The hot-water-cold-water trick

As a youngster, I had a book which basically consisted of cheap thrills for the inquisitively minded, finding interesting stuff to do with bits and bobs found around the house.

I devoured this book via the eyeballs, but, typically, turned little of it into tangeable experience. The one exception to this rule was a trick so easy to perform, and so full of promise that only the dullest of minds could have failed to want to repeat it.

The book instructed one to fill one bowl with hot water, one with cold, and a third with a tepid mixture of the two, dip each hand into one of the "extreme" bowls, then plunge both hands into the middle bowl. The different contexts of the different hands causes the middle bowl to feel cold and hot at the same time.

The final result is indeed satisfyingly odd and, thinking about it now, the same experiment is being repeated again and again throughout life.

The 'middle bowl' of my life is my decision to jack it all in and move to Frankfurt.

My feeling of itchy feet, of the bigness of the world versus the smallness of my experience of it and my general dissatisfaction with the known set against my wild imagination of the unknown, is the cold bowl.

The feeling of knowing that, living within a fairly small radius of every location, was everyone who I think is great and love the idea of sitting at a proper wooden table with drinking red wine in a dimly lit living room. The comfort of knowing that one text was all it would take to organise the next hanging-out session. These things are my hot bowl.

Set against these contexts, my new life here feels warm and cold at the same time.

The cold doesn't need much explaining, and I've written plenty on the subject here before. Not having close friends is tough. Making close friends is also tough. Or rather, it takes a long time.

More interesting is the warm. This, I will describe via the medium of the three short anecdotes about what happens if you live in a small place (ie. not London!).

1) The piano teacher
Hand-written messages were springing up all over campus. 'Klavierlehrer gesucht' they said. Insisting on the British musical-note nomenclature (in Germany they have a note called 'H'!) and asking those who could decypher the broken German to contact an English man.

One woman responded to this call, and I went to see her a couple of weeks ago. She turned out to be about 17, and more used to teaching first-time kiddlies than your always-humble but fantastically-talented narrator. She was, however, certainly interesting. It turned out that she's a semi-professional jazz singer and musician and had been desperately seeking a piano player who could reliably bash through a jazzy chord sequence to accompany her when she does her gigs. Needless to say, I'm now on her list. She also knows many, many piano teachers and has promised to hook me up with someone.

2) The abrupt interrupter
Where do you go when campus is all locked up (as it more-or-less is at the weekends) and you want to study Econometrics with your nerdy maths-pals? A question oft-posed around these parts.

Me and a course-mates ended up upstairs in Starbucks (did I ever mention that Germany is exactly the same as England?) looking through some equations over a large tea (€3.40 for a tea. Can't we do something about the fucking pound already?). We were rudely interrupted by a woman sitting at the end of our table, who'd been being annoying on her mobile phone for some time.

"Entschuldigung," quoth she. "Ich habe bemerkt, dass Sie Englisch sprechen." She went on to ask if we knew anyone who could do a short translation for her and how much it would cost. We said that we could probably do it and we invented a price of €30 per page. She agreed and we exchanged email addresses. It turns out, after the 25 minutes it took us to translate what she had (my maths friend speaks great English, and I polished up the final copy), that the text was for the inlay for a CD she's about to release. She's a professional composer and concert pianist and has since promised us a free copy of the CD. I've also been in touch with her asking if she knows any decent piano teachers (which she surely will).

3) The live-in landlord
Upon receiving a response I'd sent about a flat in a cool part of town (the person whose room I'm occupying comes back in March), I noticed that the landlord had MySpace links at the bottom of his email signature. It turns out that he left East Germany some 25 years ago, and lived in the US for twenty years (changing his name from Bernt Gerhard Müller by deed poll to Bernard G. Muller) and while there worked as a professional musician and is now trying to revive that career in Frankfurt. He's invited me to his CD launch party on Thursday and, whether or not I decide to take the room, I think we're going to try and make some music together. Amazing.

