Soooooo where was I? Ah yes, Saturday morning. The kindly teacher drove me all the way to Trier to move into my new WG. When I arrived everyone treated me like a guest and were very friendly; we sat in the sun in the garden, went out for food with some friends and got ready for the Abschieds Party (leaving party to you and I) as two of the girls (one of whom is the owner of the room I'm borrowing for a year) are leaving to go on their own year abroad. Später came the actual party, which was a mish mash of course mates and friends of one of the girls, as she comes from nearby. Mindful of my need to make friends and the fact that here was a room full of nice people I ignored my strong urges to give into the almighty fatigue from head to toe and spent the next 4 hours introducing myself to pretty much everyone and having several good conversations (with a few awkward ones mixed in but hey ho.) Finally around midnight (after being reassured that it was not "unbehöflich" -rude- to go to bed early) I gave in and slept like a baby despite the party apparently going on to 4am.
The next day the girl whos room I'm borrowing left and I moved into my new room, its lush!
Like seriously if I were to describe my ideal bedroom it would the eerily close to this one. Its also at least twice the size of my dinky uni room and a good £50 cheaper a month haha. The welsh flag is now on the wall and pictures of my friends and family put up so I feel very content in my room.
Then the reality started to hit me. I discovered that most of the students (including some of my flatmates) wouldn't be back til mid October, when uni starts. Meaning there's no one really around to speak to, and being a person who finds her own company rather boring this wasn't so good! But still, I had a lot to do so things were fine, and Monday morning I hit über organisation skills and managed to register at the Bürgersamt, Auslandsamt (partly anyway), open a bankkonto and buy food. Oh I'd also met the Trier language assistants the night before which was nice.
Sadly, I managed to do this by 10.30 am and suddenly had a long day and a long week ahead of me with no social activities scheduled and no one around to talk to. Loneliness set in. Ok, so in our many, many, year abroad pep talks at uni they said it was natural to feel lonely at first, but it still was pretty depressing and racking my brains for something to do to meet I came up a bit blank. My flatmate was around a bit, then went off to work.
If you know me well you'll know I'm very sociable, so this was bad times. Worse was seeing all the Saarbrücken lot arranging meet ups or nights out at very short notice. Some of you may have gathered that I don't actually live in Saarland, because unfortunately my school is right on the border in the north, and a good hour's train ride from Saarbrücken. So being faced with 3 choices: live in one of the small towns near the school, live in Saarbrücken or live in Trier (about a 30 min train ride away in Rhineland-Pfalz) I chose the latter, so I could still have student flatmates and a social life etc.
All fine, but obviously the students aren't here yet, and Saarbrucken is now a good hour and a half train ride away, meaning I watched like a sad little thing while all the Saarlanders met up every afternoon after school.
Ending on a couple of good notes though:
a) I noticed there were people on the other side of the hedge of the shared garden, so eventually worked up the courage to wander over and say hello. To my relief they were very friendly and didn't laugh when I said I was a bit lonely and said I could come over whenever and hang with them.
b) Being a British person who speaks German has some massive advantages. Mainly that when necessary I can pretend not to understand even when I have, which came in particularly handy yesterday when the young guy opening my bank account started flirting with me in a pretty creepy manner. Pity I had to give him my address and phone number to open the bank account, mind.
c) Tomorrow I have a day off, so I'm staying at Katie's in the evening (as she only lives a few towns away from my school), then Friday morning we head off to school (which for me is just a teacher training day so no actual teaching) and then after school head to Saarbrücken to meet up with the others. On Saturday we are rather randomly going to watch the Saarland football team play then hitting the town after, should be fun :)
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