It's been a year and a half since I moved to Germany, and an unbeleivable amount of things have happened. It's like living here has created accelerated maturation. This point in my stay here is especially important because it's two weeks before I move back to the States. I decided long ago that I hate my job here. It's a toxic, dysfunctional environment that's making me depressed. For a long time, all I would do here in Germany was work, go home, sleep, wake up, work. Of course I would go on trips once or twice a month, but the 90% of my life that I hated far outweighed the 10% of why I was here. I go through stages of optimism followed by pessimism and back again.
About my apartment and landlord: We live in an excellent location; a five minute drive from base right in the center of our town Landstuhl. We live a two minutes walk away from our favorite bar, the Red Lion, and live up a "two way" street that ends in a hike to the town castle. Rent is pretty cheap, only 340 euro a month per person. (Sidenote: It's only cheap when you have all rooms occupied...) Also, in the past year Ariel, Sarah, and I shared a $400 car, so while we drove each other nuts, it kept costs to a minimum. The only problem we have is with the landlord and our neighbors. There is a couple that lives above us, and I think the wife is deranged. She hates us, too. She throws water from her ask tray onto our car parked in the driveway. She won't stop feeding our indoor/outdoor cat Mogli alone and lets him into the hallway where he has no where to go to the bathroom. Of course she gets mad at us afterwards when she finds cat poop on her doorstep.
Our other neighbor CJ is a half African American, half German guy with a dysfunctional relationship with a crazy German lady. We've called hte cops on them once because it sounded like he was murdering her in the middle of the night.
The only problem we have with our landlord is he doesn't speak English. Well, he can speak at a two-year-old level, which isn't proficient enough for situations like ending our rental contract, moving out, giving us our deposit, and understanding that we found new people to take our place. So, for every interaction we have with him we have to go to the American housing office, sit in the waiting room for about 30 minutes, and have a representative call him and translate. It's a really big headache, not including that ending our rental contract resulted in multiple bills we had to pay including our end of year heating bill, which cost a whopping 600 euro.
Another thing that popped up was an unexpected letter stating in German that someone in our house had been illegally downloading music, and the music company wanted us to settle for 1200 euro. At first I didn't know what it was; I thought it was junk mail at first, so didn't deal with it. After getting the second letter from the same company, I took it to Chili's for translation. Our Polish busser Jakob told us the story and when I asked him what would happen if I ignored it, he said, "You could go to jail." I had a great night at work after that.
After freaking out, I went to the free lawyers on base for their advice. I told one of the guys the situation, and he started telling me about how I was going to pay it and the whole process. I asked him how I was going to do it while in the US and he said, "You're moving out of the country? Well then just ignore it!"
And I did. We will see what happens if I ever try to get back into the country. I'm sure German jails are comfy.