The common thread to these three tales is that, if you live in a small enough place, then you meet all the cool, interesting people eventually. It's just a question of being out the house and out of the library often enough to allow luck to take its course.

Now, about that shower I was thinking of taking. Maybe it's time to get out of the dressing gown.

Auf Wiedersehen pets,
Rob

Now they tell me...

A lot of talk is going around the various cafés and seminar rooms of my new academic existence. Much of it is related to how mind-bustingly hard the course is. It's really designed for undergraduate mathematics students. They're having a whale of a time. Piece of piss for them. Triple indefinite integrals over a Lebesgue-measurable Borel set defining the joint distribution of a vector of random variables? Did one before breakfast, they did. Borel sets coming out of their arses and glasses cases.

Still, not a little of this talk is on a closely related subject: that of what to do with those of us who are almost certain to fail the mid-terms. The language of this Masters is not English after all, but the language of post-grad level maths. And for those who don't speak it, there's a nightmare of inner translation to perform before you have any idea what the lecturers are on about.

The general consensus seems to have been reached that at least some of us are going to have to change course.

This being Germany, of course, this should be a feasible prospect. People seem to spend anything up to about seven years here on their university studies, changing course as often as a river over flat ground.

Now I should point out here that I'm not actually among those who are panicking. I kind of think I'm alright. The course is definitely tough, no doubt about it, but I more or less speak Maths and my English is pretty good too (just as an aside: imagine if you will the position of a non-English-native who did business administration at undergrad. Not much maths, not much English. There are several examples in my class. Lord knows how they're coping...).

But in the course of my research into possible alternative courses which a particular friend might like to look at, I found one happening in the building next to ours (the infamous House of Finance, see previous posts) entitled "International Economics and Policy".

Now this seems scarily like the goal I claimed to have when I quit my job and decided to study. I said I wanted to work in policy, doing something a bit mathematical (i.e. economics) and that I wanted to use my languages. Now whether or not I'm actually cut out for such work (or whether I'd actually find it stimulating) is another matter. It just sounded good so I went for it (for those who've known me a long time, refer to my decision aged 15 to become an Engineer. Knew nothing about the subject but it led me to choose nerdy A-Levels and do an engineering degree. This degree is currently gathering dust in the back of some long-forgotten corner of my CV).

So, in short, I'm going to start a bit of research into this supposed dream course. What does it involve? Is it still early enough to change onto it? How is it viewed by the outside world? Are there any nice girls doing it?

All vital questions. And all to be answered in the coming days.

Rob

Decisions, decisions

Eeurgh! It's finally happened. Just like for the child - who thinks she'll never grow up then suddenly, unexpectedly, stops thinking The Radio 1 Chart Show is worth tuning in for - there's no going back. The moment I thought would never come has arrived. I thought I was different. That the aging process was going to be different for me than for others. But I'm just the same as everyone else.

Last week I stayed in on Friday night and, on Saturday morning, felt so amazing that I decided that going out and getting drunk is no longer worth it.

On Friday morning I had woken up feeling like I was never going to be able to get out of bed ever again. I felt like I could see clearly that everything in life was hard and pointless and that I was going to just lie in the dark until summer came, feeding off my own reserves of body fat and the occasional fried cheese sandwich. As I'm sure you can guess, I was horribly hung over.

Compare and contrast this feeling with my joyous, sober weekend, wherein I woke up, showered, breakfasted, did some reading, went swimming, went for a beautiful walk in the hills, did more work, watched Extras on th'internet.

My life is changed. I'm going to officially be boring for the rest of my life.

Apart, of course, from this weekend, when my flatmates, my visitors from Cambridge and I are going to a gold-themed fancy-dress party where I plan to paint myself gold and wear nothing but a pair of gold shorts.

But after this one last blow-out, life is never going to be the same.... Honest.

