Journey to Germany: Chapter 2
Intro
In this story series, I am going to write about my Journey of moving from Beirut to Munich to do my masters degree. I hope you enjoy it!
This is the 2nd chapter of my Journey to Germany if you have not read the first one yet, here it is Journey to Germany: Chapter 1
2. Settling in a New Home
After moving into my new “Home”, I met the previous tenant of my room: Levan. We hung out a bit after he gave me a tour of the place and told me about himself. He had just finished his masters degree in Informatics after living in Munich for 5 years. He was a short friendly-looking guy with light blue eyes, dark blonde hair, and a beard. If Vikings still existed, you would definitely mistake him for one.
He was kind enough to give me his number and told me to ask him for anything if he needed help (Oh boy, did this save me). He told me my flatmate wasn’t home. Oh yeah, did I forget to mention? I wasn’t living alone. My apartment included two rooms, one kitchen, and a shared bathroom. I had no idea what my flatmate was like. All I knew was that he was a Dominican guy called Pedro.
My room was quite nice, It had nice big windows with a nice view (being a singular tree and neighborhood buildings), a nice big bed, a really questionable wardrobe that was made of fabric and plastic, a desk for me to work and study on, and a cute little table that I used to put all my junk on.
This was my new home, at least it was going to start feeling like one eventually — right? I showered and started making a small list in my head of all the stuff I needed to buy. Something I found very strange was that I didn’t see any markets or grocery stores around my neighborhood. In Beirut, you literally have 3 to 4 grocery stores on every street — in some streets, even more. However, I couldn’t find ANY around here.
This is when I contacted my friend who always has the solutions to my problems… I googled where I can buy groceries. Okay, so apparently in Munich there’s only a small number of supermarkets and they are all under the same brands: Lidl, Aldi, REWE, and Penny. This was very shocking to me. I never thought grocery stores needed to be monopolized. In any case, I found out that the closest to my flat was REWE.
After going to REWE, getting lost in aisles close to 600 times and never being sure if what I was buying was the right thing (Everything was in German. Who thought that Germany would have everything in German, right?) I bagged all my goodies and went to check out. The cashier said “Servus” which I didn’t recognize as a German word until I googled it. It turns out it’s how people say Hello in Bavaria. I paid cash since I didn’t have a bank account there yet and received a billion coins as change.
Okay, hear me out. I am used to only having two types of coins. When I got back 1 cent, 2 cent, 10 cent, 20 cent, 50 cent, 1 Euro, and 2 Euro coins, I found it a little ridiculous. The walk back home was 15 minutes long. I checked my receipt and discovered that I had paid something called Pfand? I had no idea what this was since I didn’t recall buying anything with that label.
After further investigation, it turns out that this is an amount of money charged for bottles that you get reimbursed after you return the bottles to the store. This was my first interaction with Germany’s recycling culture.
I liked the idea. I was always happy to recycle, but sadly in Lebanon, there weren’t many ways you could do that.
Finally, I’m back to my flat (not home — yet). I heard someone inside and guessed that my flatmate was back. I put the bag of groceries in the kitchen and knocked on his room’s door. He opened up and I saw a guy with dark long hair and a messy beard who was around10 cm shorter than me (I’m 184 cm for reference). He shook hands and introduced himself and so did I. We spent around 20 minutes chatting in his room. His room was twice the size of mine with a nice big couch. We discussed what we were doing in Munich. He had also just moved to Munich and knew even less German than me. He was doing a masters in Intellectual Property Law at a nearby university. Overall, very friendly guy; my worries were put to rest.
The day went by fast as I had arrived quite late. I called my parents something I rarely did back home, but that has now become a daily reoccurence in my life. I told them that everything went fine and that I was going to sleep since I was very tired.
The first night was horrifying. I was sleeping in a bed that I’d never slept in before, but that I would sleep in for the unforeseeable future. I was in an unfamiliar country, with an unfamiliar language, living with an unfamiliar person, and sleeping in an unfamiliar bed. I have never felt this lonely in my life. My stomach and heart felt out of sorts. If loneliness ever had a physical sensation, that was it. Eventually, fatigue took over and I got the one familiar thing I had left: Sleep.
Thank you so much for reading about my journey of moving to Germany :)
I shall keep writing new chapters as I continue my adventure here and potentially in the rest of Europe! I’m visiting the Netherlands this weekend and hopefully, I’ll write about this trip down the line.
If you’d like to read more from me, I would greatly appreciate it if you followed me Writer Thinker and More.
