careful to show the sticker.

What if you're re-entering or leaving the EU/Schengen Zone through another country, like Denmark? Do we just shown THEIR passport control guys the German sticker, too?
Nah, I don't bother, as German sticker or not, you would still get stamped by Denmark in any event. On a related note, on a previous trip through Copenhagen, the female passport officer noticed my stickers and then proceeded to try out her university Germany on me. (Ugh.)

No passport stamping that says you're leaving the EU?
As long as you have the sticker, no stamping, although if you're going to a few EU destinations such as the UK, you'll get an outgoing scan which registers you as outgoing. But I've never had a problem in this respect. I often do three way flights, such as I went Cologne to Stockholm and then took a ferry to Finland and then flew back Helsinki to Duesseldorf. The only time I had some raised eyebrows was when I went to Turkey for a long weekend. I noticed they read the screen more carefully the next few times I flew.

Often if it's a closer EU country such as Brussels or Paris, you will not get passport checked either in/out of Germany .

The closest I normally come to anyone tracking my in and out has been my Eastern Europe trips. On multiple trips now to Vilnius and Warsaw and one-time trips to Riga and Tallinn, every single time they will find a blank area with space next to it and stamp my arrival there. Then when I am outgoing from one of those places, they will stamp it outgoing, immediately next to the incoming one, so they are together. One time I went into Warsaw from Germany and then travelled from Warsaw to Vilnius without getting checked, so that I was then leaving Vilnius to Germany, but without an incoming to Vilnius. The agent asked, but once I explained that bit he was satisfied to stamp next to the Warsaw incoming.

I'm a little nervous about what to do when I fly soon for the first time since moving here.
It's actually easier than if you're flying on an unstickered US passport, in my opinion. For example, in particular, I've always found the UK to be the biggest pain in the ** to Americans with the 20 questions. It was actually worse when I worked there, I began to carry my actual UK work permit paperwork to hasten me through. Since I accumulated this plethora of Germany stickers, I've found them to be less questioning of my American entry for a long weekend. Instead it's 'oh you work in Germany I see, how long do you stay here?' and that is it. Versus the other Americans on either side of me getting the, 'where do you stay, for how long, have you been here before, where were you before here, where do you go after, do you know anyone here, blah blah.'

Last time I was so speedy into the UK from their lack of questions that I was through faster than the Euros in the long EU line. And an American entering the UK faster than a UK citizen, THAT is priceless. :-)