A miscellany of tales

Here is a short list of funny/noteworthy things that have happened to me recently:

1) Laughable American
I was in Starbucks in the centre of Frankfurt, enjoying an English Breakfast tea with fresh (not UHT) milk, and reading Charles Dickens. I'd like to point out, before the once-gentle reader throws up his hands in self-righteous outrage, loudly bemoaning the lack of German authnenticity of this situation, that I am like a Jewish man in Israel. A Jewish man in Israel doesn't need to go to synagogue or refrain from pig-pocketing (this is not a suitable euphemism for not eating pork, but I liked it so it remained in this sentence). Just by being in Israel he is already Jewish enough, thank you very much. The trappings that we know as Jewish culture are only sops to remind us diasporites what it's all about. Just by being in Germany I'm German enough. All the Grande Caramel Macchiati in the world can't take that away from me.

Anyway, as I say, I was in Starbucks when I overheard, in a laughably poor German accent, the rarely heard phrase "Wo ist der Hard Rock Cafe?". A large lady clearly considered herself essentially to be in a more ubiquitous (and easier to ask questions of) verion of the American Embassy, the German girl behind the counter expected to act as a consoling consolate to the lost and frightened American abroad. When the confusion as to where the Hard Rock Cafe was reached fever pitch, I stepped in and told that lady that, despite my several weeks of cycling around the streets of Frankfurt, I hadn't seen a Hard Rock Cafe. Did she know of there definitely being one in Frankfurt?

Her reply to this question was made infinitely funnier by the crumpled face, knitted brow, and sorrowful tone of a child who's just been told there is no Barack Obama, just her parents in a suit; she said:

"I just kinda assumed there would be"

Ho ho ho.

2) Accidental Children's Party Attendee
It sounded like such a great idea. A start-of-semester party! On campus! Drinks at "Student Prices"!

When the small group of us Economics Masters people arrived at the allotted hour, 3 things rapidly became clear:
i. This year's intake of first-years had, under some mysterious German government rule, been allowed to start university at age 11.
ii. There were one-hundred-and-forty-thousand of these scamps, and all of them had chosen to come to the party, and arrived simultaneously in some unseen, but later dreamed of, horrifying giant school coach.
iii. We were supposed to have brought invitations. Otherwise, the entry fee was five euro. FIVE EURO! To go to a university party on my own campus. Radical action was required.

Word quickly went around our small band of adventuring over-25s that if we could convince someone to let us be their plus one, we could both skip the queue and the entrance fee. I like to think there is no-one better equipped for this kind of challenge than me. I travelled up and down the front one per cent of the queue, shouting that I needed to become someone's plus one right away. After much embarrassed shuffling of feet (Germans = Brits, ha!), I was taken in by one group of weedy saplings who said I could come in with them if I bought them a drink. Needless to say, I teased them with talk of minimum alcohol consumption age, which they greatly enjoyed.

Anyway, to cut what is becoming a very long story short, I lost all of my course-mates via this procedure and spent the whole evening in the company of three 8-year-olds first years, engaged in the following exercise: Male 8-year-old would point out a group of girls he'd like to talk to, if only he was good at talking to girls. I went over to this group of girls and got their attention by saying something funny in English. Winning their favour, I then introduced them to my young, handsome beau. I then withdrew once chat had successfully been established, and knowlingly sipped my Apfelwein waiting for the results to come in. The young lad had two phone numbers by the end of the evening. I consider this a job well done.

3) A willing jump into drudgery
An American coursemate of mine told me that he was applying for a job he'd seen advertised in the House of Finance (see previous post re. Bockenheim and Westend) for a student IT assistant, 10-20 hours a week. He was using this as an example of how poorly Germans used email in comparison to his fellow Americans. He told me tales of waiting a week for a reply to an email. I was shocked and appauled of course. I quizzed him about his credentials in applying for the role and he told me he'd used a piece of Accounting software in his previous job as an accountant. How hard could it be? To be fair on me, I was honest with him at this point. I told him that if so much as one fifteen-year-old with no social skills and reduced literacy applied for the job, then my American friend would stand no chance of getting it, as the fifteen-year-old would trump him for IT experience immediately.

