First Letter Home

Hallo!

So here it is, the thing you’ve all been waiting for: a recap of how things have been going since I left the States! Okay, here it goes…

The plane ride from Atlanta to New York wasn’t that bad. It was only a few hours long and I got to sit next to this crazy woman, Janet. She informed me that she is originally from New York but she moved down to Atlanta to take care of her parents. They recently died so she was heading back up to New York to start a doggie-daycare business. I asked if she had a business partner or any prior business experience and she replied “No.” She pulled out a “How to start a doggie-daycare!” brochure, showed it to me, and claimed to have done her research about the whole ordeal. She recently volunteered at a doggie-daycare in Kennesaw (one which I have never heard of) and that inspired her. Interesting… She was going to give me her address so I could send her a postcard from Germany but she didn’t know it so she gave me her business card instead. I promised to email her a picture of two from my travels. Oh geeze…

The flight from New York to Berlin wasn’t as nice as the first one. Although shorter than I expected, it was 8 hours long. Bleh. We taxied on the runway for 45 minutes before taking off because they were having some bad winds. I ended up watched the movie that they played (The Golden Compass) and then tried to sleep the rest of the way. I guess I did a good job because I woke up with about an hour left until Berlin. It would help if I were able to sleep on planes. And if I rode in 1st class next time…

We arrived in Berlin about 45 minutes late. I had no way of informing my boss, Annika, so I just hoped that she was still there waiting for me. After I waited another 20 minutes for my luggage I made my way to where Annika told me she would be. There’s a designated “meeting point” in the airport with a giant flashing light above it. I went and stood under the light along with this other woman. After a minute or so we looked at each other and realized that we were both waiting on each other. Go figure, hah. We shook hands, etc. then she lead me to the busses that would take us to the Berlin train station. Annika is really nice. She’s a quite person who immediately reminded me of a much younger Frau Brücker from the movie, Young Frankenstein. Let’s just say that she looks German and she looks like she studies soil for a living (which she in fact does). We got on the bus and started making small talk. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Agriculture with a focus in soil. Now she’s working on her PhD with Brandenburg Technische Universität in the Chair of Soil Protection and Recultivation. She’s specifically studying soil recultivation of the soil left behind from the lignite mines near Cottbus that were shut down after the reunification of Germany. That’s what I’m going to be helping her with. Anyways, we got to the train station (which is REALLY big and REALLY cool looking) and realized that our train would be coming in 30 minutes. Then she told me that it would be a 2 hour ride to Cottbus. By the time we got to the train station we were slowing down on the small talk and by the time we got on the train we were running on fumes. I think we sat in silence for about 90 minutes of the ride. I was exhausted and really just wanted to go to bed…

We finally arrived in Cottbus and boarded another bus that would drop us off at the university. We were dropped off and after 30 minutes of searching we found the building that I needed to get to in order to check in and get the keys to my apartment. Luckily Annika speaks very good English because the people who work for the university’s housing office speak absolutely none. Frau Rigo went over my housing contract in Germany with Annika and then Annika would briefly explain what I needed to know. Nothing came as a surprise to me so I just signed away. Apparently I was expected to pay 110 Euro on the spot for my first months rent (which I didn’t have because I only received 100 Euro at the airport and had already used some of it to buy lunch with). Annika was going to cover me the extra money but Frau Rigo said I could pay later.

After taking care of all the paperwork we headed to my apartment and waited outside for the maintenance guy to bring me my keys. After 20 minutes of waiting he came along, I signed for my keys, and he showed me to my apartment. Well, I don’t know if you can really call it an apartment… I share it with one other person (Toni) and we have a wall of cabinets, a mini-fridge, 2 hot plates, and a bathroom to share. Oh, and a little itty bitty table with 2 stools that look like they came from an elementary school. To go along with the elementary school theme, the apartment is all white and is accented with the primary colors, red, yellow, and blue. In my room I have a foam mattress, a desk, a bookshelf, and a wardrobe type thing. The room here is bigger than my room at Tech, so that’s nice. The only thing I dislike is that there is no window in our kitchen, just windows in the bedrooms. So when you walk in it’s completely black and you have to find the light switch to see anything. Oh well. I have a place to live.

