Epiphany

I’ve figured out what it is. Why it takes me that bit more to get up and out, depression aside.

It’s too quiet. Where I live is just too quiet. In the morning you just hear the sound of the birds chirping, no cars zooming by, no noisy flatmates, no cleaners coming in at 8am. Amazingly peaceful.

Which is great if I wanted to retire here, but in terms of getting up early for uni – for someone who has problems getting himself motivated – a peaceful morning environment plus a somewhat comfy bed combined with a haphazard sleeping pattern does not go well with the notion of getting up at 7:00am to go to uni.

Last year I was in a flat on a quiet street with two housemates, and whilst I still had trouble there, I did for the most part get up before midday – partly I think due to the fact that there were flatmates making noise around me. (Not that I’m complaining about the noise – I remember waking up one sunny Saturday morning to the sound of my flatmate’s guitar-playing and smooth vocals coming from the next room.)

The year before that I was in halls at my uni, which is like being in a small village. Theresa always some noise around you (though the windows are double-glazed so the more troublesome drunkards that stumble out of the SU bar don’t keep you up at night). Whenever I went into the kitchen, my flat being the ground floor, there’d always be 1001 students walking past the window to lectures.

The good thing is I’m hopefully going to be living in halls again for final year, so here’s hoping it helps things!

Progress

It’s weird how things happen together. Whether it be a string of good things or a bad thing that balances out with a good thing, they rarely come on their own – at least not in my experience.

Take today for example. I wanted to go into town to see one of my London uni lecturers, should she be there.

I missed my connection at London Bridge (bad) but realised I could indeed change at the Waterloo and not lose much in the way of time (good).

When I got to Waterloo, however, I realised I’d forgotten to update my ticket, thinking that today was the 22nd and it hadn’t run out yet. Hello £20 fine (bad) which however won’t come out of my account for another 2 weeks (good – gives me time to make sure the money’s in my account).

Slightly annoyed, though thankful it was only £20 and not £80, I made my way to uni to see my lecturer. As it happens, she wasn’t in that day (bad) but another one was, so I got to talk to her instead (good).

When I’d finished, I went to the campus coffee shop for some caffeinated refreshment (good) and was served by a cute second-year I hadn’t met before (good).

Whilst making my way back to the tube station I took a moment to smile. I hadn’t been near my uni properly in about 9 months, and not only was it good to be back, but I was finally getting that same feeling that I’d get when I was living there during first year, which went away when I had to find a place across town in second year: the feeling that I could find a life for myself here, and succeed at it.

I could find a flat to share during final year, go to the library, or the coffee shop, or even the foyer of the arts building to do my work, have a laugh with my friends at the student union, grab s coffee between lectures at one of the EIGHT coffee establishments on campus, use the Boris bikes to cycle to town, or the river, or just to Bethnal Green for my groceries, use the Tube to go into town and mooch around Soho, finding bookshops and theatres an markets that I never knew existed, or to meet people on a Friday night – rushing all the way so that we get in before they start charging.

This is something which I haven’t felt for a long time, and whilst I know I still have to make 5 more months of a life in Berlin, doing an insane amount of courses to catch up for past neglect, I now know I have a life to come back to when I return to east London.

And that’s progress! (very good)

-R

What a difference a day makes…

So the past week has been filled with sleeping, sleeping, and the odd beer or two. Unfortunately my sleeping pattern has been so screwed up that it’s been almost impossible to correct!

Monday was a good day – because I didn’t sleep the night before I was able to get out of bed, have a cuppa and make my way across town to Wedding to go to the Ausländerbehörde (Foreigners’ Authorities) to get the ever-elusive Freizügigkeitsbescheinigung (basically a slip of paper which says I’m and EU citizen and free to travel around Germany – though I thought that was covered by my passport…it’s confusing). I’d been meaning to do it for about 5 months and as the next day was the deadline I thought it was probably best I did it. Now, I’ve talked before about the insanities of German bureaucracy, so I came prepared this time – meaning I was there when the doors opened at 7am and as such “only” had to wait an hour to be seen.