After having a good old laugh to myself about this possible other explanation for the lack of response to his application, I suddenly thought: hey, why don't I apply for the job? It's on campus. It pays well. I could do it with my brain closed, and my CV corroborates it.

So I did.

And the same evening, I had an email asking me to come for interview the following morning.

Now I'm not saying I'll get the job. I'm not even absolutely saying I'll take it if do. But it does demonstrate neatly something I've long suspected about this world of instant communication in which we now live.

If you text/email/call/Facebook/MSN someone and they don't respond, maybe, just maybe, rather than the "too busy/on holiday/out of credit/spam filter malfunction" stuff your loyal friends will have you believe, the person you're trying to get hold of just doesn't want to talk to you.

Auf wiedersehen, pets.

Rob

A tale of two systems

OR

"A short illustrated history of the progress of the University of Frankfurt as seen through the eyes of a disinterested foreigner."

"Really?", exclaimed my besuited, bebooted course-mate with incredulity. "You are going to ze student bar? On ze uzzer campus?! Haff you no idea how dangerous zis is?". He was genuinely concerned for my safety. The prospect of a drink on "the other campus", a mere ten minute cycle ride away, was enough to send a murmur of apprehension and disapproval through the assembled German students. They knew it not. They had seen it not. But they had heard tell, and what they had heard they had not liked. Oh no.

Thus begins my short illustrated history of the Other-ness of the two campuses of Frankfurt University. To each, the other is anathema. The very essence of either (a) exactly why progress must be halted and capitalism reigned in, or (b) exactly why the old systems must make way for a new, brighter, more outward-looking Frankfurt; depending on whom you talk to.

I'll start, if I may, at the beginning: a short glossary to help the peruser of this history understand the key terms used herein.

Bockenheim n. /'bokənhɑɪm/ The site of the first building of the Frankfurt Unversität in 18-hundred-and-something. Now a crumbling, left-wing relic of the 1980's Germany of mullets and oversized knitwear we know from German language textbooks.

Westend n. /'vƐstƐnt/ A former American army base, now the most spangly whizzbang campus in Europe. A centre for conferences, corporate sponsorship and private enterprise. Where I study.

The most important thing to know about Bockenheim campus, is that it is doomed: by 2011, the university wants to have everyone studying in shiny new buildings on the Westend campus, and is not shy about making this desire known. From the look of the Bockenheim campus, this plan to abandon the place has been agreed upon by those who hold the purse strings for quite some time. The place is falling apart. In some cases literally. The centrepiece of the campus is a semi-derelict tower-block, known only as der Turm (the tower), in which all the left-wing subjects have their home: philosophy, politics, sociology, education etc.
The image shown here is Microsoft's satellite view. The place is literally covered in grafitti, mostly political: a mix of anti-Nazi, pro-Israeli (interestingly, the left-wing view here is not anti-Israel like in England) and anti-snob-culture. Much of what happens there is student-led. There are regular (occasionally tense) protests about student fees, equality of access etc. and at least three student-run cafes and bars, all of which are mind-bogglingly cheap and very laid back
(a notable example of this is a place known only by the generic descriptor "Bar abend" wherein the Apfelwein (a local speciality) is €1 a glass, the staff are paid in booze and the doors are open until gone 6).

Contrast this with Campus Westend.

This is my campus, and the location of subjects such as Economics (the tongue-twistingly-entitled Wirtschaftswissenchaften), Law and Finance. The campus opened a mere two years ago, and the novelty of the place is evident everywhere you look. The buildings are beautiful, the lawns are still being grown, and technology reigns supreme. The library is a high-tech wonder, with automatic blinds, individually operated reading lights and student-card-operated lockers. The campus is an available real-estate for private enterprise. Many of the shops and cafes are privately-owned (and 30% more expensive) as is the Alma Mater of my new course, the House of Finance. In this magisterial building, shown left, the lecture rooms are named after the banks which paid for them (leading to odd-sounding timetables: Macroeconomics, 2pm in Deutschebank) and equipped with cameras so powerful they can read handwritten notes from any seat in the room and beam them onto up to 3 projectors at the front. They have their own private security (never a phrase associated with good things for some reason) and students have to use the back stairs, to ensure the lifts are always available for professors and other visiting dignitaries.

