being a functioning adult in germany
Today was my first day of being a functioning adult in Germany. Meaning: today is the first day I used the stove to make myself dinner.1
There's a reason it took this long! I first got here 5 days ago, and moved into one of the bungalows in the Olympic village. It sounds glamorous (and the Olympic village is very glamorous) but the buildings themselves are concrete cubes. The program provided us with 1 roll of toilet paper, a sleeping bag, pillow, 2 plastic cups, a set of disposable silverware, and a minimum-cost package of soup. When I first got here, I had been traveling for almost 24 hours including the drive to the airport and taking the subway from the airport to the village, and was operating on 4.5 hours of sleep. I did manage to buy towels, a garbage can, and the bare-minimum essentials I needed to get through a single day before going to sleep that night.
You don't realize how many items count as 'household essentials' until you're trying to operate without them. A steak knife! A pair of scissors! Trying to remove tags from purchased items without a pair of scissors is really frustrating, and having to do that 10 times for all the dishtowels/rags/whatever you just bought is terrible. Also, it's so easy to just forget household items that fade into the background, like cutting boards. Before today, I didn't have plates or cutting boards, and I had been eating almost nothing but sandwiches off of paper towels for four days. :((( I was buying groceries—I do actively seek out vegetables, and I get this weird headache if I eat too much bread and nothing else—but collecting the items needed to actually prepare them was slow. Frying pans! Cooking oil! A spatula! The cutting board is what I'm most relieved to finally have. No more worrying about injuring myself trying to carefully slice some bread that I can't set down.
It can be lonely shopping in Germany. The cashier might not say hello to you, and they'll ring up your stuff and move it to the other side as quickly as possible, moving on to the next customer the second you've paid. You have to bag all your items yourself, and if you haven't cleared all your stuff out when the cashier has moved on to the next customer, their stuff will get mixed in with your stuff and it's up to you to remember what you bought. I'm okay with bagging things myself, but it makes me feel so invisible when I'm still putting my stuff away while other people's purchases get added to the pile. I don't move that fast...
Every time I go shopping, I have to cap myself to what I can carry, which is why it's taken so long to fill my apartment with what it needs. Today it was really warm out, so I took the scenic walk to the store (also because I'm low on euros and wanted to skip the U-bahn day pass.) Walking back, I had to stop and take a break from carrying everything, and I saw a calico cat emerge from the bushes. I've seen her before, she lives in the neighborhood and goes where she pleases. She sidled up to me, clearly wanting some affection, and even climbed up into my lap to sit on the cushion I had just bought :D I feel so incredibly lucky to have been chosen by this cat. She let me pet her for almost half an hour before she heard some birds twittering, and disappeared again to begin the hunt.
She started purring when I scratched behind her ears :)
Today's functioning adult dinner - Rindfleisch in a marinade from the grocery store (they had a sale) with chopped-up carrots and mushrooms. I ate all of it and it was great.↩