A Zimmer of one's own

Tonight is my last night in my current room - the wonderful, 25 square metre sanctuary that has seen the best and worst of my first month in Berlin.


It seems like everyone in Berlin moves on the 1st of the month. A big business day for removalists. As yet, I’m undecided whether synchronized relocation is a good or a bad thing. I guess it doesn’t matter much to me, because I can still fit the entirety of my belongings in one suitcase. Admittedly, the suitcase is enormous, but it’s still portable enough to drag four U-Bahn stops and hoist up the three floors to my new Zimmer.

Looking for a place to live is always stressful, but it’s worse when you have to feed every advertisement through Google Translate to make sure that the apartment has a microwave, and you communicate with your potential housemates-to-be better with grunts and hand gestures rather than language.

But in retrospect (and I can probably only say this because my room is finally sorted, signed and safe) my room-hunting experience was pretty smooth. From the 15 emails and 10 phone calls I made I ended up looking at about 7 places, which is apparently quite a standard ratio. I was pretty determined to make Kreuzberg my home, which helped to narrow down my search range, but only just – anecdotally, about a third of the apartments in Berlin are currently vacant. But competition is fierce and sometimes dirty for the ones that are available.

My new place is probably one of the least impressive places I checked out. My room is shoebox-size, the apartment doesn’t have a balcony and Südstern, the nearest U-Bahn station, sits only on one line – the U7, which takes you to a whole lot of pointless places. But it’s close to the city, comes with two friendly and funny German students and has one attractive feature that caused my heart to skip a beat - the rent is an astounding 170 euro a month, which currently converts into AUD$74 a week. The extra $60 in my pocket every week gives me all the more reason to make Berlin’s ‘cultural institutions’ my second home(s).

For regular readers, I’m sorry about the late update. This week has been pretty crazy. Like I wrote in my last post, my attitude to time has changed quite dramatically, quite quickly. My only commitment has been language class from Monday to Thursday at 3pm-6pm, and most of the time outside this has been spent mostly sleeping, partying and feeling sorry for myself the morning after. I’m a bit concerned about what will happen when Uni starts on the 14th. It’s going to be a shock to think inside a schedule again.

In search of lost time

The most important part of Berlin has nothing to do with the language, the people, the ever-present history and monuments, the cheap food or the electric nightlife. It’s the way that it’s changed my approach to time.

In Australia, I never really relax. I couldn’t, or perhaps didn’t want to, escape the treadmill, the quick two-step. It’s like there’s a grandfather clock next to my head and I’m aware of every second passing and with them things I could have done. Psychological, environmental or genetic, driven by ambition, education or boredom, I don’t know. But I had to stay busy, or at least justify to myself the way I spent my time.

But here, I’ve forgotten what my alarm clock sounds like. I sleep at least eight hours a night, an extravagance compared to semester time in Melbourne. I frequent park benches and comfortable chairs, sometimes reading but mostly just thinking and soaking up the weak European sun. “Doing nothing” doesn’t bother me like it used to. And it makes me really happy.

Wasting my time in the waiting line

On Thursday I tackled the largest obstacle on my journey to becoming a legitimate student in Deutschland – obtaining my visa. There’s only one place you can do this in Berlin – in a nondescript government building in an ugly industrial suburb, which only deigns to do business two and a half days a week.

The last two weeks of my life had been building up to this point. I had been dutifully completing all the necessary prior steps in the correct order. Exemption from the German state health insurance (cutely called AOK) – check. New bank account opened (following a little white lie, for the sake of expediency, about understanding all the terms and conditions) – check. Four biometric photos from the photo booth in Kottbusser Tor that also doubles as a junkie shoot-up spot – check. And I had the documentary evidence of all these little victories safely stored in my “Life Folder”, which I carry as carefully as a baby.

I arrived 15 minutes early, optimistically hoping to avoid the wait I’d been warned about. Instead, I was greeted by the sight of almost 200 wannabe legitimate citizens queuing patiently outside in front of me, stamping their feet in the cold.