The campus as a whole is designed to be a beacon for international conferences and symposia (The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics was held there last week, with much fanfare and free grub).

Needless to say, the restless lefties on Campus Bockenheim are not best impressed, as is witnessed by this message I came across written on a wall of the infamous Turm.

This point was palpably proved (or disproved, depending on who you talk to) by a recent 'occupation' of the aforementioned House by a gang of spray-can wielding Bockenheimers. Official accounts of what happened vary but, by anyone's measure, the results were messy and not entirely non-contact.

This, in large part, explains why my coursemate was horrified at the prospect of me spending a Thursday night in the company of radical layabouts, and why I have to shuffle my feet a little whenever talk amongst my flatmates and new friends turns to the miserable future of their beloved campus. I am, without question, part of the disease and not of the cure. I'm exactly the kind of yuppie foreigner the new campus was designed to attract. I'm studying exactly the kind of cold-hearted subject my Social Science-studying stablemates love to rail against.

I would answer, were I able to adequately expressly myself in this new mothertongue of mine, that I hope to be somewhat different in my studying of Economics. That I will always be bearing in mind that welfare does not equal money, and that what is best for the community as a whole can very well be disastrous for an individual, and that nice people (like me, I like to think) need to be on the inside of the machine where they can influence things for the better, rather than on the outside, where ability to make things different is limited to writing about injustice on walls.

I'm going to close this potted history with my favourite thing I've read so far in my study of Economics. It comes from John Stuart Mill, and seems to be exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about when I tried, internally, to justify myself to the angry Bockenheimers:

"The same persons who cry down Logic will generally warn you against Political Economy. It is unfeeling, they will tell you. It recognises unpleasant facts. For my part, the most unfeeling thing I know of is the law of gravitation: it breaks the neck of the best and most amiable person without scruple, if he forgets for a single moment to give heed to it. The winds and waves too are very unfeeling. Would you advise those who go to sea to deny the winds and waves--or to make use of them, and find the means of guarding against their dangers? My advice to you is to study the great writers on Political Economy, and hold firmly by whatever in them you find true; and depend upon it that if you are not selfish or hard-hearted already, Political Economy will not make you so."

Amazing.

Rob

My birthday: a brief chronology

Here, perhaps to compensate for the great length and introspective meanderings of the previous post, is a short history of the last 28 hours or so of my birthday. I will use it as a convenient juncture to introduce a few of the emerging main players in my new life in Germany. Self-indulgent? Well, this is a blog...

8pm Saturday - Bowling with course-mates
Ah, games plus beer. What better way to lubricate those ol' social wheels? Bowling and drunkeness have always gone hand-in-hand for me and this jaunt was no exception. The evening was a lovely advert for booze- and pastime- assisted camaraderie.

It should be noted that, although in this photo there are no women, the course is actually pretty close to 50/50. For some reason competitive games and beer just don't get the chicks in like they used to.

My course-mates are of a reasonably predictable stock. Intelligent, well-bred/read, conventional. This is fine. You need some conventional people in your life and, in the absence of a job, a degree course seems like a fair place to have them.

Which brings me neatly onto my next point:

12am Saturday/Sunday - Partying with flatmates

My new housemates are a total delight: controversy arose at this week's regular Thursday-night student-bar-going slot as it turned out that another girl, a friend of the guy whose room I'm now living in (more on which later), had the audacity to also have her birthday on the 20th. But they got me invited and the English-speaking-only curry evening they had been organising for me is to be next week.

