First Blog, First Week

So, the adventure has begun. I have been here just over one week and I am finally settling into a routine... but now everything is going to change again! Tomorrow I leave for 3 days in Berlin with Donny, and when I come back I will move into my new apartment with Lisa! Currently I'm living with friends of Lisa's mother in Wedel, which is a little village just outside of Hamburg. Heidi and Bernd are very sweet, and they have a huge guest room on their top floor with a private bathroom and three skylights! It's quite luxurious, but I'm really looking forward to moving into my own place because (a) I have never lived in my own and (b) even though Heidi and Bernd are kind, I have to be on my best behaviour all the time because I'm living in their house. It will be nice to be able to just relax when I get home.

Because lists make me happy, here is a little

list of things I find different here:

• light switches are large squares instead of little rectangles
  
• you have to peel cucumbers before you eat them because of all
  
  Rathaus
  Hamburg's Town Hall, rebuilt in 1897 after the great fire.
  the pesticides
  
• the toilet bowls are only 1/3 full of water but flush more strongly
  
• keyboards switch the Z and the Y, and there are umlauts where the punctuation should be
  
• everyone drives a Mercedes, and there's loads of T-class station wagons (I'm in love!)
  
• The more I listen to German, the more I lose my English.... but it's not replaced by better German :(
  
• Budni (the German equivalent of London Drugs) sells Fun Factory sex toys!
  

When I first got here, there was a huge storm. It was so bad that the police warned everyone to stay in their houses... and with good reason! Once the storm was over, 2 people had died in Hamburg, 9 were dead in Germany, and 29 had died in the whole of Europe! Needless to say, it was a horrible storm. On Friday it briefly stopped raining so I went to the main shopping street of Wedel to visit the library and open a bank account. It felt good to put my life savings once again into a bank where it would be safe.
On the weekend, I spent time with Lisa. The weeks are a bit lonely with her gone every day, so the weekends are great and we have so much fun that I don't have time to miss Vancouver. On Saturday the 20th we walked around Hamburg centre and did a little bit of shoe shopping. I got a comfortable pair of white Lacoste runners that were on sale! Now I have shoes that don't leak when they get wet, hooray. On Sunday we looked at our new apartment. It is in a cute yellow building across from a pond and the Wedel train station, so it's very convenient. Although it's a bit irritating because the S-Bahn stops running from 1am to 5am even on weekends, so if we want to party in Hamburg we either have to leave really early or party hard and catch the first morning train home! Lisa found this very irritating but I just voted for the 5am train option and she agreed we'd just have to be all-night partiers. It's not our choice, it's the train's fault!

On Monday, it was sunny for the first time since I'd got here, and so Heidi and I went for a walk in Blankenese, which is an expensive village on the outskirts of Hamburg right on the banks of the Elbe. The shops are very cute and pricey, so we did a bit of window shopping, then we walked down loads of cobbled stone stairs past lovely houses to the Elbe. We walked along for a while and saw a few ships. Heidi told me that in Wedel there is a restaurant near the river where they announce where the ships are from and what they contain. They also play the national anthem from the ship's home port! This is the only place in the world where they announce such information, so I will have to put that on my to-do list for the Spring. Right now, it's much too cold!

On Tuesday, Heidi and I went into Hamburg to explore a little bit and see a movie called Vitus with an elderly Polish lady that Heidi has befriended. We spoke to each other in very slow and broken German, and she was so sweet and encouraging it made me happy. The movie was pretty good too, but the characters would have been more well-rounded if my German was better. Wednesday I went back into the city by myself because I wanted to take a tour of the Rathaus (town hall). When I got there, the guard told me that the tourist information was wrong and during the winter there are only tours on Saturdays. So instead, I walked around the city a bit and saw Michaeliskirche, Nikolais Memorial, and the warehouses on the Elbe. When I lost feeling in my fingers from the cold, I went into the Bucerius Kunst Forum and saw an exhibit on Cleopatra consisting of items gathered from museums around the world. Afterwards, I met up with Lisa for dinner. Everyone smokes indoors here, so by the time we left my clothes and hair stunk of cigarettes and I had to wash everything I was wearing. Now I want to avoid bars and restaurants so that I don't smell bad!

Thursday I made plans to go with Heidi to volunteer with her Refugees, where she has been volunteering for over 18 years. To get some exercise before, I went to walk along the Elbe. I think I must have taken a wrong turn though, because I never found the river... but I did find this long concrete wall that was covered with graffiti art. Walking past it was like a scrolling art gallery, some of the pieces were so good. Visiting the refugees was interesting because my German is so bad, but mostly I just smiled lots. There were two little 6-year-old black boys who were twins and their 4-year-old sister who just couldn't understand how I could be from Canada, which was all the way across the ocean! The girl was so ridiculously cute I wanted to take her home with me. When I left she zipped up my jacket for me and so I zipped hers up for her.
Friday evening I saw my first Opera here and my second Opera ever, Simon Boccanegra. Since the singing was in Italian and the translation was in German, I had no idea what it was about but I enjoyed the music immensely. I got that there was a love interest, some political intrigue, and in the end everyone died.... and when I checked Wikipedia for a summary I found I was not far off although it was much more complicated than I ever could have guessed! Next time I see an Opera I will look for the summary beforehand.

This weekend has been quite restful. On Saturday the 27th I woke up so late that Lisa and I just ended up hanging out in the afternoon at Lenny's house. We meant to see a concert in the evening, but there was nothing on that really caught our fancy so we drank some ridiculously good red wine and played cards. This morning I got up very early to go to a choir practice with the Monteverdi Chor of Hamburg. They were very good, at Bruce Pullen's level, and I would love to join except for the fact that they practice on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday every second week. That's nine hours of singing every second week, and the hours are right in the middle of the days so the whole weekend is ruined. That means I wouldn't be able to hang out with Lisa very much, and it would make travelling around Europe very difficult. So I think I will try to find a different choir that doesn't practice so often, and if I can't... well then I guess joining a German Choir just wasn't meant to be. Which is a bit sad, I think.

Tomorrow is more exciting adventures in Berlin! Wish me luck!

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