Whole families huddled together, drinking tea from thermoses while their kids screamed past and face-planted with humorous regularity. A hungover-looking guard sucked down a cigarette and surveyed the herd. I took a deep breath, reminded myself that I had come to Germany be challenged and joined the queue with a grimace and a groan.

This lovely Turkish woman started talking to me, and we discussed politics and bitched about the bureaucratic disrespect we were being subjected to. An hour later we made it inside the front door and into another queue which curled around and around like a macabre airport check-in line.

When I made it to the front, I was given a number and told to go to one of the 20 waiting rooms spread across the five floors of the building. I trotted off, feeling like I was getting somewhere finally. But alas, how wrong I was.

I can now say that I have supped on the bitter ale that is true boredom. I did my German homework, I tried to learn some verbs, wrote a bit in my diary. But then I stared into space for almost three hours. Watching the shadows move across the room, the motes of dust floating through the air, the people beside me losing their grip on reality, the numbers on the waiting list creeping ever closer to my own (the number “234” will never be forgotten). It was extreme.

When my number finally flashed up I practically skipped to the interview room, ignoring the jealous stares of my co-waitees. But after handing over all my documents, I was told that I needed to return to the waiting pen while they examined everything. Sanity fraying, I did what I was told.

Almost an hour later I was ushered into the final room, where I waited while two bureaucrats cracked jokes with each other for about five minutes before turning their attention to me to tell me this – that I didn’t have enough money and I needed to prove that I was receiving a government scholarship to remain in Germany.

Feeling faint, I sat down and asked them to explain. You don’t have enough money for two years, they said. But ah! I said, feeling incredibly relieved, I’m only staying for 6 months! They made a German-sounding exclamation, shrugged, printed off my student visa, signed it, and told me that was all and I could go. It was probably my imagination but as I left the building the sun broke through the clouds and somewhere a choir of angels started singing.

The final step is to apply for my welcoming money, a 110 Euro gift from the German Government for moving to the country. It would be better called “compensation”. For a country that prides itself on efficiency, the whole registration/legitimisation experience has been very strange. Six hours after I joined the queue I got back on the U-Bahn, relieved to be back on a part of German infrastructure that worked the way it should.

Sprechen Sie?

I'm just back from this crazy Language Exchange night, something a friend-of-a-friend told me about. It's held every Monday at Belushi's, a faux-American bar in Mitte where the English barmaids give you sass and the booze-hounds will crack onto you in Australian. Climb up the stairs and you're greeted by the babble of forty people speaking English, Spanish, Dutch and German - EXTREMELY badly. But willingly, and bravely! It's great. As well as ironing out the 'Strine from my Deutsch, I've met some top-class people there. People are open and friendly. Hopefully it becomes a weekly fixture in my diary - a single, solitary social certainty alone in a sea of unstructured time.

The U-Bahn 8 takes me back from Mitte to Kottbusser Tor. Kotbusser Tor station is known for its heroin addicts, crazy drunks and sleazy men with persistence and pockets full of pickup lines. The winner of the best German Person tonight was the punk with the rat snuffling through her black and green hair who was pointing at her girlfriend (with quintessential black fingernails) and shouting.

I'm trying to stay off the trains - the daily ticket is a whopping 6 euro and, as those who know me will attest, I am a tight arse. I also like to excuse myself from the more strenuous forms of exercise by cycling, and in this vein I have recently bought a beautiful orange bike. I literally stepped outside my door and there she was, being wheeled past by an old man on the way to the Turkish Market. I swooned and the deal was done.

In the cold light of day, I realise that I have been swindled - the brakes work some of the time, the pedals clunk and the seat, although deceivingly broad, is unsupportive in the arse regions. I got it repaired at this place for almost-free and it goes a little better now. It probably won't take me the 15 kilometres to my university every day though. I'm leaving that problem for another day.

