My Life as a Sitcom; or the Hazards of Apartment Hunting

If my life was a sitcom, I would want it to be one from the 80s or 90s, where everyone dressed in enormous knit sweaters, Calvin Klein was the fashion god, and John Stamos was still Uncle Jesse.

Check out the sexy hair.

 Anyway, my life as a sitcom would have an awesome theme song and lots of freeze frame endings as the cast members smiled as hijinks and misunderstandings got resolved.  

Yippee! All my life crises are created and resolved in 30 minutes or less!

My life-sitcom might be called "That's So Germany" or something else sappy and terrible and it would be about me, cultural misunderstandings,  becoming an adult, and Germany.

Sort of like Funny Face, minus the terrible music, the beatnik sequence, the photography plot (or is it a subplot? Still unclear...), and the awkward romance between Audrey Hepburn's character and Fred Astaire's character.

So actually not like Funny Face  at all, but I digress

But alas, my life is not a sitcom or a terribly made musical.  Case in point: right now I'm struggling to find an apartment.  In Germany.  While still in America.

Despite (or is it because of...?) the fact that the Fulbright and their Germany buddies the Kommission are in charge of everything, nobody really knows anything about the housing situation.  The German Fulbright Facebook page is just a litany of confused 20-somethings asking questions to equally bewildered 20-somethings.  

The Facebook page in a nutshell.

(According to a friend of mine who just came back from a Fulbright year, this utter confusion and lack of communication from Fulbright is typical and you have to get used to it. Awesome.)

Since the Fulbright and Kommission are no help, I turned to the Pädagogische Austauschdienst (PAD) office in Chemnitz for help.  Luckily, they're super nice.

About everything except housing.

The boss who I've been corresponding with is on vacation and in typical Germany fashion, pawned me off on a "Mitarbeiter"  which is an authority level between "lackey" and "colleague" in German hierarchy of the business world. 

His kurt little response told me that the school which I'm placed with should help me find housing.  He gave me their email, but told me that the school has vacation from the 15th of July until the 23rd of August.

Which would be fine, except I fly in on the 29th of August.

Ahh the joys of bureaucracy.

If my life were a sitcom, I at this point, I would freeze frame smile as I helplessly shrug, while the studio audience goes "That's so Germany!" while fake laughing.

Since my life is not a sitcom, my face looks something like this:

So now, your Humble Blogger is forced to trawl the internet, desperately searching for an apartment.  If I had to do this in America, it wouldn't be a big deal, but unfortunately, Germany is not like America at all when it comes to housing.

German adults rarely, if ever, own their own houses.  Most families rent the apartments they live in their entire lives.  College students, because Germans both start and end college much later than Americans, tend to live at home, in university housing, or in WGs, which are housing co-ops.  Which is just a round-about way of saying that there are basically no apartments.

Junior year, I was placed in a WG with 9 other Germans (5 guys and 4 girls) and although my housemates were always really nice to me and the location was superb, I would never, ever, ever do it again. 

(Story time: I vividly remember one morning going into our enormous and also totally repulsive kitchen, which I tried to clean in vain, every week, and finding Till, my housemate who kind of looked like Thor, if Thor was a stoner instead of a Norse god, wearing only a towel, frying something on the stove, while smoking a cigarette.  He told me, cigarette dangling off his lip, that I needed to shut the balcony if I used it, because "a pigeon could get in and then we would have the disaster that we had last year when one got in and ate all the bread and they had to chase it out with a broom and a clothes hanger".)

Although I will miss the indolent, smoking, half-naked men wandering around my home, I really do not want to live in a WG again.

Which eliminates nearly 75% of my housing options, unfortunately.

The other 25% are bleak options.  The fall into several categories and I've included some pictures for your edification.

1) Too expensive.  Money, as I've been told, does not grow on trees. (Damn.)

2) This place is sheer nightmare fuel.  This garrett was clearly one of the scouted sights for the next Human Centipede movie.

3) No furniture and no appliances! Jackpot! Who wants to invest in a sink, fridge, toilet, shower, and a washing machine while on an 800 Euro budget?

4) Too far away.  Even with a good bus system, things go wrong.  And being late to work might be one of them.

Don't worry, beloved readers, I've got a Plan B, which basically involves me breaking into a bakery after dark and curling up next to the oven to warm myself by its ambient heat.

Yep.

WILL YOUR HUMBLE BLOGGER FIND AN APARTMENT?!  FIND OUT NEXT TIME ON "THAT'S SO GERMANY"!

Finally!

Hello my darling followers!

After announcing my triumphant return to the Blog-o-sphere,  I waited for news about my placement in Germany.  No news.

And then I waited some more.

Bureaucracy.

And I kept waiting.

German Bureaucracy.

In that time: I graduated (yay!), worked five sessions of freshman orientation at the Alma Mater (ugh freshmen), got a new laptop (huzzah!), and fielded a sexually explicit phone call at work (not so huzzah).

While I waited I also tried to keep the 2:1 ratio on romance novels and Pulitzer prize winners while also planning on how I should go about knitting a hat.  While I waiting, I also realized that adulthood is not all it's cracked up to be.  Case in point: You have to have hobbies to meet new people because the simple joys of college no longer exist to bring people together.  Which leads to my other question: Why are all my hobbies sad people hobbies?

Anyway, a week ago I finally got the word - I'll be in Chemnitz, Germany!

In case your German topography is a little rusty, here's a convient map for you.

Bonus points if you can find Chemnitz yourself!

Chemnitz is the third largest city in the state of Sachsen (Saxony).  Because of its prominence as an industrial hub, Chemnitz, like its neighbor, Dresden, was bombed flat during WWII.  When Saxony fell to the Russians after 1945, Chemnitz was re-dubbed with a glorious Soviet name: "Karl Marx Stadt".

No, this isn't joke.
Karl here is 13 meters (aka 43 feet) tall.

Although Chemnitz, like Dresden and Leipzig, has bounced back from the horrors of WWII and the Soviet era, it appears that many of the traces of communism still exist.  A prime example: The high school I'm teaching at is located on the "Park of the Victims of Fascism Street", which is just about the most Soviet thing I've ever heard.

Luckily for you, my comrades, I have an excellent sense of humor.

Needless to say, I'm very excited about moving to Chemnitz! I can't wait to share my experiences with you!

What I'm not so excited about is trying to find my housing online.  But I guess that's part of being an adult, right?

Bis dann,

Your Humble Blogger and Simba

PS. I hope you like the new layout!