My Flat & Grünau (Part 1)

Hello hello! As promised, here is my post about my new home. 

I didn't get to choose where I lived when I applied to the university. All I could do was select some criteria from a list to show what sort of place I wanted. I can't remember exactly what I put, but I just said that I wanted somewhere fairly cheap in student halls, and to be living with Ash.

A couple of months later, we received an email to tell us where we'd be living. Both Ash and I would be living together in a two-person flat (2er WG) in the student halls on Mannheimer Straße, in Grünau. We're on the second floor, and Natasha Clancey is in a 2er WG upstairs.

Grünau is a suburb of Leipzig roughly 25 minutes on the tram west from the city centre, and is...fairly run down. I don't have any pictures (I'll try get that done for another post, My Flat & Grünau Part 2), but it was originally built as a council estate when Leipzig was in the former East Germany. Hm. So it's not particularly pretty. Below is a photo of the view from my window.

So you get the idea. The local amenities aren't too bad, though. There's a Lidl supermarket about 2 or 3 minutes away on foot, and over the other side of the estate there's a shopping centre, with supermarkets, cafés, electronics shops, a post office, a pharmacy, and much more. The nearest tram stop, Stuttgarter Allee, is right next to the Lidl, and trams are regular.

The downside to where I live (besides the fact that it's an East German council estate), is the fact that there are no bars or restaurants, so we have to go into the city centre for any sort of socialising. That said, there's a small student-run bar, Die Oase, actually within the student halls themselves. It's only open on Monday and Wednesday evenings, but the drinks are super cheap (€1-€2, and on Mondays all beers are €1 for a 500ml bottle), and it's a good opportunity to practice German and make some friends. They do occasional film nights as well, but I haven't gone to any of those yet.

Anyway, my flat. Other than my room it's pretty messy at the moment and needs a good tidy, so when that's been done I'll put some pictures in the second part of this post in a few days' time.

My room is quite small, maybe a bit bigger than the one I had in Japan but certainly smaller than anything I had in Leeds. That said, I'm not complaining when it's €160 (£135) per month. Ash's is bigger than mine and costs €185 a month (I think). I'll go into more detail about the rest of the flat when I upload pictures of it, but we get a kitchen/dining room and a bathroom, besides the two bedrooms. We were annoyed with a lot of things upon moving in (as with too many aspects of this university), but again, I shall go into that in the second part of this post.

My walls are pretty bare as you can see, but I don't really see much point in spending a load of money on decorations as I'm only here for another two and a half months. Despite the bare walls, it feels homely enough! 

In that €160 per month, all of the utilities are covered, including internet. Ah, the internet. I was really happy when I finally got it set up (the set up instructions were so convoluted and the procedure so pointlessly complicated, not to mention the fact that there weren't any instructions for Macs, that I think you needed to be a computer hacker to do it). The internet speeds were very fast, and there was no downtime every two hours like in my room in Japan. BUT it turns out that you're only given 40GB of usage per month. If you go over that limit, they cut your speed to 256kbps, meaning that you can barely do anything online, and certainly not watch videos. 40GB sounds like a lot, but if you think that a film streamed online is roughly 600mb-1GB, and you're doing things like watching stuff on YouTube and Skyping as well, 40GB can go really quickly.

Anyway, I'm happy enough here. The important thing is that I feel settled and it's a nice place to come back to after class or whatever. It's the first time I've had my own flat, so it's a good few months of practice before I move into a flat with Ash for my fourth and final year in Leeds.

That's all I really have to say! Check my blog over the next few days as I'll be doing a post a day (as I said yesterday). Tomorrow I'll be writing about Leipzig itself, and then about Erasmus and the university on the following days. At some point next week I'll do part two of this post, as well. Anyway, as always I shall put links on Twitter as and when I write each post. 

See you soon!

James