Intro to Oldenburg...

Tuesday brought its own set of challenges, like learning how to use the bus system. My dorm is several miles from the university's main campus, so the students I'd met on Monday night suggested that I take the bus to campus and meet with the Studentenwerks [campus administration] personnel to take care of paperwork, payments, etc. Marcelo had drawn me a map and did a good job of explaining which busses to take, but the bus system was still a little confusing at first. When I found my way to the Studentenwerks office (at around 11am), I stuck my head into one of the offices and asked one lady if she speaks English. "No", she replied in English. "Wo ist Ninas buro?" [Where is Nina's office?] I asked. Then she rattled off something in German. I understood "14:00", so I figured she wouldn't arrive at the office until 2pm.

I decided to have lunch at the Mensa [campus cafeteria]. It's a very different set-up than in U.S. campus cafeterias. There are three different meal routes -- each marked on the floor with dots of a particular color. Each lunch choice has its own theme (and price). One is the main (cheap) food option-of-the-day (€1.80 / $2.40); another's a vegetarian meal (€2 / $3); and the third is an a la carte line with two or three food choices. I did the a la carte line and took rice with tomato-cabbage-meat sauce. I also got a small bowl of sliced cucumber and a small bowl of yogurt with fruit and cereal mixed in (cost: €3 / $4.20). There are no "meal plans", where you pay for a certain number of meals before the semester starts and slide a card through a reader to deduct a meal each time. Instead, everyone just pays for each meal individually. Mensa's are only open at lunchtime, so it looks like I'll still need to cook a little in evenings (or else eat my dinners at restaurants and Turkish food shacks).

At 2pm, I met with Nina;J... and found her to be different than I expected. Based on my correspondence with her, I'd expected a ditzy, shy, 18-year-old, fairly clueless girl. I'm not sure of her age, but she seems very competent, in person. I think one of the reasons her communications were so late is that she's a student and only works at the Studentenwerks office one afternoon per week (and is overworked, as the only English speaker in the office). Nina speaks English perfectly -- like a native speaker -- but with a slight Kiwi accent (she spent a year during high school living in New Zealand). She was genuine and helpful, and I got campus maps and other useful info from her.

Then I decided to buy some necessities in town. I had slept, fully clothed, on a bare mattress (with a pile of clothes for a pillow) on Monday night, so sheets, a pillow, and a blanket were high priorities. I also needed clothes hangers. I enjoyed wandering around the town just looking at the shops and available goods, trying to get a sense of the town. It seems to have quite a busy, bustling downtown area.

Although I want to improve my German while I'm here, I'm still getting acclimated, so I was hoping to sort of "ease" into speaking German. But as I walked around to the various shops, very few shopkeepers and sales clerks were able (or willing) to speak English. So much for easing in! I'd gotten used to Stockholm where every single person I spoke to responded very confidently to my questions in English. I'd forgotten how exhausting it is to be a language novice in a foreign land where English isn't spoken much. It requires so much focused concentration to gather the right words in roughly the right order so that I’m understood. And then it’s even harder, I think, to decipher the German response, which is frequently spouted off quickly and with a different accent than I’m used to hearing. I returned to my dorm room around 7pm.

My missions for the evening: get internet set up and get a good night of sleep (on my new sheets and pillow). In order to use internet in the dorm, I needed to find a particular resident named Hanjo (pronounced "Hahn-yo"). After filling out a request form, Hanjo installed the internet connection onto my laptop. Hanjo speaks English very well and is a nice guy, so I also took the opportunity to ask him several other questions: Where's my roommate? (He hasn't been here since I arrived). Where do I throw out trash and recycling? What restaurants and stores are within walking distance of the dorm? He said he doesn't know my roommate well, but he knows that he's a black guy. He also answered my other questions.

At Hanjo’s suggestion, I went downstairs to a bar in the dorm basement that opens every Tuesday night (and for special occasions). Even though all of Hanjo's friends were speaking (very quickly) in German with him and each other, he carefully made certain that I knew what was going on by translating into English for me periodically. Hanjo’s a nice fellow.

Then at around midnight, I noticed a black guy standing next to me at the bar. I asked Hanjo if this was my long lost roommate. He said it was not, but he introduced me to him and said that this man, Alinda, knows my roommate well. I began talking to Alinda (in English) and learned that he's from Cameroon... and so is my roommate, Lionel! Small world, eh? My roommate is apparently on vacation in Yaoundé (Cameroon's capital city) right now. It was a little like finding a long lost brother (and the promise of meeting another, who will be my roommate). As often happened in my Cameroonian Peace Corps days, Alinda started buying me beers. I was already on my fourth when I met him, and he bought me a fifth and sixth. This was a very nice gesture, but we didn't leave the bar until 3:15am when the bartenders (gently and kindly) threw us out. We continued talking in the hallway about Cameroon and Cameroonians until 4am. I've been slowly catching a cold over the past few days, so I really shouldn't have had more than one beer and should've gone to bed "early" (12 or 1)... but it was just too nice to have some interesting conversation in this new land with Hanjo and his friends at first and then with Alinda later -- especially after a somewhat rough day trying to negotiate the downtown district and shopping with a city full of people who couldn't speak my language. But today, as a result of my early-morning carousing, my cold has worsened, and I have a bit of a hangover. Ah-well... thankfully, I've got two weeks before classes start.