Words on the page

(Before I get on with other stuff, I want to share good news....I was able to obtain my residency (that process was MUCH simpler here than in Hungary) and have an appointment on Thanksgiving Day to get my visa...now, onward)

The moving process is a difficult one at times. Or maybe it’s not that difficult but it’s just MAJOR time consuming and at moments you feel like you get nothing accomplished. These past 2 weeks that I’ve been in Germany have been like that for me.

I was just asked the other day by a good friend (WHAT’S UP TAM?!) what it was that I was actually doing during the days. That’s a great question. I told her (and I’ll tell you now) that the best way I can describe it right now is for you to imagine yourself in the midst of writing a long research paper in college. You spend hours upon hours researching things on the web or checking out and reading books from the library, and then organizing all your research but you’ve yet to write a word on a page for the actual paper. You might feel like you haven’t accomplished anything because there are no words on the screen to show your work, but in reality you’ve done a lot. That’s how I feel each and every day here. I KNOW things are getting done, I just don’t have much to show for it right now.

So what have I done since I got here? I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit slowly inching my way to a carpal tunnel specialist’s office as I sit behind my computer researching things. Each day I look at the new apartments being listed...that shouldn’t take much time should it? Well, no, if you can read the apartment descriptions and you know where all of the German-named streets are in Berlin. I, however, do not speak German yet, so my plan of action is the same for each day....
1) search for apartments in Kreuzberg (the district that I’m going to live)
2) out of those, I copy and paste the address of each apartment into googlemaps.com to see where it’s located in Kreuzberg in relation to where we are going to focus
3) if it is close to our geographical focus, then I click on the apartment’s link which takes me to a detailed description of that certain flat...in German of course (“flat” is European word for apartment)
4) I cut that flat’s description’s web-address, navigate to translate.google.com, and paste the web-address there in order to translate the description from German to English
5) And I do that for each flat....VERY TIME CONSUMING AND FRUSTRATING!

Sidenote: The other thing you need to know about the way flats are rented out here is that when the owner (or rental agency) is going to show the flat, they announce it and EVERYONE who is interested shows up at that announced time....there are no private tours of the flats. So it’s very common that you are going to see this flat at the same time as 10 other people who are interested. It’s a very competitive process!

Other research that has been done besides looking for flats?....figuring out which mobile phone company I want to go with (and plans are NOT set up the same here as they are in the states), which bank to bank with, which language course I can enroll in (depends on where I’ll eventually live which of course I don’t know yet!). And again, all these pages are in German so the same process happens with trying to translate it all.

So, just like researching for your big paper, work here is getting done....I just don’t have any words on my page to prove it just yet. The important thing for you to know is that this does not discourage me because I know that this is the process. At the same time I hope it doesn’t discourage you because you aren’t ‘seeing results’. You and I both need to get used to that though, because many times “results” are not quantifiable in the type of work I’ve been called to! So you may not see it....but things are getting done and I’m encouraged!