And here they are:

Marcus, Steffi and Romy hold a basket of goodies

In this very blurry photo you see the three people I'm now sharing a flat with. Not present is Günther (known universally as the faintly rude-sounding Günni) seen below in his last moment in our flat.

His departure was something of a heartbreak for Steffi (pronounced, in slightly hilarious German style, with an initial Shhh) and Romy. He seems to have been a celebrity figure around here. He worked for a local underground radio station and had some involvement in a prison-squatting arts organisation. He seemed to know everyone and everyone who speaks about him does so with a slightly starry look in their eye. This made for an awkward first morning in the flat as my new flatmates cried at the departure of the person I'd been brought in to replace. I felt like a new head-office appointed middle manager. This is being forced upon me by the powers that be. It's really not my fault.

Anyway, the three remaining Germans are lovely, as I've said. Steffi is a half-crazed southerner with an odd dialect and a hyperactive personality. She's temping at a half-way house for council-adopted children. Romy is a sweet-natured Social Science student. She works in an continuing-education institution. Marcus is a philosopher. He divides his time between reading the great works and working part-time at a peace research organisation (I'm not making this up).

So, three warm, alternative, interesting people. And they bought me a basket full of German nosh for my birthday. Excellent.

1pm Saturday - Birthday Brekkie at home

A lovely, lazy day ensued with the following highlights: Romy and Steffi made a sumptuous feast for breakfast. I had a snooze. Steffi made me a cake.

Off to uni again tomorrow. This time it's 'Mathematics Part II - Real Analysis' (I have no idea what this means).

Till next time.

Rob (aged 29 and one 365th)

The first 29 years pass uneventfully...

Funny thing memory. It's how I can say "I'm not going to go down this dark alley; the last time I did I was mugged" or, "I'm never playing football again; the last time I did the ball hit me in the face and my glasses flew off to the mirth of all assembled". It tells us which of two potential arrow-targets is the apple, and which our trusting son.

Any yet this Darwinian function, at which the memory so wonderfully never fails to deliver (have you ever forgotten how to walk? No. Who your friends are? Well, possibly...) is not the yardstick against which memory is judged. No, it's all about: "God, I never remember people's birthdays" or "Shit I've forgotten the PIN for my mobile phone". These socially constructed tasks are just not what the memory is good at. Something else it's not good at is measuring time. In the same way the the human eye is a very poor judge of volume (the old "which glass is bigger? this really tall thin one or this really short but very broad one" trick) so the memory makes this morning seem like a former life and Sgt. Pepper's like something you've recently got into.

Turning 29, as I do on Sunday, makes me think about what it has all added up to. If I don't think carefully about it, the tempting answer is "not much". This is characterised by the sense of panic I felt when an old, much-beloved teacher from Secondary school contacted me out of the blue on Facebook. I thought "Christ, I must have been full of promise as a fifteen-year-old. What have I become/done which would do anything other than disappoint this former steward of mine?". Similarly, when I got back in touch with an old friend from Cambridge last week (via Google, ruler of every aspect of modern life) I felt like I could happily bring him up to speed with me and my life in about 6 sentences. Went to Uni; lived in Cambridge; went to France never to return; returned; went to London; went back to Uni. And my memory assists in this perception by its ability to scan over events really quickly. Even when writing those six sentences, it doesn't seem that implausible that someone who knew me when I was fifteen would now know everything there was to know about the 29-year-old me.

But memory is not designed for thinking about a whole life. It's not its default mode. By default, when you ask it "what have I done in my life" it gives you manageable highlights. Flashes of retina-content which accompanied three or four easily memorable events. To try and counteract this default behaviour, I tried this as an exercise: How many times have I felt a surge of endorphin and an unexplained delight at having the sun suddenly break through cloud and hit me in the face? Can I recall the times? Can I remember all the times I sat surrounded by friends and cloaked in a beer haze and felt like everything was perfect?

