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
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