Post Titled: work. (or lack thereof)
I called Robert, a boyfriend of a friend of an employer of Nadine to ask him how he'd kept afloat legally in Berlin for so long. Turns out he was working at the time but asked me to call him later in the evening to talk. Instead he calls me back saying "Uh, you have some time to work tonight" "Oh, hell yea" and I met him to go to a super-richie-posh health spa and fitness club and change the lighting scheme in a room the'd recently renovated. This was a bit tricky due to the flat translucent installations on the ceiling- but after a few hours we'd finished, returned to the Werkstatt to drop off the bulbs, ladder, van adn went out to the resteraunt he works. When it closed we went to the smalleset bar Iäve ever been to, appropriately called MINIBAR, the place wasn't much bigger than our kitchen. We talked until 3am basically... I'm not sure if I can do the conversation justice, but he was very honest: "You gotta learn German, REALLY learn it so that it is perfect, because this town if full of stupid f***ing Americans and Australians and Brits who show up here and just float along´, never learning the language or talking part in the culture in a real way-" (he is allowed to say this because his German is basically flawless, just a trace of an accent but thatäs it, he speaks it like any other 26-year-old german guy) All the while Iäm having flashbacks of my teenage years here, when there were people who did and people who did not speak German,... this is all much to long and complicated to blog about...
which brings me to the fact that he didn't know what a blog was... or craigslist... which is something I've encountered more than once here...
ok, gotta get outta here adn try to insulate the front door a bit more... it's chilly and the wind just moves right through the gaps... canät wait to see if we get a place which needs to be, well, finished... a lot of apartments here are rented unfinished... Altbau... like, no bathroom or kitchen... nuts.