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 

私の東京にある部屋

Have a look round my room :)

In other news, I've just finished packing up everything ready to come back to the UK! Tomorrow at 5am I'll get up, before going to Narita and flying home...so my next blog post will be from England!! It doesn't feel real that tomorrow evening I'll be back in my house..! Looking forward :)

James

My 20th Birthday in Japan

Yesterday was my 20th birthday! It's quite an important age in Japan; basically the equivalent of the UK's 18.  It was strange to come over in August and revert back to legally being a child, but now I've caught up again!  20's also the legal drinking age in Japan, but as a foreigner I never get asked for ID so not a lot will change there...

To celebrate, a group of friends and I went out to Kichijoji.  We started off at the Hub British Pub to catch the end of Happy Hour there, which is 5-7.  We ended up arriving at about 6:45, so ordered about 6 drinks to each of us whilst they were still cheap!  The Japan vs Tajikstan match was on the TVs, and the pub was full of lairy supporters, which did give it a good atmosphere!  Although I don't see how the Japanese can be so into football when their national team is so RUBBISH.  Anyway, we stayed there until about 8, when our drinks ran out.

By 8 o'clock we were all getting pretty hungry, so we went to an izakaya for some grub and more drinks.  We had a whole room to ourselves, with a big, long table for us all to sit round.  The table was traditionally low to the floor, and we sat on tatami mats.  The horrifying realisation that I would have to sit cross legged and lose all feeling in the lower half of my body hit me just before I noticed that there was space underneath the table to put your legs, just like a normal chair - phew!

The food and drinks kept coming throughout.  Without realising it, I ate whale and horse.  Hmm.  The whale (in sashimi form) was extremely fishy; not too sure if I liked it.  The horse was also in sashimi form; raw, with soy sauce to dip in.  Unfortunately all I could taste was the bed of sliced onions it was sat on, but I guess the texture was nice!  Just like a (very) rare steak!  There was plenty of other gorgeous food; I think I may have eaten my own body weight in gyoza. Mmmmm yummy.

The original plan for after the izakaya was to go on to a bar somewhere and have some more drinks, but we ended up staying for hours, and getting very drunk, and also people started having to get off home, so we called it a night!  Naturally, we had the usual encounter with drunk Japanese people on the way to the station, including two who liked to tell me I was very cool.

People were kind enough to pay for me, so it was certainly the cheapest night out in Tokyo I've had yet!  I should have birthdays more often!  Thank you everyone :) The TUFS lot also got me a couple of presents!  Certainly wasn't expecting that!  They got me some chocolate called Horn (no jokes, please, Kieran's already made them all), and a book!  I gave them to Max to put in his bag as I didn't have one with me, but he then disappeared into the night after popping to buy some fags in between Hub and the izakaya and wasn't to be seen again.  I guess I'll get them back off him on Monday at ICU then!

I've also been getting some birthday post at home!  So far I've got cards from my grandparents and parents, and a fair few other people have stuff en-route to me, and some relatives have put money in my account, too :) with the card, my parents sent me these amaaazing slouchy pants that Mum and Ayu picked out for me :) I love them so much - I really wanted some nice slouchies and these are just the sort of things I was after!  They're warm and soft and mmmm :)

Sally was also sweet enough to leave me a little birthday surprise!  I opened my bedroom door on Friday morning to go brush my teeth, and there was little bag waiting outside with a beer and a handmade card inside!  That was a nice start to my birthday morning :)  I put the card along side the other ones I've received so far, and had the beer before meeting everyone in Kichijoji that evening!

I love the 3D meerkat card from Mum & Dad hehe

Thus concludes my birthday!  It was a very fun day :) although, I did have exams in the morning...I'll make a proper exam post when I've finished them all next week, though.  It's a very strange feeling not to be a teenager any more! I really don't feel like a twenty-something :s

James