Settling in...

This fountain was originally destroyed in wartime bombing



Me, on the Elbe



New room...



...and the kitchen!


Most of the last week has been taken up by organising my new place. On Thursday I got the keys and went through the contract and paperwork, in German and yes, with a dictionary! When I was asked “Do you have a bed?”, I got a sneaking suspicious that all the furniture was about to disappear from the room, something which was confirmed when I moved into a completely empty-but otherwise very nice-room the following day. I was undaunted by this however, happy as I was just to have a permanent roof over my head and some space finally to unpack my stuff.

I am reluctant to buy furniture that I will have to abandon in a few months, so I now have a cosy floor thing going on... I have bought cushions and blankets and rugs for a little sleeping area and I have fashioned some low tables from pieces of wood and boxes. I splashed out on an amazingly comfy floor cushion and am now very snug in my new room. My room is at the top of a lovely old baroque building in a very nice, quiet neighbourhood fairly close to the university. I live with two girls, both students, Claudia and Aspasia. They both seem very friendly, speak little English, and although I see little of them I have been practising my terrible German when I do see them. The rest of the flat is quite small, but there is an excellent shower (nothing at all like the infamous Bolivian shower!) and a good kitchen where I have been whipping up some culinary delights now I can cook properly again. In true German fashion, we have a highly organised and rigid cleaning plan which amuses me somewhat and which I am slightly scared of forgetting to carry out. Talking of German timetabling, and at the risk of mentioning European transport in every blog (I am still in awe), the bus routes here are linear and are due to arrive at the bus stops on both sides of the road at the same time. And I have actually seen buses come round the corners and pull up punctually at the corresponding bus stops on either side of the road at exactly the same time. Inexplicably, this made me giggle a lot.

After getting my living arrangements finally sorted over the weekend, I have started work on the essay I have outstanding to send to England and the presentation I have to do here on Tuesday for my Geopolitics of Energy class. Unfortunately, bureaucracy dictates that I cannot yet get a card to actually take books out of the library until I have received certain paperwork, for which I require other paperwork that has yet to come through! However the weather has turned quite terrible (hail today; although it was remarked that it could have been volcanic ash...!) so I am quite content to explore the extensive English language collection and sit in the library pondering the nuances of democracy. The library is excellent and I am currently trying to calculate how many books I can read in the next few months. I am very happy to have no time-consuming meetings, events and people to organise, endless copywriting, phone calls to answer, continuous running around.... right now, my life is coffee, cake and political theory. Wunderbar!