The hausmeister who knew too much

Although my parents were the ones who said being in a country in which you don’t know the language is very difficult, and although I didn’t really believe them, they were absolutely right.  From checking out in a grocery store while the little old man that rings me up mumbles happily to himself, to nearly breaking my new phone out of frustration (turns out I was supposed to press “*” for a long time, not press every key while slamming it against my bed), not knowing German in Berlin successfully pushes me out of many loops.  In addition to these two incidences, quite a special one occurred yesterday.  While in my room, feeling bad for myself and deciding if I could be brave enough to take a bus downtown by myself, the landlord (or hausmeister) bursts into my room along with who I later understood to be an electrician.  He immediately started talking to me in fast paced German (not that it would matter if he was talking in slow paced German), and I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to tell me.  I eventually figured out from his exclamation of “kaput!!” and pointing to a socket, that something was terribly wrong with the electricity.  However, during this visit, he also discovered that I had proven myself to be a dreadful bed maker.  It was not a difficult discovery to make.  I was using the blanket cover as a sheet, which was too short for my bed, and not using anything for a blanket cover or pillow cover.  In my defense, none of the bedding had any kind of shape, leading me to believe that they were of use to no one.  The hausmeister sorted out this misconception, and I felt like I was finally making strides in my growing experience. 

Today at the supermarket I bought some mandel spaß, which is a cookie with some kind of nut/jam combination on top.  They happen to be delicious. Today was also the first day we ate at the mensa, or the dining hall for the Freie Universitat, which definitely trumps Brower cuisine in basically every category.  Everything was fresh, there was tons of variety, and my meal came out to be about 5 euros.  After the mensa, I walked around a small but nice park with a friend where we discovered a cute little playground that left some 20 year olds from our program incredibly enthused.  After getting lost in some other part of Berlin (I still don’t know exactly where we were) I was able to get us on the right train and bus to go home, while my friend was a quite lost in the whole directions department.  It made me feel like I wasn’t a completely hopeless traveler, and even though I didn’t know which ausgang to take to get out of the train station and ended up in some kind of bus depot for a while, we eventually made it back home to Celsiusstraße and bought a variety of foods from the supermarket in hopes of producing some semblance of a meal.

All in all, parents sister boyfriend weren’t completely lying when they repeatedly told me things would get better, for now I have some mandel spaß and a persimmon, in addition to now knowing that you should not continually try to use a strange public restroom if it doesn’t seem to be working, because two angry men might walk out together and curse you out in German… good think it sounded like gobbledygook to me.