Читать книгу The Ex-Pat's Guide to the Best of the Wurst - John Doyle - Страница 4

Just like all big cities, finding a place to live in a German city can be a nightmare. Everything is too small, too expensive, too far away from everything, or too filled with roommates growing maggot cultures in unwashed bowls of what was once macaroni and cheese. Add to that moving to a foreign country, needing an address to get a visa, and that everything from the real estate websites to the contract signing must be conducted in that simplest of human languages, German, you will find yourself saying yes to the first thing with four walls and one tiny window. I hear it’s especially bad in Berlin, since every hipster with an idea for a new theme restaurant-that-serves-only-peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches-slash-bowling-alley who watched Cabaret.

Every expat’s living situation follows an eerily similar pattern:

1. Someone else’s grandma’s basement

Most people rely on wg-gesuch.de or immobilienscout24 to find a place. Unfortunately these are really your only options. More unfortunately, everything’s in German, the people posting there have ridiculously specific roommate requests and will get about 1,000 responses without 24 hours no matter how completely fucking insane they seem: I once read an ad in Frankfurt for a guy who was looking for “two princesses to serve”, spent about 40 lines of ad space talking about how much he loved taking care of and doting upon women. There was no mention of the pit he kept them in, as I assume that he hadn’t quite brought it up to code.

That guy’s ad was listed as ‘filled’ TWO DAYS LATER.

You can’t make this stuff up.

This is what causes that first, horrible flat share that serves as some sort of expat right of passage that we all give each other knowing glances about at the semi-annual expat hoedown, but never, ever speak of.

I haven’t quite figured out while the people letting out rooms are exclusively old ladies. And at first, that really doesn’t sound so bad. My grandma loves to cook for me and buy me presents and tell me I am the most beautiful, wonderful, intelligent, funny, perfect pile of carbon atoms that ever walked the earth. What could be so bad about living with someone’s else’s grandma? Only this: the place you live belongs to her and has since before they installed indoor plumbing.

These places are almost exclusively in villages outside of the city where you work or study, and are only reachable by taking a taking a train to the edge of town, then a bus to the village, then walking through a field, climbing a cliff face and belaying down a ravine. Once you get back to your twelve square foot room that costs 500 euro a month, you turn on your light and if it’s after 7 PM, it’s probably the only one in the whole street.

A friend of a friend (as fake as that makes this sound, I’m sure she wishes it was), let’s call her Sarah, lived in one of this basement rentals from a woman whose Bild Zeitung told her the Americans were spying on the Germans, and decided that meant this 21 year old university student was doing just that. She refused to tell Sarah and her boyfriend the internet password, and wouldn’t even let Sarah be in her own room unless her boyfriend was also there...because Puerto Ricans have magic spy-nullifying powers, apparently.

“Oh you want to…use the… kitchen?” asked another friend’s Oma landlady. No, I’d really just like to eat potato chips and drink warm soda until I expire in my own filth.

So the first big tip is, no matter how desperate you are, do not live in a family’s house. Do not rent a room in someone’s house unless you want your picture above the phrase “last seen on”. Or to share a bathroom with a former circus performer called Jens who does not clear his hair out of the shower.

2. A WG – a sinister and misleading acronym

I always just called it ‘living with roommates’ or ‘being under the age of 33’, but it Germany, a WG, or Wohngemeinschaft is like entering into a contract to suddenly because 3 strangers’ new soul mate.

In Britain, Ireland, or the US, you’re likely to see an ad for a flat share like this:

Room available in [overpriced neighborhood]. Rent: [90% of your monthly income]

In Australia and New Zealand they’re even shorter.

Now here is an abridged version of a very, very real ad I read on the back of a bathroom door at the University of Freiburg library:

Two out-going girls and one sport-crazy guy are looking for a new friend to live with us! We do NOT want someone who just stays in their room and keeps to themselves. We love to throw parties, and everyone pitches in to buy beer. We plan a lot of activities and like to watch TV together. Two of us have cats and our cats rule the apartment, haha. So no one who is allergic please! We would also like someone who speaks fluent Spanish or French so we can practice! We’re all REALLY into electro and dub step, so be prepared to hear a lot of it.

I thought you moved in with people based on whether you have similar opinions about loud music and dirty dishes and if you could afford the rent. But in Germany, it is much, much more serious. You don’t move in with people, you ‘found a WG’, like you’re the fucking pilgrims on Plymouth Rock, founding the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And when you need a new roommate, you do a ‘WG Casting’ (yes, it REALLY is called a casting) for whoever will play the role of everyone’s new best friend forever. Because you can’t just spontaneously have fun in Germany. Fun has to be planned, has to be determined and organized and scheduled, because then how would you know you’re having it?

This is great for introverts who want to get to know a lot of people at once before they slowly start to hate them all and how they put the cups back in the cupboard with the handles facing instead of out and how they always have loud Skype conversations with their cousins at 3 in the morning before you have an exam and refuse to use headphones because screw your need to sleep and eat your yogurt and don’t shut the door when they have sex and sing loudly and out of tune while the cook and…

Sorry. I might still have some post traumatic stress.

For introverts, this WG set up is a nightmare that will make you long for the days of the old lady and her rules about only having 1 guest over at a time and barring you from using the refrigerator.

Since WGs can somehow be passed down from roommate to roommate without a new lease being drawn up or the landlord kicking you out to renovate and let the place to an unmarried doctor, most of the decorations on your walls were probably put up when Paris Hilton was considered interesting. There will be photographs of parties where girls are wearing butterfly clips and body glitter and a poster from when coke cost 1 Deutschmark. Weird inside jokes are scrawled along the inside of your bathroom, underneath a calendar from 2002. It is blasphemous to take any of these things down or change them at all.

3. Free at last (free meaning really, prohibitively expensive)

So you’ve finished studying, or you’ve managed to beat the impossible odds that John’s generation saddled us with and gotten a job. Who cares if it means looking after a rich family’s kids while you cry over your Master’s degree? You can finally stop getting halfway through and realizing one of your roommates used the last of your toilet paper, you can find your own place!

There is one very, very odd thing you will notice when you start apartment hunting in Germany. You will step into the kitchen, and right there where the sink, and oven, and fridge should be is a very sad empty space with some wires sticking out of the wall. Apparently Germans are very intimate with their kitchens, and take them out and move with them. Occasionally, someone who has realized what a pain in the ass this is will offer to “sell” you their kitchen as if they are very definitely doing you a favor and not the other way around.

Imagine moving into a new place, exhausted from bring boxes all day, and not being able to refrigerate those extra pieces slices. After you move, you’ll have to haul it to IKEA, buy a bunch of appliances you have no idea about, and even less of an idea about how to install these potentially fatal-gas-leaking devices into your kitchen.

If you manage to find a place WITH a kitchen, and without a realtors fee (up to three months rent sometimes) and actually near places like a supermarket and pharmacy, then you’re lucky. If you manage to find this within the vicinity of the city center, then you’re a mythical being who is stealing all the good apartments from us normal folks.