Arriving in Mannheim

On July 31, 2012 I embarked on my Journey from my home in Boston, Massachusetts to Mannheim Germany.  During the next 5 months I will be living and studying in Germany.  So far the experience has been amazing, and I am excited to see where my journeys will take me.

The first 40 or so hours of my trip were not particularly pleasant, however.  While my flight was relatively easy the change in time zones resulted in me more or less missing a night of sleep.  I left Boston around 6:30 in the evening on Tuesday July 31 and then flew to Dublin Ireland before continuing onto Frankfurt, Germany.  I arrived in Ireland around midnight in the Boston area, but it was five in the morning in Dublin, and after waiting a few hours I flew to Frankfurt, where my plane touched down at around 10:20 on Wednesday morning.  After collecting my luggage I was able to navigate my way through the Frankfurt airport and purchase a ticket for a high speed train to Mannheim.  This is where things began to get interesting as I had no taken any German language courses prior to my arrival in Germany.  This made me all the more proud of myself when I arrived in Mannheim without too many issues.

At this point however I had to make my way with my luggage to my new Apartment.  I expected navigating the city of Mannheim to be a relatively easy process because the city itself is set up like a grid (which is rare for a European city), but that does not mean I didn't run into problems.  My apartment was located on block G7, but after having little success making sense of the tram map I was beginning to feel less confident about finding my apartment.  While trying to make sense of a map I met a kid from Ireland who had actually been on my flight as well.  He also didn't speak German, and eventually a German man helped us buy tickets and told us which tram routes we needed to follow to get to our apartments.

When I got off the tram at my stop I began searching for my apartment with little success.  The Man who had told be where to get off had explained where I needed to go, but he spoke little English and I found it difficult to understand him.  While I understood that that the grid is set up with increasing letters in the alphabet for vertical streets and numbers for horizontal streets, I had not understood that the letters for the left half of the grid were A through K while the right half was L through Z.  The Tram stop I got off at was at in the right side of the grid I began working my towards where I thought G would be only to realize the lettering system of the grid about an hour later.

Once I finally arrived at G7 I began searching for my apartment complex.  I wasn't expecting it to be too difficult to find because its a fairly distinct looking orange and gray building, but I could not remember if my room was in building 26 or 28.  Once I found the entrance I searched for a way of contacting my Hausmeister (landlord) about getting into my room.  I had miss understood the instruction as I was expecting him to be there upon my arrival.  When I realized I had to call him I was not sure what I was going to do because I did not have a German cell phone yet, and my American cell phone was proving to be frustratingly useless (and at that point I would have paid any amount of roaming charges just to make a little forward progress).  Luckily for me a student who lived in the building pulled up in his car and after I explained to him my situation, he called the hausmeister for me.  About 10 minutes later he arrived with my key and let me into my apartment   Once he left I promptly took a shower and began to get settled in.

After that I went out into the city on my own and began exploring and familiarizing myself with the area.  I was also determined to find something to eat as it had been quite a while since I had eaten (shelter took priority).  I found a small Donner shop and ordered the traditional Mannheim food (its kind of similar to a Gyro) using as little English as possible.  Eventually I made my way back to my apartment and settled in for the evening.  After the incredibly long day, I had a lot to think about.  There was no doubt that I was overwhelmed with all that I had experienced, and I was beginning to wonder if I had made a huge mistake.  After all, I was about to spend the next 5 months in a Country where I didn't speak the language.  Besides that and ocean separated me from nearly everything I new in life, but I tried my best to reserve my judgement.