I've been having the most devastating, embarrassing hangovers recently. I'm blaming it on my approach to currency. The Euro still seems like toy money. I have trouble taking it seriously and hence find it horribly easy to hand over a twenty and not care about the change. This accordingly makes me more likely to splurge on cocktails, a drink that I'd never touch in Australia due to its hole-in-pocket burning capacity. And once you have two 3 euro ($6 Australian) cocktails in your system, all the bad ideas suddenly seem like good ideas.

But otherwise, the nightlife in Berlin is completely and totally satisfying, mind body and soul. I thought Brunswick Street was good, but there's hundreds of streets in Berlin that trump it in both variety and quality. The drinks are cheap, the music is great, the couches are comfortable and the dancefloors are full. It's very tempting to throw caution/my education to the wind and spend my nights prowling around with a good-looking entourage (as yet to be fully established). At present education is still king and it will undoubtedly remain there (Mum, Dad?) but I'm looking forward to a semester of a carefully-struck balance.

On that note, I also received an extremely important bit of news last night. I've been offered a graduate job with the Victorian government as a trainee lawyer, to start in March 2010. I have been giddy all day, smiling at pretty much everyone which probably makes my fellow countrymen a little nervous. This means that I'll have a full-time job in what's likely to be a very bad year, employment-wise. It means that I will be coming back to Australia for 2010. It means I'll be doing exactly what I wanted to with my law degree. And it means that I can be a bit more liberal with my credit card. Sverige, here I come!

Flasher on the Platz

It’s 3.00am on Friday morning and ladies and gentlemen, I have just witnessed my first German penis. I’m not exactly a stickler for romance, but I think there’s a lot of room for improvement on the situation where a man approaches his objet d’affection with his pink bits poking out through his fly and waves them at her.

Unwanted sausage is frightening. Even though I know the politically correct response to a flasher is to point and laugh hysterically, I think horror and disgust are the actual reactions hard-wired into the female psyche. Especially when you’re alone, and especially when you’re lost in Alexanderplatz, Berlin’s soulless central square.

Even before the willy incident, tonight has been pretty mediocre. Chris (another Australian guy from my language course) his friend (whose name has temporarily escaped me) and myself attempted to find a pub called Weinerei, a place based on the Lentil-As-Anything idea where you pay as much for an evening full of drinking as you think it’s worth. Perfect student fodder. But we got lost and by the time we got there it was shut and the owners were contentedly getting trolleyed inside.

Then Chris remembered that despite being world leaders in public transport technology, the last trains on the Berlin U-Bahn run around 1am. This wasn’t too concerning for me - I live in Kreuzberg, a relative hop-skip-and-jump’s distance from the action; whereas Chris and his friend live out in the F.U. student accommodation, which is an hour and a half away when your planets are aligned and there are connecting services. But eventually they found a bus and I found a taxi and I am now safely ensconced inside my room.

My language course at Deutsch Akademie only runs until Thursday so technically my weekend has begun already. I think I’ll need the whole three days to understand what I have supposedly learnt already. The course is great, although it’s difficult to sit still and pay attention for three hours straight after four months away from the books.

In my relatively limited experience, learning a language fucks with your emotions in a way that conventional Arts or Law education can’t – the ridiculous bursts of euphoria when you get a sentence right, the frustration when a concept that a 3 year old can master eludes you. It makes you care.

And finally - slowly but surely, I’m reaching the summit of the administrative Everest of becoming a legitimate person in Germany. There are about six different things every new student needs to do, which roughly translates into six queues, 18 forms (half only in German) 12 stilted conversations, 40 kilometres, 250 euro and about 30 hours of precious time. I’ve found that the key is to turn up early, often before a morning coffee or shower - the time saved is worth offending everyone around you.

I don’t think I’ll be sleeping for a while – I had a sneaky pre-drink of several espresso shots from our stovetop espresso maker (every day I have a choice of 4 methods of making my coffee – this one is the quickest and packs the biggest punch). But until next time, bis später yo.

History revision

Ich bin ein Berliner for a week and things have stabilised into something resembling normal life, complete with all the recognisable cycles of the twenty-something lifestyle. As is typical for a Saturday, I spent all of yesterday in bed with a hangover, eating lots of chocolate, watching DVDs (Bridget Jones' Diary) and begging the lovebirds to stop shrieking.

