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.
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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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