Apartment sweet Apartment

The lack of convenient internet has really been messing with my blogging schedule.

Excuses aside, much and more has happened in the last two days. I decided to go to the Krankenkasse first thing yesterday. It opened at 9am and I walked through the doors at 9:01. At maybe 9:07 I walked out again with my insurance waiver in triplicate. I only had to show my insurance card! It would have been nice to know that earlier. Then again, I had what I needed to register in time for the enrollment meeting.

Now running late for the orientation presentation, I hurried over to SuperC, one of the main campus buildings. To be honest, the presentations were not terribly informative. Mostly various groups said that they were available to help foreign students. INCAS, BeBuddy, and AV were some of these groups. At the end someone explained the process to apply for a residence permit and another talked about IT services. The former I had already learned. The latter had some helpful information. The most important piece was that it takes 24 hours after activating your student account before it will go into the system. I also found out that AV (the legal counsel group for foreigners) offers free SIM cards. I do not know their rates, but that seems like something they might have better advertised.

I later chatted for a while with some fellow foreigners. Sadly, we spoke in English, but it was fun regardless. Afterwards, I tried to plan my day for today. There I made an idiotic blunder. I thought the hours of operation of the Studentenwerk where I had to go to sign my lease were only from 2-3:30 on Tuesdays. In fact, they are 9-12:45 and 2-3:30. When I realized this I kicked myself hard in the face. Literally. However, in retrospect, it would have made little difference. The schedule below is why.

7:00   get up and pack up as much as possible

8:00   make sure I have everything I need from the internet while at the Starbucks

9:00   go to the enrollment meeting

9:30   find out that I am in entirely the wrong place

9:34   locate the room full of exchange students where the meeting was held and discover that my forms and 

         the other CMU exchange student’s are absent

10:30 finish the meeting without too much hassle and hear from AEGEE on foreign student assistance.

10:45 check out of my hostel before I have to pay for an extra day.

11:00 give up arguing with a ticket dispenser that won’t shut up and take my money and jump on the bus I 

          think I need

11:17 learn that this is the wrong buns and hop off before it’s too late

11:20 thank God that the road slopes downhill when I’m pulling 50lb and 20lb suitcases and wearing a 20lb 

          backpack.

11:30 ask God why the road had to switch to uphill FOR THE NEXT 2 MILES

12:10 find the wandering road to the apartment and dump my stuff in the other CMU student’s room

1:00   lunch with other student, Christine

2:00   sign my lease (make sure to bring a print copy of your receipt for the deposit)

2:50   finally get my keys and get into my room

3:30   get my stuff out of Christine’s room which I had forgotten was locked…

At long last, I started unpacking. The room has plenty of space, enough that I could do yoga facing any direction without difficulty. The building being constructed across the way makes for an unattractive view, but the curtains I found in a drawer give me plenty of privacy from workers. The bathroom, a tiny thing, has an incredibly high shower curtain rod. Even using three links for every hole in the curtain the fabric just brushes the shower base’s lip.

The communal kitchen is more than I could have hoped for. I get a shelf in a fridge, 1 in a freezer, and an entire cabinet of dry food space. A broom closet brims with communal pots and pans and, well, brooms. I would have preferred gas to an electric stove top, but the microwave makes up for it. I shall not go hungry!

I could keep talking, but I found a Euro under my bed and want to see if I can spend it.