As it was now 8:15am I decided to go find myself some breakfast so I went to Friedrichstraße, which is this main road slap bang in the centre of town. As well as being located fairly near Unter den Linden and the Brandenburg Gate, it’s also somewhat swankier in that it has a lot of office space but also shops. As such, it’s the perfect place to sit in Starbucks and people-watch – which I did! I always find there’s something comforting about watching people go about their business. I suppose it’s especially comforting now cause of the whole depression thing because I’m seeing that there is in fact life beyond the four walls of my apartment. Even back home in London I love just walking around town, not necessarily having something to do but just immersing myself in people going to the shops, or going to work, or rushing to get the Tube, or picking out new clothes for “the big party tonight at so-and-so’s place”.

But anyway, I digress.

After forcing down what was a truly godawful “breakfast panini” (god I miss Starbucks in the UK), I decided to go to uni and do something else that I’ve been meaning to do for ages – pay my fees for the next semester so that I can actually study at the place some more!!! That was a huge weight off my mind, mainly because I was worried that I’d spend the 249€ sitting in my account on something else!

Having a look at my to-do list, I realised that the rest of my things I needed to do for the day were all at my flat. By this point it was about 10:30am and I didn’t really want to go home yet. So I went back into town and spent a good couple of hours walking leisurely around town filming shots for a little project I’m working on. However, by the time I got to Alexanderplatz I realised that I was really getting tired. My lack of sleep from the night before was catching up with me, so I decided to go back home for a bit (I was supposed to be meeting my friend, but not for a few hours), make myself a cuppa and just chill.

However, “chilling” turned into sleeping and before I knew it my friend was texting me at 7pm saying “Sooo what you wanna do?” I had to cancel on him as all I wanted to do was sleep! Tuesday was, as such, not so good, spending most of it in bed and doing sod all until I remembered I’d promised to make it up to my friend that evening instead.

As I got up late on Tuesday, it resulted in me spending the whole night awake, which in turn, resulted in Wednesday being great. Not only did I get up in time to talk to the house management during their (stupidly early) office hours, I got some washing done in preparation for my brother coming to visit on Friday and I went to a very positive counselling session!

But best of all, I went to bed at about 7pm and, save for my friend C. ringing me at 11:30pm, I slept right through until 7am today! Just shows how little things can turn your mood around in the blink of an eye!

So good morning world!!!

-R

Language Howlers

I’ve been living in Berlin for four-and-a-half months now, and as I mentioned in my last post, it’s not always been easy.

One thing I’ve managed to avoid, however, are what my lovely friend at Inane Whitterings calls “Language Howlers” – mistakes in a foreign language which are colossal in their error.

I’m still haunted by the memory of discussing contact lenses with a group of German gays in 2008, and instead of illustrating my difficulty with putting in lenses by saying that I’d spent half-an-hour at the optician’s (beim Optiker) I ended up saying I’d spent half-an-hour in the optician (im Optiker). Needless to say that was the source of great hilarity.

Now, I thought that I was safe from such howlers by now, but oh no, I couldn’t have been more wrong!

The other day I was telling my friend C. about how for breakfast I have two bread rolls with butter and Lachsschinken. Now I had assumed that Lachsschinken was just a type of ham (Schinken being the German word for ham). Imagine my surprise when I google Lachs out of curiosity and find out it actually means “salmon“! I’d been having fish for breakfast!

Upon telling this to C., however, he burst out laughing and proceeded to tell me that Lachsschinken was indeed just a certain cut of ham, and nothing to do with salmon at all!

As he said that I realised with slow horror that I had done the German-equivalent of thinking that shepherd’s pie was made from shepherds.

German 1, Robin 0

A Problem Shared…

I’m not quite sure how to start this post. I’ve been putting it off for some time, which, as you will find out, is somewhat ironic.

Let me just start by apologising for not having updated this blog much since I moved to Germany. This was supposed to be my travel blog whilst here on my year abroad, but it’s not really been a huge success so far.

The reasons for my inactivity are complex and varied, but it’s not just my online activities (aside from Facebook, watching YouTube and reading Glee fanfiction) that have suffered, but also my personal and academic ones.

I’ve been asking myself for weeks if I should even talk about this in such a public sphere, but ultimately I’ve decided it could do me good to get it all out in the open, and stop pretending everything’s okay when it really isn’t. That way I can also hopefully start moving on from it all.

So here goes.

I’m honestly not sure when it started, but at some point over the past couple of years, I’ve become depressed.

