Finding a Place to Live

Finding a place to live while you're living in a different country is interesting. I applied with the Studentenwerk to get student housing, but I still haven't heard from them. My second plan was to respond to ads on WG-gesucht.de, which is a roommate search website. I found a lot of nice places and responded to a lot of ads. It's kinda scary to e-mail a stranger in your second language and try to sound like a nice, sane individual. Further difficulty comes from the website warning users against communicating with scammers who are pretending to be foreign. The first few responses I got were from people who had already found their roommate. I finally got a request for more information from a girl who was looking to sublet her 1 bedroom apartment for a year. (I also ended up getting 3 or 4 more positive responses, but this was after I had already found a place.)

Okay, so I found a place to live. The next (and most terrifying) step was to wire my deposit to Germany, which required me to have faith that this person was not a scammer and will actually be subletting her apartment to me. The bank teller who helped me wire this money had never sent money abroad before, which increased my nervousness, but I found out yesterday that the wire was successful. Hopefully everything else will work out - I'm pretty sure the worst part will be getting registered once I arrive in Germany.

The only bad thing that I can see about this apartment is that it is a bit of a ride on the tram from both the Uni and my school, but I figure that the price and situation (furnished! near an aldi!) make up for it and I think I'm going to have some down time while I'm living there; a bit of a commute never hurt anyone!

I also got my official acceptance letter from the Universitaet Erfurt last week. It sounds pretty straight-forward; classes don't start until mid-October, so I have time to get acclimated before choosing a course to take.

I'm counting down days until I leave - I can almost taste the RitterSport now!