Trip Preparation

In order to get ready to leave for this job, there were a few things that I first had to do:

a) Get a plane/other travel tickets
b) Find Lydia and I a place to live
c) Help Lydia find a job in Bonn

a)
Of those three things, getting my travel tickets was by faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the easiest. When students needs to get tickets for a trip, the first thing they should do is check the Internet. Not only is the Internet your best bet for finding the cheapest tickets, but it also helps price things out (and with plane tickets, you really, really need to price things out.... for my trip, I found a price range of $300 after tax for a one-way economy class ticket to around $5000 for the same ticket). The winning ticket for me was found at the Air Transat site, which gives very cheap flights from Canada to Europe. The only catch is that the flights are budget, so there is little leg room, and you have to pay for any alcoholic drinks that you get, but when you're saving thousands of dollars, that doesn't really make a lick of difference. Here's a link to the AIR TRANSAT site, for any future travelers out there. I would also recommends going into Travel Cuts inside the Student Union building so that they can check with their resources to see if they can get you any deals. I am planning on doing a bit of extra traveling while I'm out here, so they were very helpful in arranging all of my extra little journeys (i.e. getting a Euro-rail pass), and with getting things like traveler's insurance.

b)
Finding a place to live ended up being a struggle. There were right away no shortage of web sites to look for accommodation in Bonn:

• http://www.e-rent.de/GEFSmrl.asp?Language=En&Stadt=Bonn

• http://www.zwischenmiete.de/

• http://www.mitwohnagentur-bonn.de/

etc.

And the prices were great (i.e. the average cost for a furnished, 1 bedroom apartment was around 350€ a month (equal to about $500 Canadian), it was simply getting a place that was difficult. It wasn't until the day before I flew to Germany (close to 3 months of searching) before I finally managed to secure an apartment (or so I thought it was secured). There were many reasons why it was difficult, but just to name a few:

• All but the first rental sites were in German, meaning I had to use the online translator Babelfish to translate the web sites. Babelfish is a very useful tool. It allows you to translate entire pages, then (attempt to) navigate through them as it translates, or you can use it for simple word to word translations in about a billion different languages; however, the tool is far from perfect, so I had tonnes of fun with that.

• Once I managed to find a place that I liked, I had to contact the people, which was a problem, because I don't speak German, and from what I have found so far in Germany, not too many people here speak English (compaired with what I have seen in other non-English speaking countries). Because of this, I would again have to use Babelfish to translate, this time my English apartment request into German. If anyone has ever used an internet translator before, they know the funny results that one can get through the translations, so when I thought that I was asking the landlord for an apartment, I could have really been asking for a frog for my curtains for all I know. After a while, I gave up on sending email requests due to my feeble response rate of around 60 emails sent and 6 emails returned. Instead, I asked to use the phone of the co-op office for my German calls (since calling Germany repetitively isn't too nice on the student budget), and luckily, they agreed. After I started using the phone, I started to find some German landlords who spoke English, and who had apartments that I wanted. This brings me to my next issue in finding an apartment:

• Germans have #*$@-loads of ways to reject you for an apartment! Here are just some of my favorites.....You are not allowed to stay here because: You have a girlfriend, You don't speak German (even though that person was speaking English, and I told him that I had someone to speak German on my behalf), You aren't staying long enough, You are staying too long, You are not currently in Germany (even though I would be there at the time the apartment was available, and I was willing to send a deposit in the mail)........but the winner is.............You aren't a young catholic male (I've got young and male down, and I probably could have faked being catholic, but that's just a weird criteria for an apartment).

As I said before, I managed to finally find an apartment for Lydia and I on the day before I got on the plane to Germany. I talked to the landlord on the phone, and he guaranteed that he would have a lovely, furnished, private, 1 bedroom apartment waiting for me in Bonn. Unfortunately, around 24 hours later, when I met with him in his house in Bonn, he discussed with me how in that 24 hours, he had given the apartment to someone else..... #$(@ Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), he had a room at his house where Lydia and I could stay for the time being. The problem with that is that he was a very shady looking character, who lived in a very shady house, with a lot of shady looking people, who included Jakob (a man who violently screams in German while he sleeps), Gerhard (who looked like Albert Einstein on drugs), Yetta (who was really the only nice one of the group, but she had a bit of a temper), Nick (a former roadi for Queen, which was awsome, but he liked to wander around in pajamas a lot, and he was quite weired, and Mustafa (a fishmonger who tried to rent out his shack next door for around ten times its value). With no other option, Lydia and I took the room, just so we had a place to stay for the time being. It turned out that they weren't all that bad, but the room was about the size of a double bed, and the house only had one washroom, with a shower/bath that had no curtain, so it was still far from ideal for us, but we did manage to get a new, far better place after we got back from our Europe trip (which I'll discuss in a different section).





- The view from our first apartment's driveway (there was a massive PNE type fair going on when we got there, which went on for the first week. It was fun at first, but falling asleep to the sound of screams gets old fast)












- The Shire (our first apartment here)
*Notice the lack of ROOM in the room











c) Getting Lydia a job was at first going to be a major issue, what with her not speaking German as well, and us only being in Bonn for around 3 months, but it ended up not being all that bad. During my first day at Empirica, Lydia went around Bonn with her resume while I worked. As it turns out, she didn't even have to go around, because the people at Empirica were kind enough to offer her some short term work to participate in while we're here.