When you think about the ludicrous expanse of time that takes up a single year, it's mind-boggling. I regularly have weeks where, at the end, I can't even begin to picture what I was doing at the start.

Anyway, in summary. Life is ridiculously long. It's the longest thing I can imagine. A year contains a thousand times more interesting facts, funny moments, tasty bananas, sunny mornings and feelings of mutual understanding than even the best of memories can cope with (let alone my cotton-wool coated effort). Trying to summarise it into a "what have I achieved" is meaningless.

I'm still alive. I'm not yet a mean, intolerant old bigot. That's good enough for me.

Bis später,
Rob

A night in at home

A coherent existence

A close family friend told me years ago that she was moving back to the place of her birth after years of travelling because she'd found that the day-to-day business of life, once it settled down, felt day-to-day and business-like wherever you were in the world and that you might as well live it in the place you know best and be near to your friends and family.

When I heard this conclusion as a 17-year-old I was appalled. I hated the idea of settling in with what you knew best rather than continually taking on new adventures. Now, though, I think I know what she meant - although I don't totally disagree with my former self; life settles into a routine but I think that's a good thing. And a routine in one place may fit you more or less than that in another.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that a kind of existence is opening up for me here. I've got a lovely flat, I cycle everywhere I go (having lost my month travel pass the same afternoon I bought it), I have wine, I make food, I play my piano, I look at books about Macroeconomics. It's not wildly exciting but then it'd probably be awful if it was.

Economics is proving, thus far, to be the right choice. I wanted to stretch my mathmuscles again and so far I've gone to bed most nights needing the equivalent of a hot bath and a Ralgex rub. It seems like a good science to be involved in because, unlike biochemistry, astrophysics or molecular biology, the current state of the art is that we don't really know very much about the world, and the models that we have to describe it aren't very good. The credit crunch is a great example of how poorly defined the science currently is. It's the economics equivalent of the lobotomy as a cure for schizophrenia: the success rate shows that there's lots more work to be done.

In my other great educational frontier, progress seems slow. I'm past the enthusiasm of base camp andclose enough now to the mountain to see how far it really is I've got to climb. Yes, my German has reached the great intermediate barrier (is that the term? I know there is one). The advancements I make seem pitiful in comparison to the task of understanding my flatmates or reading even the simplest brochure. There's just so many god damn words. Still, grinning and bearing it is currently the plan of action. I've been here before with French (although actually I was infinitely further on before I realised the size of the challenge that time). I came through it and now the idea that the language is unconquerable seems laughable. Cela me fait rire.

So - I raise of glass of Apfelwein to a coherent existence in this country or the next. I drink also to the sense of hopelessness that comes from being at the start of two massive educational projects.

Prost!

I'm arrived. Proper like.

My new room. Isn't she beautiful?

Jetzt bin ich in Deutschland

Holy shit, what a five days it's been. Never has a rollercoaster of emotions felt so little like a fairground ride. Sure, the ups and downs have been there (a touch of the round-and-round too) but, unlike the hours of queuing for any fun-tower worth the Alton name, I've not stood still for a second between rising on Saturday morning and collapsing into a sofa on Thursday to write this blog entry...

But I get ahead of myself. The where-am-I is best presented as the gripping dénoument of the how-did-I-get here.


The story, massively abridge as it will have to be for the sanity of author and reader alike, starts on a sunny saturday in N4.

Pippa, as is her infinitely generous and thoughtful nature, was instrumental in creating the carful of life you see pictured above. I left nothing behind save an Ikea bedside table, two defunct electric radiators and a wooden sword. Suffice it to say that we had to lean on the doors to get them to close.

Following an inauspicious start in a hermetically sealed box-room on the outskirts of Ipswich, Sunday saw a mad dash for the ferry due to my taking at face value Aaron's recommendation as to the amount of time it would take to drive to Harwich. I'd forgotten of course that Aaron has a penchant for three-figure mph speeds. I - with one hand on a map, the other hand preventing my possessions from sliding onto my lap at every left turn and a car whose MOT was acheived only thanks to a Greek garage owner "knowing someone" who would pass it - had not a chance of making his 30-minute yardstick time.

