I Chemnitz, I saw, I conquered

I was saving this blog title until I felt fully settled in Chemnitz – or at least until I had all the components necessary to feel fully settled. I feel justified in using it today, for the latter reason. Let me outline the following factors that have allowed me to feel like this:

A Place To Live For Months At A Time

I now have a room all of my own! I moved on Friday to the Johannes Kepler Internat, Hofer Straße 2. An Internat is in many ways like halls of residence; this one has younger children rather than students, but as far as I can work out it seems to be like a boarding house. The kids go to school here in Chemnitz, stay in the Internat during the week, and go home at the weekends. At least I think that’s why I haven’t seen any of the other inhabitants this weekend. A spot of detective work on the part of Jack – “Have we been eating anything with chocolate sprinkles?” “No...?” “Someone else has been in the kitchen today!!” – and the mysterious moving around of toothbrushes and other toiletries in the bathroom have allowed us to deduce that there are other people in the flat. However they are, as yet, invisible. Or they saw the empty bottle of €1.50 wine in the bin and the numerous bags of crisps, and they decided that taking flight was the best option.

Either way, it doesn’t matter because most importantly, I have a settled place to live for the rest of the year! For the first time in nearly three weeks I have been able to see all my clothes at the same time, if I so wish, because they are all in a wardrobe rather than crumpled in my suitcase. With cries of delight, I unpacked my dressing gown, tealight holders, and two sets of crocheted bunting, and all of a sudden I felt more relaxed and happy than I have done since arriving in Germany.

On Saturday, Jack and I went on an expedition into Chemnitz town centre, taking the bus for the first time (successfully, I might add, with just the one classic British-person-abroad thing of waiting on the wrong side of the road - great). We went to Woolworth, which is suspiciously like Woolworths used to be, where I bought very many useful things, like bin bags, a chopping board, and a draining rack, and some marginally less useful but no less wonderful things, such as a hula hoop, yet more candle holders, and glow-in-the-dark stars to stick on the ceiling. This all leads me on to my second important thing to have, which is:

A Convenient Place to Buy Important Things

In general, I find it makes me very anxious to be in a place where food is not easily accessible. Don’t ask me why – it could be my abnormal levels of hunger at all times of the day, or maybe I just have a nervous nature, but either way, I have to know where my next meal is coming from before I can relax. It runs in the family – if you're reading this, Father John, I blame you. When I first visited Hofer Straße last week I was concerned that the nearest supermarket was 20-25 minutes’ walk away, clearly not close enough for comfort. However, this weekend I discovered, or rather, Jack discovered, when he kindly offered to go food-shopping and leave me to stick up my photos and precisely pin bunting in peace, that a mere ten-minute walk from the house is a kind of shopping complex with an Aldi-Markt, a Penny, an Edeka, and several other big shops, including a mattress and furnishings shop where I will attempt to buy a desk lamp this week. This, along with the fact that the bus to town takes about five minutes, has considerably alleviated my fear of being foodless. And this leads to the final component in the holy trinity of feeling-settled-in-a-place:

A Means of Transport That Does Not Cost Money Every Time You Use It

This weekend Heike and her husband Stefan paid a short but fruitful visit to Hofer Straße, during which they dropped off Stefan’s old mountain bike for me to use this year. It’s different from the kind of bike I’m used to – my one at home has a lowered cross bar, dodgy brakes, and three gears, only one of which works. Stefan’s bike, on the other hand, has a higher crossbar, which means I’ll have to stop getting on and off the bike by swinging my leg over the bar in the dashing manner I have cultivated, and instead go over the back of the bike. That has taken some getting used to – at the moment I have no idea how high the back of the bike is, so I tend to overshoot and swing my leg far too high over the back just to make sure I don’t crash into it. So that is graceful in the extreme. But I will learn. The brakes are a lot better than those on my bike at home, and the bike also seems to have thousands of gears, seven on each handle, which don’t work perfectly but they’re much better than nothing.

Anyway, enough bike talk; my point is that I feel a lot more free to roam around Chemnitz now that I have a quick way of getting home. The station is only a 20-25 minute walk and a ten-minute cycle home, as I discovered today. It’s up a very steep hill, and my legs have only just stopped shaking, nearly an hour after the event. On the plus side, the cycle to the station will probably only take about three minutes. I can also get into town quickly now with the bike, which is wonderful. My next expedition is going to be to the Schloßteich, a park and lake on the other side of Chemnitz. Anything is possible with this new steed!

The final thing I need before I can be fully content is, of course, internet. I haven’t yet been introduced to the rumoured wifi in the flat. It’s apparently extremely slow, and you might as well not bother using it after 8pm, because there are so many people on it that it barely works at all. However, between 9am and midday it is okay, because of course everyone’s at work, so if I am cunning I can download programmes to watch then and watch them later in the internet dry period. I’m considering getting a dongle (pause for laughter at the word ‘dongle’. Dongle.) but they can be quite expensive and only have a limited amount of internet anyway, so I’ll wait and see how the wifi holds up first.

In general, it all seems to be falling into place; I’m still waiting for my fixed timetable, but as soon as I have that I’ll know what my weeks will look like this year, finally! I’m also hoping to sign up for a language course at the Volkshochschule to keep my German up to scratch. People here are too lenient when you make mistakes and instead of ruthlessly correcting you and refusing to answer until you’ve said it correctly, they annoyingly try their best to understand and help you at every turn. It’s awful. So, a German language course should help get my self-confidence in German back down to around the level it was in the first Grammar and Translation class in the first week of First Year, which is as it should be.

On the whole, everything’s feeling a lot more positive than at some points in the last three weeks.

So on that happy note - bis gleich!