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!

So you’ve just arrived in Berlin. You’re living on Döner Kebab, still getting smug satisfaction simply by reading signs and advertisements in German to yourself, and generally having a good time walking the streets of one of the greatest cities of Europe. Great!
But of course, your temporary living arrangements are just that: temporary. Like a patriotically-striped popsicle clutched in your hands on a hot day of halcyon summers past, your time is markedly fleeting, all the while putting a sticky mess in your hands.
Yes, you are endowed with the distinct pleasure of finding a room in a Wohngemeinschaft in Berlin.

There is a well-engineered, streamlined, and many times practiced protocol for your journey. Allow me to introduce you to it.
First, you will browse several different websites catering to students looking for rooms in Berlin. These sites will allows you to search specifically for places in the neighborhoods you are interested in, and present you with endless lists of potential places of shelter.
You find one that looks nice. Decent price, good neighborhood. If you are lucky, you may be able to email them, but more likely there will be listed a phone number by which you may inquire further. Prepare the following: German phone; pad of paper; handkerchief; and a deep sense of humility. Take three deep breaths and dial.
No, you didn’t accidentally dial confusion - that came of its own accord, as if by uninvited conference call. Unfortunately, confusion has better reception than you, so you will just have to talk louder. Somehow, you will get the important points across and will be given a time for a Besichtingungstermin - a visitation meeting. Wipe the cold sweat off of your forehead with the handkerchief.

A better term than visitation meeting might be interrogation, though there will be no man in a fedora smoking in the corner - he won’t be wearing a fedora. After being shown the apartment, you will be sat down in the kitchen with the other inhabitants of the apartment. The ringleader, armed with pad of paper and retractable pen, which they will incessantly click, will ask you many questions. They will begin simply - your name, where you’re from, why you’re in Berlin and so forth. Then they will segue without warning to more challenging ones, both in language and in content. (Have you heard of this obscure German band? No? Schade.) Having so destroyed your will and confidence, they will ask you if you have any questions for them. In all likelihood, owing to your crippled dignity, you will not. However, having been asked, you will feel obligated to come up with something, thereby forcing you to come up on the spot with the most asinine imaginable question. (Well, yes, I suppose we do like spaghetti.) Don’t worry, you’re right on track. Having broken out again in a cold sweat (you forgot your handkerchief, didn’t you?), you will write your name, phone number and address on a list of 20 others who have come before you, and you will be shown to the door.

And now the final phase. I hope you kept your deep sense of humility handy. After waiting several days, you will receive an email. Your heart will leap. Could this be it? The answer, my friend, is no. Likely, it will say something like:

hi Leute,
unser kleines Zimmer hat ab jetzt einen neuen Bewohner und leider ist es keine/keiner von euch.
grüße,
so und so.

Translation:

hi people,
our little room now has a new inhabitant and unfortunately it is none of you.
best,
so and so.

Head up, my friend. You’ve got three more Besichtigungstermine today.

-Micah

Footnotes:
1. I might be exaggerating a bit. And I’m honestly having a great time. A more conventional update will come later - perhaps when I’ve found a place.
2. If something seems to good to be true, it probably is. For example, if you get a reply to your wanted ad (suspicious in itself) offering you a furnished room in Kreuzberg with several others, when you go to visit you will probably discover that the three people living there are between 40 and 70 years old, will fit the stereotype of “eurotrash” unbelievably well, and will then sit you down for tea and not let you leave for over an hour, discussing how intelligent they are, while one of their dogs insistently tries you eat your pants and bite your hand off.

I have been fielding many questions regarding how exactly I’m managing to go to Germany, how long I will be there, whom I will be staying with, and so on. I attempt to answer most of these presently.
Some people will be rather sick of these trivialities. To these, I can only say that I sympathize dearly.

I am going to Berlin for 11 months on a scholarship, called the International Reciprocal Scholarship Exchange Program, or IRSEP. As its name implies, it is a reciprocal exchange program at the U of M, currently with programs to 6 countries. (If anyone reading this is eligible to apply, I highly, highly recommend it.) After an extensive application process, I was selected was one of two recipients to go to Germany. This is an amazing blessing.
(more…)

In precisely 5 days, I will be en route to Berlin, by way of Chicago and Frankfurt, with the final leg by train.
I have not even begun packing. My room looks like the same eruption of dirty laundry and various debris as usual. All in due time.
The main point of this post is to make sure this site and all of its various tendrils and functions are working swimmingly so as to avoid any excessive mucking in the deep caverns of technology once I arrive.
The impetus for this site was to keep people informed of my travels (this upcoming year in Germany in particular), and to that effect, I have provided myriad ways to stay informed at your convenience.
Some of you are receiving this as an email, and if you wish to keep receiving them, say no more. Otherwise, just let me know and I will take you off the list. If you or someone you know would like to be subscribed to the email list, there is a small box to join on the site.
Otherwise, these postings are syndicated on Facebook, LiveJournal, and of course RSS/Atom. If none of this means anything to you, that is quite all right. It can all of course be viewed at any time on the site itself at micahpaul.net.

With that, I will end this insufferably banal post. I plan on writing up another one soon comprising an overview of why and how I am going to Germany.

Liebe Grüße,
Micah

At times, everything just seems to synthesize into perfect harmony.
These times are fleeting, but while I’m here, what better than to blog about it, right?
Right?
A bunch of little loose ends all connecting in a short period of time.
My time spent in Chicago, I feel, has culminated in the realization of so much possibility. Many aspects have been belatedly and unexpectedly emerging. Such adventure is the gift that keeps on giving.
So if I start segueing from the abstract to the tangible, what is the method, and at what point does it become monotonous?
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A couple of hours ago, I returned home from a little journey. I set out for one week on the road with minimal planning, looking to go new places, meet new people, all that usual stuff, and with a more deep-seated desire to gain profound new experience and perspective.
In all of these respects, I succeeded.

What follows is an very lengthy account. However, for the sane ones who do not have the interest to read this beast, it can be summed up thusly: I surfed collectives in Chicago, met my friend Max at a Chicago jail, took him and friends West to Omaha, crashed at an anarchist house there, then headed North up to Brookings to spend a few days with my friend Wes, cut across Minnesota to Chippewa Falls to see Mariah, and then home. And it was amazing. On with it, then. Actually, one note: In reading over this account, it seems to come across as a bit flat - I seem to have failed in getting across the true feel of this trip. I hope the events can at least speak for themselves.

In the days preceding my departure, I began to get a nasty skepticism about whether this trip would work. Travelling without a plan and expecting to run into great adventure is a pretty gutsy move. I had never done anything of this sort before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. My fear was that I would drive to Chicago and have nothing to do and no one to meet for a week, and come back home with little gained but a gas bill.

The moment I arrived at the place I would be staying in Chicago, however, these fears were alleviated.

The drive to Chicago was extremely foggy. I stopped in Madison to have dinner with my brother, Noah, and would later find out that the reason I had a dickens of a time getting back on to I-90 was a 100+ car pileup that happened there. Anyways, I got to Chicago fine and then found my home. This was a place I had found through The Couchsurfing Project, a site which I very highly recommend for any traveler. It was listed as a warehouse having 16 people living in it. And how!
(more…)

If somehow you have stumbled on this page, know that there is nothing of substance here yet, but there will be soon.
-Micah