Re: Logistical complications

OK, so I get to Munich, scoop up my bags, and race to the student affairs office so I can pick up the key to my dorm room. I was sternly reminded via numerous letters from Munich to heed the office hours. The office closes at 12:30pm, and I didn’t leave the airport till 11:40am. Made in plenty of time, thanks to a fantastically aggressive Bavarian cabdriver. More on that later, I promise.

I get to the office with 15 minutes to spare, drop my luggage, and stand in the line. My favorite part of the experience: there was a spacious lobby directly adjacent to the foyer in which I was standing (where I dropped my bags), with two or three comfortable-looking benches. Yet the line that had formed went from directly in front of the closed door of the office I needed to enter and back into the foyer. Absolutely no one thought to sit on the benches instead of stand with one’s face pressed against the damn door to the office. I felt like sitting, after awkwardly lugging on my bags around to the right building, in the rain, but I was afraid that these people wouldn’t respective fives, and I would lose my spot in line.

So I played cultural lemming.

But eventually I did get into the office, and spot with a charming Frau Brendel. She remembered e-mailing with me; I didn’t remember it, but asked her name, and it eventually came back to me. Great, she says. Herr Schäfer. OK. Starts flipping through a stack of students and their dorm assignments. Hm, wasn’t in that stack. Must be in this one! Nope.

You see where this is going.

They had no registration for me absolutely anywhere, although Ms. Brendel definitely remembers e-mailing me regarding the room. I have an e-mail (I just searched for it to be sure) in which she confirms receipt of my fax of the room reservation. Well, none of that matters, because I was supposed to live in the Lothstraße dorm, and it’s now 100% filled up. Every single room given out.

Have no fear, boy, she assures me. You won’t be out in the street.

Now I’m starting to fret about leaving my bags unattended in the foyer (the office was not nearly large enough to accommodate the berth of my larger pieces of pack). She says yes, go get them, but I knew there were scads of other betroubled students with their faces pressed up against that door, and there was no way I could plow through them and their part of the lobby, back into the foyer, and then carry all the bags back into the office by myself. Not gonna happen. But Ms. Brendel’s colleague comes out and they lament in excellent Bavarian dialect about how much this day must suck for me. “And it’s even raining,” they say. Yes, the rain. I care about the damn rain.

So what it came down to was that they gave me the key to a “guest room” in a dorm very near that building. I lugged my stuff up there in an elevator so tiny I had to sit on atop my big suitcase. It was awesome. I’ve taken a few brief snapshots of that room, but didn’t think to grab my camera cable out of my bags before heading out in search of internet and bank, so I can’t post any yet. They’ll come.

The place I’m in right now is only temporary, I’m told. A few students should move out of the Lothstraße place by the end of September, so hopefully on the 1st of October I could move in there. Kind Frau Brendel also looked up an alternative for me, which would be living in a house with five other students, two bathrooms, living room, and so on. If I can afford it, I think I’d like to do that! We’ll see how it goes, of course.