Still, as the inevitable last passenger to board the boat, I had a beautiful view of Suffolk as it slid away into the haze.

The rest of the drive was remarkably successful given that I was navigating from an A4 map printed off Google Maps which included both the Hook of Holland and Frankfurt (i.e. basically two circles, one marked Holland, the other Germany). Of some excitement was the first glimpse of Frankfurt am Main on a road sign. It meant that, on some level, in some tiny way, I knew what I was doing. At least cartographically speaking.

After an entirely uneventful evening in a rather expensive Motel on the outskirts of the city and a wholesale move to a somewhat cheaper (and infinitely more threadbare) hotel in Offenbach, a satellite town, I began the search for normality by returning to my flatshare website and making some non-desperate-sounding appeals for housing.

I'd got the pieces of my bike out of the car and assembled them into something resembling its former self so felt a little more at home. I wasn't getting anywhere on the accommodation front though. I had a couple of rather depressing experiences with flats: one held a couple of bankers in their twenties who had a beautiful place but no sense of community. The 'shared area' was a glass-topped table in the hallway upon which they were completing their spreadsheet of prospective tenants (along with a whole A4 side of questions to ask each!). New parqué flooring or no, I was not going to live somewhere where the idea of socialising was that sometimes they were "in the room when someone else is cooking" (their words not mine). This was followed shortly by a room in a beautiful, old, crazy, perhaps even Parisian flat in the trendy student area of town. The other sharer was Rudi. Promising name. I pictured some young bohemian girl with an expressive mien and an espresso on the go. Rudi was in fact a man in his late fifties and the room was actually his living room. The bed was a sofa and the 'en suite' bathroom was the only bathroom in the house. This meaning that if I wanted to lie in past nine o' clock, I'd have to welcome towel-clad Rudi into my bedroom as he made his way to our shared shower. I think not.

At the same time as doing all of this (along with thinking about getting a phone, opening a bank account, buying a monthly travel card (German beaurocracy is not so different to French it seems, surprisingly), getting from my satellite town hotel every morning and worrying about my carful of life on the streets of Frankfurt) I started my Economics Masters on Tuesday. It was straight in with talk of Isoquants, Indifference Curves and Average Fixed Cost Analyses and I was instantly out of my depth.

All of this led, not to panic, but to a general sense of anxiety. I just felt plain nervous for about 3 days. What was I susposed to remember to take to Uni? Where was I going to live when my 3 booked evenings in the hotel were spent? Why couldn't I speak German (or everyone speak English, as I had expected)?

The thing about anxiety is that it breeds anxiety. Although I was increasingly exhausted as the days went by, my head was a whirl of things to remember and things to sort out (never mind cost minimisation formulae and consumer rationality) and so my sleep was light and often disturbed.

Not until today, then, have I really started to feel like a vaguely normal person again. I'm now happily installed (I won't bore you with the details of how) in a 4-person flatshare. There are two girls, one guy and me. All German (aside from the latter) but all with excellent English. They're cool, friendly and relaxed and their flat (despite being on the 3rd floor (no lift) and in a ho-hum part of town) is gorgeous. I'm still somewhat in transit as the guy who's leaving his room for six months to go to Spain hasn't left yet so I'm in the other guy's room, who's on holiday for a few days. I've now got a German phone, a German address and I know my way from my flat to my university without needing a map. I'm getting a bank account tomorrow and did my first supermarket shop today.

I'm arrived!

More as and when there's something to tell. To be honest though, I'm hoping this trip aboard will be a little more dull and uneventful than my somewhat colourful time in France. If that does turn out to be the case, there'll not be too much to write here and I'll just be living happily and quietly in my new setup.

Experience suggests otherwise but who knows... perhaps Levy luck will out.

Love
Rob