Roommate tryouts

Before arriving here I'd heard from a bunch of different people that finding an apartment in Hamburg was difficult. Feeling a little self-assured and dismissive, I downplayed everybody's words in my head. To my imagination the insurmountable, horrifying difficulties that everybody was talking about were grossly exaggerated. Overreactions to a task with a medium difficulty level at best. What could be more basic than simply finding a place to stay? After all, this isn't NYC or something, and Hamburg has fewer residents than Salt Lake City. What was there to be afraid of or nervous about?

Answer: everything. My underestimation of the housing situation in this city has come full circle and kicked me right in the ass. Finding a place to live in Hamburg has been an incredibly frustrating and hopeless process. For one, there are pretty much two resources that you can turn to to find something: http://www.wg-gesucht.de, and the bulletin boards on Hamburg University's campus. Craigslist practically doesn't exist in Germany, and all you find on other housing websites are duplicates of the listings you see on wg-gesucht. Campus bulletin boards, on the other hand, are full of people who are looking for apartments themselves, and precious few actual bulletins advertising apartments.

And you have competition. As in hordes and hordes of other students looking for shared living accommodations. I can't think of a better word for the ruthless and persistent crush of people who are flooding the scene. For a single listing in a single apartment there will literally be about 150 other people who are all fighting for the room. Absolutely no exaggeration on that number. This goes for all parts of the city and all types of apartments. So far I've sent out 20 inquiry emails with 20 additional follow up emails after I wasn't responded to, and I STILL haven't had a response.

Yesterday, however, I finally found a listing with a phone number, and called to set up an appointment to see the place. Little did I know that this wasn't actually an apartment showing, but more like roommate tryouts. There were five or six other people in the apartment, all being chatted up by the people currently living there and shown around the premises at once. The odds of what I'm up against are pretty bleak: a roughly 1:15 chance of simply being replied back to when you inquire about an apartment listing, and then 1:6 (depending on the place) of finally scoring the room once you land an apartment showing. Rough stuff. Thank god I still have another two weeks with the Ketels, I'm going to need every day of my remaining time with them.

This has put me in a pretty grim mood for the most part, but let's not end on a low note. After a particularly frustrating day of apartment searching (which included getting rained on without an umbrella and getting splashed by a car driving through a puddle on the side of the road), I found that I was in a much better mood after putting in a couple hours at the school. I'm not doing real lessons yet, but helping out the students with their work and assisting the teachers in their classrooms just puts me in an incredibly good mood. Probably a good indication that I've keyed into something worthwhile! And I've finally managed to put together a few other meetings with some people on WG-Gesucht, so all of the tooth and nail clawing and fighting is finally paying off a little bit. The situation isn't quite hopeless, I'm sure I'll land something eventually.