On the road...

I’ve left Mainz behind, tied up all my loose ends, gave chocolate to my advisors, cookies for the doorman, pralines for the cleaning lady. Despite my best efforts I had a ton of stuff: one fifty or sixty-pound backpack, three smaller bags. And I opted to walk to the train station.

Bought my ticket: two hours to Karlsruhe, change of trains, an hour to Offenburg, change of trains, finally in Freiburg. My friend A. picked me up at the station, which was a godsend—three smaller bags were too much for me. I was traveling with the “happy weekend” ticket, good for local trains across Germany, inclusive S-Bahn. So in Freiburg we get into the S-Bahn; somewhere in the old town the conductor checks our tickets.

And he says mine isn’t valid.

He takes my driver’s license and tells me to get off the train. A. and I get off and follow him. He proceeds to explain to me that my ticket—which explicitly says ‘valid in S-Bahn’—is, in fact, not valid, because this is a private train company. Apparently the S-Bahnen from Berlin and Braunschweig, for instance, are included in the ticket, but others are not. How the @$%# was I supposed to know that my ticket should actually have read ‘valid in S-Bahn, except in some cities, but we won’t tell you which ones.’

The fine for riding without a ticket is 40 euros.

He says he doesn’t care that I didn’t know, he says (as per the placards on the train) that upon boarding the train I was bound by the service policies of the train company. I don’t dispute that. True, it was my fault I didn’t know, ignorance is no excuse—but it’s an honest mistake! I fork over my 50 euro bill. I’m close to tears. There isn’t much I can do. If I’d known, of course I’d have bought a ticket. He puts the bill in his pocket, continues with his lecture. I’m pretty distraught. I have a 50 pound backpack. I’m fresh off of the train from the state to the north.

He gives me the 50 euros back, because, as he said, I admitted I made a mistake and didn’t make a scene. I, of course, am completely grateful—though some part of me really wonders if he was on the level or just looking to give me a hard time. But I’ll never know, and I am now not 40 euros poorer, so I guess it’s all good.

I, of course, am now late for my appointment with my landlady, who is to give me the keys and explain stuff. She gives me the phone numbers of my other roommates and takes off.

My room is in the corner of the apartment, overlooking the street and a café/bar. We have quasi the top floor apartment (all floors have two apartments on each, except for the very top top, which has only one apartment. We live in the last floor to have two full apartments.

It’s a big apartment. Because we live on the top we have huge ceilings, in some places vaulted, and in most places 12 to 14 feet. My room is 18 m2 with partially slanted ceilings. The room next to me is listed, on the floorplan, as a closet and is 9 m2. The woman who lives there is only sometimes in Freiburg. There are then two further bedrooms, 22 m2 each, and an entryway hall bigger than most student bedrooms and a kitchen just as big, with a little balcony out onto the inner courtyard. The bathroom and the toilet are two separate rooms, which actually makes a lot of sense and cuts down on the morning traffic jam considerably, as we all share these two rooms. There is no living room (and isn’t one in most apartments). But it’s big, spacious, and airy. Most rooms have plank wood floors which creak, and it’s on the 4th floor of a restored villa/townhome on a quiet street near the S-Bahn station, five minutes into the city, eight to the University.

My room, however, has only a bed, mattress, and a desk chair in it. Everything else is up to me. But I looked through an IKEA catalogue (for anyone who has seen Fight Club, that is the catalog from which Jack is ordering his drapes or whatever in the very beginning), and found acceptable items for reasonable prices. IKEA is a Swedish company that sells build-it-yourself and out-of-the-box furniture with Scandinavian functionality and style, and a relatively long life considering they are relatively cheap. High quality particleboard, I guess. Most German teenagers have bedrooms from IKEA. Those familiar with the catalogue or products get déjà vu every time they enter your average German house.

I can probably buy a dresser, carpet, desk, bookshelf, sheets, and wardrobe for about 200 euros new. I think I am going to start by keeping my clothes on a bookshelf (I have almost nothing to hang and extremely few articles of clothing anyways). I’d really like a sofa. A TV will have to be bought used if at all—I’d be fine not having one at all, but since I can’t even watch DVDs on my laptop I have no way to watch anything. No rush. I’d like to get my clothes off the floor, but otherwise I don’t have to buy everything right away, and I need to find someone with a car before I buy a wardrobe.

A. and I just dumped my stuff at home and headed back into town to meet a friend of hers for coffee and cake. The cake slices were the size of pizza slices. I didn’t even order one (stomache upset from pretzels and apples on the train). They served hot chocolate and café au lait in bowls, not cups. We (A., M., and myself) decided to meet at A.’s place later in the week for dinner and to go to a particular bar on Friday.

Instead of going back to my empty room I headed to A.’s, where we cooked and ate dinner, watched a movie, drank some (mediocre) wine, and chatted. She lives in a district that is part of the city but fifteen minutes away by S-Bahm, separated by a greenbelt. Getting out of the S-Bahn we ran into an elderly couple. After initial attempts to communicate we established that they were French. They wanted to go to the bus stop that would take them to the gondola. I forgot the word for ‘straight ahead’ but managed to explain to them in French where they were supposed to go.

A.’s place is on the top of a hill, ten minutes from the S-Bahn station. She’ll keep in shape living up there. She lives in a newly built basement 2-room apartment, 20 m2, pays 2/3 what I do, gets along with her roommate. Just finished buying her bedroom furniture (IKEA) and her DVD player is temperamental. But we found a Luc Besson film to watch and had a great time. As we were at my flat she said she’d happily trade with me—where she lives is absolutely beautiful, in a verdant green valley full of old churches and gingerbread houses, but it’s a bit out of the way, and I’m happy I’m living near the city this time. Otherwise, though, the place is gorgeous, everything is new and pretty and very comfortable, with a garden and a terrace and such.

German introduced us in Braunschweig, as we would both be studying in Freiburg. It turns out we have similar tastes in music and movies, sport, etc. We get along like old friends. She and I are journeying to IKEA on Tuesday to look at stuff for my room, and her roommate might have access to a car at some point.

It was nice to have a slow morning on Sunday—I got home from A’s at 1 AM again, slept till 7 the next morning, and had onion bread for breakfast. After a thorough comb-thru of the IKEA catalog I showered and went into town, but there wasn’t much to see so I spent the rest of the morning reading the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s version of Le Monde, only not so socialist), cooking stew, having tea, and not doing much. It was interesting reading the FAZ, perhaps Germany’s most highly regarded newspaper, what the NY times or Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, something like that would be in the US—its use of the German language is of noticeably higher quality than the books and magazines I normally read. I read it practically cover to cover.

But after hours of reading you have to get up and do something, so I headed for a walk. Direction: up. Anywhere that went uphill, in the hope of getting a good view or at least a workout. I got both, and a ruined cloister, a tower, and a tudor-style mini castle to boot. The joy of walking in Germany, much like in England, is that you can pretty much go anywhere not marked ‘private,’ closed off with a gate, or encircled by a fence. As land is so expensive, people don’t own forest—people who own land build stuff on it. The state or the city owns the forests, so anyone is welcome to go there. Ten minutes from my house and I am hiking in the woods, the beginnings of the black forest. The trees are only beginning to turn, though at one point I came across a brilliant yellow tree in the midst of a forest of pines. And to spare myself the S-Bahn ticket I walked into town (20 minutes walk) and back. There wasn’t much to see or do, but more people wandering around and the sun was shining, so it wasn’t quite as cold, and actually quite nice till my legs started to mutiny.