Today I made up for it by doing some homework and then taking myself to the German History Museum. Five hours later I was spat out of the exit, my head aching from factual/historical overload and hungry enough to eat a horse. I had great plans to make up some Dougal-inspired dahl but all the supermarkets are shut on a Sunday night, so felafel kebab it was. I'm now sitting in my room rugged up in my 10 euro winter jacket (I've discovered that "room temperature" is actually culturally contingent) with some serious garlic breath and a cup of Earl Grey, taking stock of the past week.

It got a lot better towards the end. Every morning I've been spending a couple of hours in the library with my Schaum's German Grammar book which has provided just enough routine to both bore me to tears and calm me down. In the afternoons I have been taking to the streets on Helena's borrowed bike to explore and get my bearings. My sense of direction is being foiled by Berlin's overcast weather - it's impossible to tell where the sun is or where the shadows are. My map is my constant companion, but I try to be subtle about it.

Riding in Berlin's a different ball game than Melbourne, where speed is king and most cyclists take themselves a little too seriously in their lycra bodysuits. Here cycling on footpaths is encouraged and wearing a helmet is a clear sign that you're a little slow. Helena's bike is built for leisure - you can roll up and down curbs without the bike shaking apart and meander along slower than walking without falling over. As well as being beautiful, Helena's bike is also incredibly old so and it's got backwards pedal brakes and awkward handlebars. I have lovingly dubbed it "Crazy Bike".

I'm only subletting my apartment in Kreuzberg until the end of March. But it seems like a great suburb to make my home - cheap, close, amazing Turkish food, great bars and some crazy political stuff happening. A few nights ago I was drinking in a bar a street away when a group of young people march past wearing all black and holding up traffic. I took their flyer home for homework and after twenty minutes' painstaking translation discovered that they were demonstrating for the death of fascism.

Thea is also temporarily living in Kreuzberg until she moves into her permanent room. She's couchsurfing in this amazing place that, on the outside, looks like your typical haunted house (slight lean, on a massive vacant lot, trees that scratch at your face, bats etc) but inside is a beautiful loft. Yesterday her host had a massive couchsurfing party there, attended by the Berlin Couchsurfing A-List. My aforementioned hangover forced me into premature retirement but it was going off-tap when I left.

Tomorrow I start my language course. I can't wait - I'm realising that my German is becoming book smart when I really need it to be street smart. So I can give some proper lip.

On the up

Well, as it turns out, things got worse before they got better. But it's on the up now. Basically, myself and a group of others (mostly Australians) have been axed from the FU language course. According to the authorities, our German is too shit for their "beginners" level. We were given a list of other places that offered language courses, directed to the office to get our money refunded and sent on our merry way. 

After wallowing in our sorrows for a few moments, myself, Thea (another girl from Melbourne Uni law school) and Maria from Spain rode the U-Bahn hard, checking out these other language schools and eventually enrolling in one. It's called Deutsch Akademie and it's in a posh part of town, sandwiched between up-market department stores and Western franchises. It starts on Monday, so I have until then to bring myself up to speed with the trickier aspects of the grammar.

It's just on 19.00 and I'm back from the Amerika Gedenkbibliothek, a library I've found that doesn't require an annual fee. The entrance is plastered with signs prohibiting a lot of things I can't understand, which is fine by me. It seems like everyone there is also studying German. The reading rooms are humming with the sound of strangers having fledgling conversations. There's a happy sense of community and people are willing to practice on anyone. A man from Turkey who was sitting next to me asked me some questions and suffered through my pigin German, then offered me some of his Kit-Kat as a consolation. And so I made my first German-learning speaking friend.

This is the first time I've committed myself to learning a language in a meaningful way. In high school the teachers were so uninspiring that it was more fun to feign ignorance than learn the subject matter. And while weekly Swedish lessons before I went to Lund gave me a reasonable grasp of the basics, the fatal combination of Swedes speaking English perfectly and the lingua franca of the exchange community being English all but convinced me to forget I ever spoke it. 