Toni, my roommate, is really nice and was very excited to see me when he came home that afternoon. I think that he just finished his first year here, but unfortunately he is moving out next week. He was majoring in Environmental Engineering but decided school wasn’t for him and took a job back home in Leipzig instead. I was really bummed to hear that he was leaving because I was really hoping on getting to know him and then have him introduce me to other people around campus. He’s never here so I haven’t had much luck yet. He said that he’s going to be having a going away party in our apartment and the one across the hall so I’m excited for that because hopefully I’ll meet some people. We’ll see…

I still don’t have internet in my apartment yet. That really sucks. Toni said that it’s wireless but you have to pay for it. Apparently I have to talk to the maintenance guy to get it taken care of. Turns out he is only in his office for 1 hour each day Monday through Thursday. I missed him today so now I have to wait until Monday to speak with him. Kind of disappointing. I have internet in my office but I’m not sure if I will be able to access it over the weekend or at a decent hour to use skype to talk to you. Hopefully I’ll be able to get wireless sometime next week. I hope so…

As far as food goes Annika told me of a store just down the street. She told me it’s really cheap and it’s the one that she goes to. It’s called Liebl and it’s just like a Aldi back at home. You have to pay to use the shopping carts and everything is off brand. Took me a while to figure it out but now it’s not that bad. I bought a few reusable bags so I can carry stuff back to my place. I bought some cereal, yogurt, pasta, and some sandwich stuff so I can eat breakfast and lunch at the apartment. The breakfast stuff has been working out well and so has the sandwich stuff. The pasta I made tonight for dinner (it was drizzling outside so I didn’t want to walk to the center of town) and it was pretty gross. Not sure why, but it tasted nasty. I’ll pass on making my own pasta here. It was probably the sauce – I’ve had better. I’ve made better, actually. Oh well.

Funny Story: So, I’ve been told that just about all of the students in town know how to speak English because they’re required to learn it in schools. The adults however do not know because they grew up before the reunification of Germany and because Cottbus is in East Germany they were forced to learn Russian instead of English (like the West Germans). I think “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” has been my most used German phrase thus far. I can’t understand much of what anyone says because they speak it really fast and I wasn’t really that good at German to start with. Even when I do come up with a well thought out phrase and try and say it the people look at me funny. I haven’t decided if it’s because I’m saying it incorrectly, my grammar is really bad, or if I just look funny. Who knows. Anyways, so I’m about to checkout at the register will all of my groceries and out of my satchel slips the jar of mustard that I was purchasing for my sandwiches. It falls, breaks, the mustard goes everywhere, and I’m stuck waiting in line holding the container waiting to try and tell the cashier. I’m trying to think of how to say it in Germany, but I think me holding a broken container of mustard pretty much says it all. It’s my turn and she just looks at me and gives me the evil eye. I try to say something but she just starts talking in Germany really fast and I have no idea what she’s saying. Apparently she was telling me that I could go get a new one but I had no idea. I just continued to check out with the rest of my stuff. Then, because I finally realized what she was saying, I shove my way back through the line with all of my bags to go and find a new mustard. I find one and then try to find my way out of the store. I guess to keep people from stealing things the ONLY way to get out of the store is to go back through the line for the cash register – all of the closed cash register aisles are blocked and the doors at the front of the store only open one way and there is not enough time to sneak by while someone enters the store. Crap. So I end up awkwardly standing in line with my large bags of groceries until the woman sees me, yells at me in German, and I end up pushing through the line one more time, say “Danke!” a few times, and run for the door. Good times, good times…

I’ve eaten out twice already and both have been really good experiences. The first time I ate across the street at some restaurant Annika told me about. I had a few awkward experiences with figuring out if I had to sit down or order at the bar or what, but after I ordered it was fine. I had this amazing pasta dish which was delicious. I also decided to order a beer (now that I can) and asked the waitress what she suggested. She showed me my options: German beer or English beer. Because I’m in Germany I decided to go with the German beer and so she brought me out a glass of it (I don’t remember the name). It was okay – I’m not a beer drinker back at home (never really liked the taste that much) but I figured I should get accustomed to it now that I’m here. It wasn’t half bad. I don’t really have much to compare it to, so I guess it was better than the beers at home? Who knows.
The next time I ate out I went to the center of the city and sat down at this outside restaurant. The weather has been amazing here so I figured I shouldn’t be inside all the time. I ordered some sort of Strüdel that came with French fries and a salad. It was delicious! I forgot all the food words that I learned in German class so I was really just guess and what everything in the menu meant. I ended up choosing very well. Once again, I ordered some beer (this time it was a much larger glass) and it was, once again, okay, I guess. If anything it was nice to walk around the city for a bit after I finished eating with a little buzz, haha. I still haven’t gotten the hang of ordering in German restaurants (I need to look it up in my text book) so it has mostly been me pointing and the waitress being very nice. So far so good.

