Catch-22

Let's talk about apartment hunting, shall we?

I saw my first two apartments in Berlin in June, during my nine-day visit with Hannah. I registered with an English-speaking housing agency that specializes in furnished flats; they sent me out on the viewing appointments. One was a lovely, bright street-side apartment with a small balcony, but I found the surrounding area to be somewhat lifeless and bordered by grim allees, the long, wide boulevards that change from strip-mall to upscale shopping to dead zone to major commercial center. (It was also a fifth-floor walkup...). The second was in a great area but was only one room, dominated by an ugly bed, with the shower stall IN THE KITCHEN, and the WC in a peculiar little space with a deep window and crawl space behind the toilet. It was also dark, being on the inside of the building. Great people as landlords - two art historians and cute baby - living in the next flat; would have been fun to get well acquainted with them but the room would have made me feel like the poor orphan girl in "The Little Princess." So ixnay on emthay.

I spent the summer back home communicating with ExBerlinerFlats, but could not commit to anything online; was simply hoping for there to be something I could send Hannah to go see for me in person. Nothing. So I tried Craigslist, appealing because it's also in English, which should be rechristened Scam-o-Rama and forgotten by the world. 100% of the people who responded to my inquiries were scammers, and not particularly bright scammers, at that. In fact, maybe it's only one person whose hobby it is to list phantom apartments and see who will bite. There was a definite monotony to the stories being related: This flat is the most important thing in the world to me because I inherited it from my dead husband/wife and so your "absolute maintenance" of the place is of the utmost concern and oh by the way I am going to/already in West Africa on a mission and I have the keys with me but once you wire me a big deposit and several months' rent I have made arrangements to send the keys to you and really it looks just like it does in the pictures. I'm not kidding. There must have been at least a dozen of these with only minor variations.

Arriving in Berlin should have made things easier, as I could actually look at places. The first place was a great space - nicely furnished, near the river - and nothing nearby except block after block of apartment buildings. No shops, no cafes, no bakeries, no grocery stores. Nada, zilch, nothing. Not the European urban experience I'm looking for. I don't need Hipster Heaven, but a coffee shop at least is de rigueur.

The second place I went to sounded really promising, being more in the middle of old Berlin, also along the river, in an older restored building, on the first floor; also furnished. The building was truly stunning, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century striped masonry edifice with bay windows and a gracious entry. Again, the area wasn't quite as lively as I would have liked, but the building was so beautiful I would have made do. Except that the "first-floor" apartment turned out to be a dank basement room with Pergo floors and an old, dirty green couch to sleep on. Eeeew!

By spending a work-week's of hours deciphering German online newspaper ads and agency listings I finally understood enough to be able to send out some email inquiries. One guy responded promptly and we set up an appointment but then I remembered to tell him I have a dog and that was a deal-breaker. Understandable. One response was an auto-reply from an agency referring me to their website. I'm guessing they specialize in "fixer uppers" as most of the spaces were in pretty bad shape; one didn't even have a toilet installed, just the pipes where one had been. I did not bookmark their page.

It is very common here for people to take their kitchens with them when they move - sink, stove, fridge, even the cabinets and countertops. I find it a bizarre practice, but at least it helped me narrow my search results to places with cooking areas intact. The toilet thing still puzzles me.

Feeling frantic, I registered with another English-speaking agency, right in the courtyard of the Goethe Institute, specializing in helping people like me - new to Berlin, lacking language skills, needing furnished places. They sent me to two beautiful flats, one in the picturebook district of Schoeneberg, and one in the trendier Prenzlauerberg. Schoeneberg was a very nicely done place - ground floor, nice kitchen and bathroom, flat-screen TV, but was only one room with a round bed in the middle of it. Also a little dark, being on the airshaft side of the building, and the neighborhood gave me a social-class anxiety attack, the way my kids' prep school in Seattle did. Beautiful, but maybe not quite where I belong. And the place in Prenzl? Sheesh! Nice place, but the area is like a freeway for strollers - Hannah calls it "Breeder Central," there are so many young families living there. And did I mention the commission? The agency wanted 2 months' rent for two telephone calls and one email, the equivalent of about $2,000.00 U.S. Plus 19% service tax. Works out to about $100 per minute which means I'm REALLY in the wrong line of work.

OK, enough of that. I did finally find a place, by myself, through the newspaper. Unfurnished. Ground floor. Good light. Pleasant garden, good for the dog. One big room, one nice kitchen, one lovely bathroom, 3 french doors. No partridge.