Everyone has been saying that immersion is the best way to learn a language. But I'm torn between my desire to meet people to make Berlin a little less lonely and my desire to nail German (as much as my beginner 1B level will allow). I think the answer lies in meeting friendly Germans with time, patience and a preference for speaking slowly and repeating themselves often. Another excuse to frequent bars, hurrah!

I'm sorry if my so far my blog has been preoccupied with my German language soap-opera. But this is the reason I'm here so early and I'm sure that once this works out, everything else will fall into place. Then I'll start seeing the sights and taking photos and living the life a little more.

deary me

Today has been a tricky day. For the first time in a long time I feel like I'm in something way, way over my head. It was the first day of classes at FU Prep, the 6-week program designed to give exchange students a grounding in the language. Or so I thought. 

I got there fine. I even bought a coffee and a chocolate croissant at the station, and made some friends as we got lost and then found each other along the way. But this is where the fun ended. The rest of the day I spent feeling like I was on the outside of a horrible private German joke.

I have been deluding myself that the bits and pieces I've taught myself between jobs would be enough to get by. The day involved three language tests, including the "conversation interview" where I stumbled through some verbs and nouns much to the disappointment of the teachers and the cringing embarrassment of my peers. I also managed to "ace" the online test component with a score of 13% through guesswork that had nothing to do with comprehension. 

Apart from (as is probably obvious from the tone of this post) my self-pity, I'm also worried that I'm not good enough to do the course and they will refuse to take me on. I'm willing to work hard but I don't know if it's enough. It's all just a little overwhelming at the moment. 

But to put it into context, I came overseas in search of a challenge, and I sure as heck have found one. And I've made some friends today, and tomorrow night we're going to a pub. So things will be getting better very soon.

Just a short post before my jeg-lagged delirium seizes complete control. After 4 flights, 7 servings of airplane food and around 30 hours in transit I have arrived at my temporary home in Kreuzberg, Berlin. The journey was pretty good, as these things go. My plan of learning a hefty chunk of Deutsch in transit was quickly abandoned and I spent most of the my time asleep, hence managing to avoid both a hangover from my going-away party and too much conversation with the blonde beauty therapist that sat next to me on the Sydney-Abu Dhabi stretch. The premonitions of my own death that usually accompany take-off and landing were forgotten by the time we arrived in Munich. 

I also had plans of speaking German with everyone once I arrived in Germany. I managed to have an entire conversation with a middle-aged couple on the plane, although admittedly it mostly revolved around me telling them that I don't speak much German in 4 different ways. I also slipped back into English at the Lufthansa counter when I realised I was being ripped off. Apparently the checked-in baggage limit was 20kgs and I was just over at 22kg. The lady at the check-in desk said that the fee would be 10 euros, which I decided to grin and bear. But when I got to the excess baggage counter it became 30 euros because this was the minimum transaction the computer would register. I started muttering things about conditions of sale and contractual obligations and that Air Caledonie case but quickly decided to let it go, being as I was at this stage very hungry and very tired and probably very close to either violence or crying, both actions that are powerless in the face of airline bureaucracy. 

My room is five stories above Marienstrasse in Kreuzberg, the "Brunswick of Berlin" as it is known to myself.  The room is massive, with two windows that overlook the street and let in heaps of light and a cage with two lovebirds in it that I am caring for. I am renting from a woman called Helena, who came home from work at a discotheque at 10.30am this morning exhausted and spent two hours tidying up my room. 

While I waited I made conversation with the main owner, a prematurely-greying and unemployed philosophy student who gave me cup after cup of filter coffee which propped me up just enough. Most walls in the apartment are covered by creaking bookshelves, stacked high with his philosophy books. I have sadly forgotten his name - it's something crazy - but the other two flatmates are called Pablo and Flavia and they're from Spain and Brazil and they're both studying German too. Tomorrow I go to university and start the language course, so it's probably time I head to bed. Gute Nacht.