Today, Thursday, was my first day of work so Tuesday night and all day Wednesday were free for me to do whatever with. I’ve walked around the city some – there’s a “downtown” area that has a lot of stores and restaurants here and there. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on some park benches that I’ve found. There is a really really large park that is south of the city (I live north of the city) that I want to get to this weekend. I think I’m just going to walk there instead of worrying about public transportation and how to work it. I have all day Saturday so I figure I’ll find the park eventually.

Just about everybody here rides a bike. I see grandmas daily riding their bike around. I wish I had one here. Annika explained that Cottbus is extremely flat so that’s why everyone rides – no hills to worry about. Probably why I don’t want a bike in Atlanta – too many hills, hah. Lots of people have cars here as well, even the students. Toni told me that he drives home every weekend to Leipzig to visit friends back there. He said all of his friends do the same on the weekends. Cottbus is not a very happening place so I can see why… Annika said that most of the kids just come here for school and then leave after they graduate and move to bigger cities. I don’t blame them. Hopefully this weekend will be one of the only ones I spend in Cottbus as I plan to travel and such the rest of the time. As soon as my internet is up I need to start making living arrangements for when I travel…

I started “work” today. Basically Annika showed me around the labs and introduced me to her boss and some people that she works with. Everyone asks if I’m a Master’s or PhD student, hah. Then I have to tell them that I just finished my 2nd year of my undergraduate degree. Whoops. Annika gave me some books to read so I could brush up on what I’ll be doing this summer. Right now I’m going to learn how to operate this new machine that they just bought (Annika and I get to learn how to use it together next week because she’ll be doing it for the 1st time as well). It’s a permeameter – it measures the permeability of soil (how easily water flows through it). From it’s readings we can calculate the hydraulic conductivity – another measure of how well water flows through it. The books that she gave me were extremely complicated and had lots of physics and calculus in them – who knew that soil was so complex?! Crazy stuff. Anyways, it should be interesting work. We get to go and take samples about every 2 weeks so that’s something to look forward to. She also said that I just need to work 25 hrs per week and I can do that however I want. I figure I can squeeze 25 hrs into 3 or 4 days which will give me either 4-day or 3-day weekends so I can travel. I had ideas that I would travel to a few other countries, but apparently I thought that trains traveled faster because Annika told me that I would barely be able to make it to some cities in Germany and back again if I had planned on working 5 day weeks and traveling. Now that I’ve sort of experienced Cottbus I realize that I want to be gone as much as possible so I have no problem working a little longer for only a few days a week so I can get some traveling it, hah. Anyways, I’ll keep you more up-to-date with what I’ll be doing as soon as I know more. I have no idea what Annika has in store for me but I’ll know in a few weeks.

Overall I guess my experience has been okay. I have my ups and downs. The lack of communication is killing me right now. There’s really nothing to do here when I get back from work except read and watch TV shows I have on my computer. I’ve been watching The Office every night which has cheered me up a lot, but other than that I just really hope this all gets better when I start traveling. I’m finding it pretty impossible to meet new people because of not knowing anyone to begin with and the whole language barrier thing. There are some couchsurfers (the people that I’m trying to meet online so I have a place to stay with when I travel to different cities) in Cottbus that I think I want to write to online and see if they want to get some coffee one day or something. We’ll see. The plan is to meet new people when I travel either in the hostels or the people that I’ve found to stay with – whatever I end up doing. I think it will get better – Cottbus just isn’t that great of a city for this thing. Oh well…

Well, I’ve been typing for over an hour now so I think I’m going to call it quits and watch a few more episodes of The Office before bed. I’m sure I’ve left some stuff out and I’ll fill you in the next time I write (or hopefully I’ll have my internet up so we can talk on Skype instead). I haven’t taken any pictures yet but I’ve decided to be touristy this weekend and begin the picture taking process. I’ll find someway to put them online so everyone can see them. I’ll let you know. Hope everything is going well at home and I’ll talk to you again shortly.

Tschüss!

- Keaton