New digs

After four weeks of concerted effort, about a hundred emails, a few botched roommate tryouts and little success, I finally found a permanent place of residence a couple weeks ago. And it has been such an enormous relief. Simply having a place to yourself--where you can have a sense of permanence and stability--is a really important thing, and something that I took very much for granted before coming here. My first month in Hamburg was full of ups and downs, and feeling rootless and really hard-pressed to find a room in a short period of time heightened my adjustment period troubles significantly.

But I finally have something! And that is a wonderful thing. There's a teacher at a different school who has a couple extra rooms with a living room and bathroom in the top floor of her house that she usually rents to teaching assistants and Fulbright grantees. Finding it completely impossible to land a room in a normal apartment I decided to take her up on it. The place is down in Wilhelmsburg, which is a big island right in the middle of the Elbe, which flows to the south of Hamburg. It's pretty cheap, furnished, and, you know, it's a place to keep all of my stuff, so I'm feeling satisfied with the decision. The only thing is that it takes me upwards of an hour to get to my school, which really sucks when you have to be there by eight in the morning, but I'm making it work. Every Monday and Wednesday I've decided that I'm going to read on the train, and every Tuesday and Thursday I'm going to write.

I've got a roommate too, Loic from France, who is a French teaching assistant at a different school. So far he's been good company, and it's pretty boring living by yourself, so I've appreciated having him around.

Old room at Gesche and Manfred's.

New room!

Living room area.