13 Things (That Happened to Me Yesterday)

Yes, my lovely followers, it's true, I'm finally in Chemnitz!

I'll be posting photos soon, but for now because I'm still a wee bit jet-lagged, here's a list of a what happened to me yesterday (or was it the day before yesterday? Anyway, it doesn't matter):

1) A long plane ride to Amsterdam (Note to Self: get aisle seat next time)

2) A long wait at the Amsterdam airport for the flight to Berlin where Your Humble Blogger who never drinks coffee, discovered the joys of being fully awake thanks to coffee.  I WAS NEVER MORE AWAKE IN MY ENTIRE LIFE.  And then it wore off and I wasn't. Bummer.

3) A very short, but very embarrassing bus ride to the main train station in Berlin with all my luggage. Contrary to popular belief, some Americans can speak German and we understand just perfectly when being scolded by Germans. (Note to Self: Take taxi next time.)

4) Hanging out the Berlin train station and munching on the world's biggest Bretzel.  Am happy to report that it was delicious and perfect.  Also happy to report that using the ticket kiosks in the train station brought back all my latent German, including several swear words.

5) Train from Berlin to Leipzig.  Met an adorable little old lady on the train who wanted nothing more to chat with me in English until she got kicked out of her seat by someone with a reservation. Also learned about seat reservations on trains.

6) Train from Leipzig to Chemnitz.  A group of drunk punk-goth gypsies (yes, you read that right) got kicked off the train.  Sadly, most of the yelling and the police intervention happened on the platform, not on the train, so no gossip.

7) My cooperating teacher, Andrea, picked me up from the train station!! She even had a little sign! I was so happy to see her.  She loaded up all my luggage into her car (it fit, thank goodness) and she drove me around town a bit.  We went into the city center to get dinner where....

8) We ran into Maria and Kaylee, two of the ETAs from last year in Chemnitz.  Luckily, Maria recognized me from my photos on Facebook! Huzzah for the internet!

9) After dinner, Andrea took me to my apartment where my landlord, who is really nice, gave me a pick of 4 rooms in several WGs (Wohngemeinschaft aka a flat share) in the apartment which he both lives in and renovates.  I am the first person to live in this new WG so I may be all by my lonesome until October, when the semester at the Uni starts.  I picked a big room with lots of natural light on the 3rd floor and I have a lovely view of a little park behind the apartment.

10) Andrea is amazing - for many reasons, but especially because she brought me sheets and towels!

11) Maria and Kaylee draw me a city map on a pizza box lid since I have no paper.

12) The three of us head down to Lidl and I get some food for breakfast. Mmmmm yogurt and Musli. I feel German already.

13) I crash onto my new bed for a blissful 14 hours of sleeping.

In Case You Were Wondering How I Feel Right Now

(You probably weren't, but I'm going to tell you anyway.)

This has been my life today.

Frantically doing laundry:

 

Discovering I scheduled multiple appointments at the same time on the same day:

Apparently I can't be at the dentist and getting my hair cut at the same time? 

Trying to fix that:

Unable to find my Official Fulbright letter:

Trying to make lunch while my brain melts:

Overall:

How to Avoid a Pre-Departure Panic Attack in 8 Easy Steps

Step 1: Refuse to quit your 9-5 job until the last possible minute. Being forced to wake up early and go to bed early leaves little time for pondering the terrors of being abroad.  Practice the zen of the cash register, my friends.

Step 2: Find a tv show or book that you've forgotten about or everyone has been talking about and become ridiculously invested it. Worry about the problems of fictional people and remind yourself that your life could be much worse.  Like Breaking Bad worse.

Step 3: Take up a large, time consuming project.  Like souffle-making.  Or knitting a sweater on size zero needles.  Or an enormous cross stitch pattern.  Something that goes along well with Step 2.

Step 4: Don't pack until the last possible minute. Otherwise, you'll just keep having to do laundry because you'll take favorites out of commission. No thank you.

Step 5: Visit with friends and family and try to avoid talking about going abroad.  Pretend you have a normal job like a normal college graduate to obscure the truth that you're absconding off to Europe. (Plus, bonus points, you get to be with the people you love.)

Step 6: Take out the empty suitcases you plan on packing at the 11th hour in an attempt to fool the Parental Units into believing that you have outgrown your college ways of procrastination.

Step 7: Every time you feel like crying, swallow it deep inside you.  Hysterical sobbing should be reserved for the plane ride.

And...

Step 8: Make sure you put your passport in spot where you can remember where you put it when you're frantically packing on the eve of traveling.

Of Course Everything Comes Together Last Minute...

A couple of days ago, I got an email from my coordinating teacher.

In English! (Gasp!)

Who seems really, really nice.

She also complimented me on my German.

Oh, stop it.

And I got an email from the former ETA there and he just about gushed rainbows and kittens about the school, the faculty, and the students.

Which made me really, really happy.

But best of all....

 I finally have an apartment!!

So I guess I should start thinking about packing?

Nahhhh, probably not.

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!

Return of the Blog

Hello my darling followers!

Long time, no see!  And yes, I've missed you too.

My senior year of college is wrapping up, which means that in three weeks I will be a woman of letters. 

Which is pretty awesome, not going to lie.  I get to run around introducing myself as a B.A. in English and German.  (Yes, pun is intended.)

But you're probably asking yourself:  "But Hannah, what are you doing to stay out of jobless poverty post-graduation?  You just majored in the two most useless things ever!"

In fact my parents were asking themselves the same thing.

My answer.

Remember when I blogged incessantly about taking the exam from hell (aka the LSAT)? 

It's funny how life works, my friends, because I'm not going to law school at all. 

Gasp! It's true!

I spent a dark semester of the soul where I debated whether I wanted to go to law school or graduate school for English.

To avoid you hearing all about my angst (used here in the English sense of the word, not the German), I'll just get right to it.  Eventually, I realized that a life without studying English literature would be just plain miserable. It's my true passion and I'm not afraid to own to it.  I love books. I love the poetry of words and the possibilities they can inspire.  I love reading books and finding kernels of truth about the world, about people, about myself inside the covers.  And I want to spend my life doing just that through teaching and I'm seriously considering a Ph.D. in Literature.

Of course, whenever I mention that, people (especially my professors) seem to think that I want to be poor forever.  Because I'm totally not pragmatic and I don't worry about money ever.

Yup.

That aside, I was all set to go to graduate school for my Masters in English.  Then I got the email that changed everything.

I got the English Teaching Assistantship Fulbright Award. 

I cried a lot when I found out. Just not in public.

To go back to Germany.

Which means:

Never was a .gif so applicable

 
Although I don't know where I'm teaching yet, I'm very, very, very excited about going back.  And my second adventure in Germany will begin in September.

What this means for you, my lovely followers, is that the blog is back! 

Over the summer, the blog will be getting a face-lift and some technical improvement (like sorting the tags, fixing photo links etc.), so don't freak out if the blog looks all funky if you check in during the summer.

Right now, I'm trying to make to graduation through the mountain of papers and exams I still have to do.

Preach.

See you soon my dear followers! I hope you join my on my new journey!  Don't forget to show the blog some love on Facebook!

And as always,

Lots of Love,
Your Humble Blogger and Simba