Even just writing that was hard for me, cause it’s not something I can control. It’s not a pizza in the oven that I can take out before it burns. Nor is it shortsightedness that I can combat with contact lenses, or an acting role that I can perform better in by analysing the character, or a language that I can improve upon with practice. It’s something in my mind which I cannot trace, identify nor destroy on my own. And that scares me to death.

I’ve not achieved a lot of the things I set out to do upon going to uni. I’ve not got into shape, nor learned to cook much past pizza, spaghetti bolognese and the occasional chicken fillet with chips (and yes, Chris Lomas, I mean “occasional” – Germany appears to be almost a chicken-in-breadcrumbs-free land), I haven’t done much in the way of acting, save a couple of uni plays last year, and my constant state of disorganisation means that a lot of this isn’t likely to be done anytime before 2019!

This, in turn, gets me down, and when I get down I get apathetic, and when I get apathetic, stuff doesn’t get done, lectures don’t get attended, I feel even worse about myself and the cycle continues.

This culminated in March of last year, at the end of the second semester, with me having a combined 10,000 words to write in the space of about three days, cause I’d procrastinated and put things off to the last minute. On the penultimate day of term, I went to the library after class at about 6pm, started my last 3,000 word essay, furiously typing throughout the night until I submitted it at 6:02am the next day. I then went almost straight to my retail job at the time for a 9-6 shift, after having printed out the hard copy and walked to my friend’s flat to wake him up, so that he could hand it in for me before the 4pm deadline. I ended the day feeling majorly overtired and vaguely nauseous from the amount of coffee and Red Bull I’d had to consume in the preceding 36 hours to stop myself from shutting down.

So then I said to myself “No more!” and vowed to go to see my doctor. Well…it’s all very well VOWING to see your doctor, but you’ve gotta flamin’ well do it! And it took me at least another month to do it.

At the time, she put me down as “low mood” as opposed to “depression” and put me on a mild anti-depressant, advising me to avail myself of the uni’s counselling service. Again, it took me another month to get myself together in time to actually do so, and by then the counsellors were all taking their holidays, so the sessions were somewhat fragmented and sporadic. One thing that I DID get from it was that I definitely needed to see someone on a regular basis.

Come October and I’d moved to Germany. I thought “Great! Hopefully this’ll be a new start for me!” whilst still intending to see a counsellor out here. However I was feeling positive.

Then I started missing lectures again. Lecturers told me that because I missed the first session, I can’t take part in the course, or that the course was fully booked. And then I sleep in or wake up with only half an hour to go before I would have to leave, which would mean sacrificing either a shower, a cup of tea, or breakfast – I should go in anyway, but I don’t. I roll back over and fall back asleep.

I don’t know why I do all of this. I know I’m sabotaging my own future and yet I still do it. I went from being enrolled for 2 Drama courses, 3 Culture courses only available to ERASMUS students and a German as a Foreign Language course, to doing just two of the Culture courses and the Language course. Even in the two culture courses I’ve been missing lectures. I’m not going to get Leistungsscheine (certificates of achievement) in either of them because I’m not taking the exam, and in one of them I’m not even sure I’ll get a Teilnehmerschein (certificate of participation) because I didn’t do a presentation!

I went to two sessions of counselling, after which she recommended I go and see a proper therapist. Not only did it take me another month to get round to looking for therapists (giving a man with organisational and motivational problems the responsibility of looking for his OWN therapist isn’t really the best of ideas in my opinion), but when I did I found out that therapy doesn’t appear to be covered in my EU Health Insurance. When I found that out, I didn’t just start missing lectures, but also days of my life. I spent the good portion of one week either asleep or eating.

In many ways, I think this depression has gotten a lot worse since I came here.

However, that is the reason I’m writing all of this now.

I need to get myself sorted, I need to do it NOW. Today, I woke up and felt inspiration for the first time in a very long time. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it’s just cause my flat’s tidy, there’s food in the fridge, clean clothes in the wardrobe and they’re hanging on hangers which I FINALLY got round to buying after months of “getting round to it”. For whatever reason, I thought “Today’s the day I’ll write that post”, cause I know that once I write this and publish it online, I’ve said it. It’s out there, people will know what’s wrong with me.

I’ve got two months after next week where I don’t have ANY lectures. Two months until all Hell breaks loose and I’m doing about 12 modules to make up the credits I lost this semester. Two months to work on me, to get me to a better place.

