MicahPaul

Hola!
After 6 weeks on the search and having made 45 Besichtigungstermine, I am very happy to report that last week I found and moved into a Wohngemeinschaft (apartment).

It is a wonderful apartment located on the top floor of an old building in the borough of Neukölln. I have one wunderschöne roommate, a German girl my age, also a Politikwissenschaft student, though at Uni Potsdam. Neukölln is located in the southeastern part of the city (though formerly West Berlin), quite pretty (on the Berlin scale), diverse, with Turkish produce markets and flea markets, all of the amenities easily reachable, and prices comfortably low.
My address is:
Hermannstraße 160
12051 Berlin
Germany

With this hurdle overcome, I can move on to bigger and better things, namely, egging each and every one of the 44 Wohngemeinschaften that heretofore passed me over. Accordingly, I find it decorous to use (and slightly modify) the old dichotomic motto Liberty or Death: in my case, Eggregious Vandalism or Deportation.
Right, then, with that out of my system I can get to good-but-not-as-good things-that-are-bigger-and-better, gratuitous hypenation inclusive.
One such thing is school, which one could say is in fact the reason I am here. Classes started last week, and I have since figured out my schedule here. The registration here is very open – you simply attend classes that seem interesting for the first couple of weeks, and continue going to the ones that prove to be actually interesting. The classes I am taking this semester (translated) are:

• This was the GDR (about the history, particularly cultural, of East Germany)
• German as Foreign Language B1.2
• Peacekeeping through Administration, Peace Building through Development (actually in English, centering around Kosovo)

and either

• Introduction to European Integration

or

• The World Trade System as Regime of Global Governance.

A nice bonus, owing to the way academic scheduling works here, is that I only have classes on Tuesday and Wednesday. As I surmised, the academic German in political science lectures and texts is extremely challenging, requiring a dictionary close by, but I am hoping that it will grow easier as time goes on. Overall, anyways, the classes look to be very interesting and it should be an excellent and productive semester.

Besides these things, nothing terribly exciting has happened in the interim since the last update. One small burp in the digestion of progress was the loss-theft of my laptop, for which I am in no small part to blame. A Gas-X of rectification has been administered and a replacement is forthcoming. It is for this reason, however, than I presently offer no new photos; suffice it to say that they exist and will be exhibited at my earliest convenience.

With that, then, I leave you. I must inspect the egg stocks of local groceries.
Alles gute!