When you move to Germany - or change your address once you're here - you have to register with the city within seven days of obtaining permanent accommodation. It's called anmeldung. (Visitors who stay in hotels also get anmelded, but the hotels do all the paperwork so the guests don't even know about it.) You need a copy of your lease to get your anmeldung. You need your anmeldung certificate in order to get a bank account. You need a bank account in order to produce enough cash to make a deposit to obtain your lease. Foreigners have to pay bigger deposits. You can see where I'm going with this. I'm now stuck in Catch-22. I can't withdraw a large enough sum of money from an ATM to pay my entire deposit and 3 months' rent in one fell swoop, which means I can't get the lease document to take to the Bürgeramt to become anmelded in order to open a bank account to pay my deposit...

By dribs and drabs I will accumulate the cash I need from ATMs and by using 3 cards. I paid a third of it today and it will take me until Monday to accumulate the rest. And then I get to go shopping at Ikea, which also only takes cash.

The icing on this particular cake is deliciously ironic. Hannah was describing a high-maintenance friend to me the day before I went to look at this apartment. She said, "She's so mühsam." I said I thought the apartment I was going to see was on Mühsamstrasse, and what did it mean exactly? She laughed almost to the point of tears and said, "It means 'pain in the ass'". Perfekt.

A Day Off

I will begin with a bad pun, given where I am, but Friday night I hit the wall. I was in bed by nine and didn't get up until after nine Saturday morning. Twelve hours after that, I was still tired and was so very happy that evening does eventually follow daylight and that bedtime heaves into sight, every night, at last. It has been an exhausting two weeks, hitting the ground running as I did; no wonder my brain and body both rebelled.

In spite of the fatigue, I walked a good bit Saturday, out and about with Hannah, who is likewise fatigued, to the farmers' market (pecorino!) and paper stores (still on the sketchbook quest; fail) and later out with Maggie for her evening stroll. It was a pleasantly cool early fall day; suddenly this week it is dark noticeably earlier.

Neither of us felt like cooking so we went out for Vietnamese again, always a good choice for tired people who have not eaten particularly well all day. (On days when I have not had my vegetables, I am now able to say "We are not gemused.") We then holed up all evening with our books and laptops, Hannah working on her academic papers on Pope Gregory VII and the Habsburgs, and I moving restlessly between online apartment-hunting and reading my novel. We took frequent Maggie breaks.

Berlin has me thinking about relationships, as what I am doing here these days is establishing a new one, with the city itself. Getting oriented in a city is almost exactly like meeting a new person, beginning with elementary chitchat. Lovely weather we're having = I don't yet need a sweater. I like your hat = This is a pretty park. What do you do for a living = What IS the economic base here? I venture a little farther afield each weekday, but weekends have been for sleeping, cramming for German tests, and doing laundry. We are at an early stage of acquaintanceship.

My hubs so far are two: Hannah's apartment and the Goethe Institute, in two vastly different neighborhoods. The GI is right in the heart of Mitte, the cultural and historic "center" of the city, if Berlin can be said to have one. It is really more like a bunch of smaller cities stuck together, each one with a distinct personality, like any big city I suppose, but less homogenized than, say, a place like Seattle. Mitte is home to the major museums, the Berliner Dom (technically a "cathedral" in name only as it has never been the seat of a Catholic bishop but always a Protestant institution), the Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, and the most famous modern landmark, the Fernsehturm, Berlin's TV-tower answer to the Space Needle.

I have mentioned that Hannah lives in gritty (I need a new adjective!) Friedrichshain, an industrial working-class district that was heavily bombed during the war and then was part of Soviet East Berlin until the Wall came down. Cheap rent and lots of empty flats made it popular for students and artists right after reunification, but as ALWAYS happens, the cheap-rent era has been followed by gradual gentrification and a slow rise in rents. Although still pretty dirty, F'hain has become a hot spot for the twenty- and thirty-somethings who like its club scene. Students and artists are now moving to the next cheap areas...and so the cycle will go on. I am looking for apartments in Prenzlauerberg, Kreuzberg, and the quieter, cleaner parts of Friedrichshain, near the Volkspark. I hope to find something this week.

Once I find a place and get settled, my relationship with Berlin will change yet again, from first-time visitor in June, to currently displaced flat-seeker, to actual resident, at least for a time. I am eager for that phase to begin. In the meantime, I have a test tomorrow on noun declensions, comparitives, and the passive voice. I think I'll go to the fleamarket.