And I’m not gonna lie and say I’m not scared, because I am. I’m absolutely terrified. Terrified I’ll screw up again, terrified I’ll fall back into the same cycle, flunk out of the Year Abroad and have to pay my 2250€ Erasmus Grant back. But I’ve been so blessed by the support of my family and the friends who I’ve told bout this. Sometimes just ringing home – hearing words of support from my Mum, or talking to my Dad, who can go from being one of the wisest and most practical people I know to one of the silliest within seconds, or just hearing the calm, collected voice of my brother as we share clubbing horror stories – helps me no end.

And I’ve got friends here too who are helping me, even if they don’t know it. I’ve got my 6’8″ friend C. who forces me to unwind when I get too stressed, I’ve got my fellow Engländer here, N., who reminds me that I do have responsibilities when I get too apathetic, and I’ve got others too who inadvertently brighten my day just with a smile and a “Hello!” in the corridors.

It’s not gonna be easy – there are going to be bad days, and days where I wake up with this permanent heavy weight on my heart – but I’ve got to try.

The alternative is unacceptable.

…and heck, I’m writing this with a foggy head from a night out, and a stiff neck from sleeping awkwardly – if that’s not a triumph of the human spirit I don’t know what is!

-R

Between Rain and Results

So I left the flat today for the first time in…three days? God that’s a depressing start to a blog post, but I promise it’s not.

The reason for my apparently self-imposed isolation wasn’t depression or homesickness, but quite honestly a lack of money and a lack of somewhere to go! My Deutsche Bank account was unreachable purely because they hadn’t had the manners to send me my PIN yet, and I kept sleeping in past the time where I could have seen certain people at uni to talk about course choices!

Finally today I could so something – admittedly after ringing home for £50 to tie me over – and I went into uni for my Einstufungstest (language placement test for German classes). I met some nice people outside, W. and S., and had a good laugh in German and English. As for the test itself, it was one of those (in my opinion) ridiculous C-tests, where you have to fill in the blanks for the end of words, but what you fill in must be either equal to or one greater than the number of characters in the given segment.

Okay, I can sense some people’s eyes are crossing so I’ll give an example. Say I was given “Di__”, it could have been perhaps “Diese” (“this”) or “Dick (“fat”, yes har har) but not “Dichter” (“poet”). Needless to say it’s basically a vocabulary test and doesn’t properly test the grammatical ability or the ability to self-produce, so I find it a tad one-sided when trying to determine the level of a language. But anyway, rant over!

The main point of that was that my result was rather good – 83% or C1 on the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages, which did rather surprise me as I had got either one or two whole levels lower on the practice test I did over the summer!

I also went to try and register for an Italian course, as I’ve already done GCSE Italian, but that was 3 years ago and I want to try and get my level up somewhat. So I’ve got another placement test tomorrow morning! Which isn’t too bad, cause I’ve got to come in anyway the next two days for some orientation events for the Theaterwissenschaft (theatre science/drama) department!

Then I’ve got my registration for my German course (now that I’ve done the placement test) on Friday! It’s all go here!!!

The Pains of German Bureaucracy

So this is officially my first post in Germany! I’ve been here for a week and so far it’s been pretty damn good! Spent a few days with my Dad getting a LOT of things sorted, made some new friends and went to an induction event!

Unfortunately, I’m currently doing something which is far less enjoyable. I’m sitting in a crowded waiting room at the council offices, waiting to register as a resident.

I’ve been sitting here for at least 30 minutes already and the big screen on the other side of the room still says “Number Waiting: 78”. Seventy-eight people are apparently waiting to see the people here for whatever reason – that’s ridiculous! Though, to be fair, it wasn’t ALWAYS saying 78 – when I arrived it said 74, then 76, then 77, then 76 again.

I’ve just looked up from my laptop and I’ve seen that it’s now at 81. Oh God, I might spend the rest of my life in this room!

It wouldn’t be so bad if they had had the foresight to at least put a water cooler in here. I had to go to a stand across the road to get a bottle of something cold, and (although it’s very unlikely given the amount of people before me) I might have been called in the meantime! Also, it’s fairly stuffy in this room and whilst newspapers are good to look at, they aren’t nearly as thirst-quenching as a bottle of Coke.

Suffice it to say, I’m not impressed so far with the so-called German efficiency.

UPDATE: I ended up waiting 3 hours and 15 minutes, for them to look at my form, and process my registration in about 5 minutes! It defies logic!