Die ersten Tage in Berlin.

Well, here I am in Berlin. I still don't think I believe that I am here. The flights were all on time, and I made it to all of them on time too. I did have a little trouble once I got to Berlin, though:

First, I needed to get out quite a bit of cash to pay for the month in the apartment here in Berlin. I was glad to find an ATM in the airport. It had the MasterCard logo, so I figured I was good to go. When I got to the end of the transaction, the machine told me that my card didn't work in that machine. This was after another card usage failure in the bus ticket machine. Luckily there was a little teller window next to the ATM, and she was able to manually charge the card for the withdrawal.

After paying for a bus ticket in cash, I had relatively little trouble getting to the nearest subway stop from my apartment. I got off the subway and went to the nearest exit, but it had neither an escalator nor an elevator, so I went to the farther exit. There, at the farther exit (probably 70 meters from the other one) there were still only stairs. So I climbed them, with all 140 lbs. of my luggage. When I got to the top, I realized I didn't really know where I was, and, more importantly, I didn't know where my apartment was in relation to where I was. I did, however, have an address, and I noticed that there was a map back down in the subway stop. So I dragged all of luggage back down into the subway, looked at the map and got my bearings. The BVG (Berlin public transport) website said the address would be about 100 meters from the subway stop. So I got to the street of the address, and, from what I could tell, I was in low 30s in address numbers. I was looking for 31 Alte Schoenhauserstrasse (where I was supposed to meet my landlord), but I couldn't find it. So, I was kind of going up and down that street looking for a guy who looked like he was looking for a guy. I even asked a man on the street: "Kannst du mir helfen?" (Can you help me?), inappropriately using the "du" form of “you” with someone with whom I was clearly not familiar. I asked him if he spoke English (he did) and then asked him if he knew where the address was. He basically told me that it was probably somewhere near where I we were.

Eventually, still rolling/schlepping all my luggage, I found a bench on the street, and sat on it. I knew that I had the landlord’s cell phone number in an email that was on my computer and Merle Schlabaugh had let me borrow his German cell phone. I noticed there was a coffee shop nearby, and I took myself and again all my big luggage into the rather small coffee shop. I ordered the first thing on the menu (an espresso), probably more because I felt like I needed to atone for bringing all my stuff into their poor little coffee shop, and not because of a particular hankering coffee. I got my espresso, sat down and found the email on my computer. I then called the landlord; he came and found me, and showed me to the apartment.

Sidenote: he said he had been waiting by the subway stop. If I had come up the other staircase, I later realized, I would have been almost directly in front of the entrance to the apartment.

Some pictures of my apartment and the views out of the windows:

Saturday, September 06, 2008:

The good:

I found an ATM in my neighborhood, and my debit card worked. I think I am getting over a cold that hit it’s peak yesterday after 22 hours without sleep.

The bad:

I don’t think my 40-dollar electric outlet converter works correctly. I plugged my alarm clock, and now the time setting buttons don’t work. Later, I plugged in my beard trimmer, and it made a heinous grinding noise the entire time I was using it.