New apartment, new classes, and a new Berlin

This entry has been long in coming, and unfortunately I only have around twenty minutes to write it! More to come next week I hope. In a couple of hours I will be on the train heading south to sunny (warmer than Berlin!) Poland, destination Wroclow Glowny. After a sudden hail storm last night (I thought it was the washing machine spinning clothes really fast until I looked out the window and saw ice everywhere… luckily I was not outside) I’m convinced that summer and the days of good weather in Berlin are behind me. And yet I can easily say that October has given me a new lease on the city and this upcoming year.

I am sitting on a high stool in the kitchen in my new apartment, staying warm with tea despite the fact that our heat hasn’t been turned on yet (warm clothes, lots of blankents, hot drinks and it’s not a problem). Outside the trees are turning, more yellows than the reds of New England, but colorful nonetheless. I have a great view both from the kitchen and from my bedroom of a set of train tracks bordered with trees on each side. We’re on the fifth floor (and in the innenhof, inner courtyard) of our “altbau” building, hence minor amounts of exercise on the way up every day. About every five or so minutes I can hear an S-Bahn train go by; the fast, sleek ICE’s come less often.

After visiting around nine different apartments and going through an “interview” process at each one, I was ready to give up on the hope that I could live with nice German students. I switched my search from three or four-person apartments to a two-person apartment, realized that there was a lot more choice in this category, and had an apartment to visit right away. Robert helped me find it on a Friday afternoon, and instead of being nervous I felt comfortable here right away. My current roommate, Anna and for now her boyfriend Diego, and I talked for about an hour over tea in their living room. She is a political science and Spanish student, specializing in “Latinamericanistics” as they call it here, and she met Diego while travelling in Colombia a couple of years ago. They’ve been together ever since; he came to Germany to learn the language and find some work during Anna’s first year at the FU. He will be going back to Colombia in a couple of weeks to visit his family for four months, which is why Anna was looking for a new roommate. It’ll be strange to have Diego leave - I have never met anyone who smiled so much, and he was great about explaining to me a bit about Colombian politics while we were watching the last presidential debate (in short, TLC is NOT GOOD… he was really impressed that Obama mentioned the support of human rights over free trade in South America). Anna has helped me so much already with finding my way at the university – even just by showing me what a typical student’s workload is like and what their weekly schedule looks like is more information than I had before moving in here.

With much help from Robert I finally have everything that I need to feel completely settled in. I could finally unpack everything that has been in bags and suitcases since July, and I even have some fun red bed covers to match the Canadian flag hanging on my wall. Even though it’s a two bedroom apartment, with one of the bedrooms being a “Durchgangzimmer” or a living room converted into a bedroom, and even though the bathroom is barely big enough for a toilet and a shower (the toilet is conveniently located, believe it or not, right in front of the shower door so that a bath matt is hardly possible), I really feel like I found the perfect place to live in this year. On the Shoeneberg-Kreuzberg boarder, for those of you who know Berlin, a few bus stops away from Mehringdamm and the Akazienstrasse and around thirty minutes from Dahlem, the suburb where the FU is.

Of course, I was sad to part with my guest family but we’ve already made plans to get together for dinner next weekend. In return for all of the incredible meals (after which I consistently ate all the leftovers – they were impressed that I could pack it all in) I baked them a meat lasagna a-la-Morgan, which they absolutely loved. Ricotta cheese is not easy to come by in Germany, so I was proud that I could find all of the ingredients. Once I purchase a few baking supplies I will make them vegetarian lasagna.

With newly darkened hair (finally, a haircut!), a comfortable room, a few ACTUAL CLASSES WITH GERMAN STUDENTS under my belt (I survived, good to know), a five-page paper (all in German!) on Judaism in Germany today due on Monday (ooooh Scheisse), about sixty pages to read about the Prussians for Tuesday, and a train ticket to Poland for later this afternoon, I am late and busy as always. It’s nice to know that I’ve made it this far, despite my less-than-punctual ways. Now I am going to run run run to try to catch the next bus heading towards Dahlem for a class on the rights of German citizenship as it regards immigrants and those temporarily residing in Germany (I’m serious, that’s all in the course title!).