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