Ok so I'll have a quick re-cap so the whole blog isn't entirely out of context...
I've been in Berlin for 10 or so months. I moved out here the September after graduation. If I'm honest I'm not sure if I would have had the balls to do it had I not told everyone my plans at university. Come September I really had no choice, and, thank God for that, I needed the push.
So I came here with no plans and a little money. Easy, thought I, I can just go live in a hostel until I find a house, and, being the charming articulate person I am I'll probably find a job in the hostel whilst I'm there. This was a foolish decision and one which left me homeless for 3 weeks, jobless for a further 2 and completely broke for nigh on a year!
Turns out people want hostel jobs. Who knew? Also turned out that people in Germany are much more fluent in German than I am...as in...the Germans are more fluent than I am. So there I was, after not having learnt German for 3 years, fumbling around for what few words I could recall. I quickly realised I was out of my depth applying for reception based jobs straight off. Luckily the hostel had a bar where I could meet people and quickly forgot about this. Mistake one! This meant I was eating up my money and oversleeping
when I should have been looking for a flat. 2 and a bit weeks later, lesson one was well and truly learned. I moved into another hostel in the south of Germany (Neukoelln if you're interested - yes the place where they caught the Canadian killer), this one had no bar and free coffee. Sorted. Except now I was sharing a hostel with lots of interesting people who weren't travelling en masse with those huge Australian travel buses (contiki tours or something I think). So I spent the third week of Berlin nosing around a few abandoned places with some other like minded tourists (an old radar/spy station and a theme park), also fun but - again - not that productive. I had a few house interviews but these were all immensely over subscribed: picture turning up to a flat share interview with 15 other people looking at the same room. Mistake two, finding a house early on would have saved me yet more cash, moving to Berlin when the university semester was starting was foolish - I should have gone either in June or July, or waited until mid October. Lesson learned.
I was lucky though, at one house interview it was just myself and another guy who I recognised from the Starbucks when I was living near Mitte - he was clearly looking for a flat too and we'd both been shamelessly rinsing the free wi-fi. We spoke to the people, they seemed nice enough. I don't blame them for not choosing me, I had had no job at that time and no prospect of getting one in the near future. But, luckily for me, the French guy didn't get the house either. Upon leaving and having exchanged phone numbers with him I thought that was it; pleasantries etc. However I had a phone call a week later, it was the same guy and he'd found a house for us. It was furnished and fairly reasonably priced - think 310€ including bills per month per person. More expensive than lots of places (especially seeing as I would be living in gentrified Prenzlauerberg), but for what we got I think it was fair.
Brilliant! Now for the job. It took a few weeks but I finally found an opportunity in an Irish bar around the corner. I'd walked in with a big smile on my face, narrowly missing Zolltar the automatic fortune teller, as my eyes adjusted to the relative gloom. "Welcome to a wealth of wisdom!" he bellowed; I cringed instinctively at the tourist feel.
Half striding half limping, I'd banged my knee on a table, distracted by the fortune puppet, I approached the bar. An ill looking man with long greying hair was stood there observing me in silence. "I was wondering about jobs" I asked in (what i thought) was fairly proficient German. "Experience?" he barked. I was going to have to try my luck, "not yet" I smiled. It worked, I was to come back next week for a trial shift.
Cash in hand jobby, no job security, and a constant feeling of unease around the bosses. Every shift threatened to be my last, if it was too busy or if one of the other employees wasn't feeling too energetic the burden fell on me as the new boy. This would have been fine had i have had experience...but I didn't and I wasn't the best waiter/drinks bitch! My tips weren't too bad and it was good enough cash-wise...when I got the shifts that is - some weeks I'd have none, others I'd have 4 - but it just wasn't for me. I'd talk too much; rush too little.
It was never going to work out, but it did for 3 months and bought me a bit more time to pansy around here. Went home for Christmas only to come a few weeks later with the boss in an awful mood. Did the shift, was told to come back the next day. Returned to a similar mood, apparently I had got worse since being back in the UK. This was possibly true. I'd spoken no German for 2 weeks and then was coming back and expecting to pick it all up again. But, in reality, I suspected they would have rather have had someone who'd had prior experience. This had arrived in the form of a strange (but not entirely unpleasant) village boy who'd moved to Berlin a few months earlier and who walked into the pub the week before I'd gone back to England. He kept budgies and had done an apprenticeship in a restaurant at his (very German) village.
Either way, the boss resumed giving me shit, then I just stopped caring I guess. The job was stressful, she was stressed and menopausal, and when I cleaned up (according to her words) her plate with some of her"sauce on it" before she was finished she made it clear that we'd fallen out. I probably shouldn't have breezilly continued the shift, I suspect it was this that really pissed her off. Something I've been told by my brothers I have a knack for.Needless to say, I wouldn't be returning there - according to her, not me! I was unhappy there but would have kept working in those conditions just to get enough money to find something else.
Unemployed again I entered the routine of housewife. Louis, the flatmate, would return from University to ask what was for dinner. Partly I liked the cooking, mostly I liked saving money and eating cheap. Discovering lentils was a goldmine.
3 weeks passed, I cooked, I slept, I attempted to make use of my optimistically purchased gym membership. Finally I decided that sending out e-mails might be a better way of using my time. After 5 or so I was quickly bored again and carried on my day in a fit of frenzied lentil preparation.
A week passed. I'd got a reply. It was from a hostel to do night shifts, fair enough I thought. Went to the interview and it seemed like a cool place to work; the gods of German must have done something to me the night before too, 30 minutes chatting away in Deutsch and it felt so natural. I guess your brain knows when to turn itself on, mine figured this out 6 months too late, but it got there in the end...bless him. Waited another week and finally had my first shift: it was now mid February.
4 months in and I've finally got some security. I have a monthly pay check and I know my shifts. The job shifts between the boss's two hostels: one big one and the other 'fun' sized. The big one's nice, it's got a fancy bar and lots of beds. The smaller one's my favourite though, mainly because, as it looks run-down, people don't expect much. That's not to say that I am lazy, although I guess it could be fairly accurate sometimes, more that you get to talk to people. As the larger one is treated like a hotel by some guests it means that you are perceived more as an employee than someone who's just fooling around for a few years. The conversations in the larger one are therefore more stunted and less amusing. At least in the otherone it's a 'what you see is what you get' affair, and people realise this it's not your raison d'etre to send them to clubs and pour pints.
So I work between the hours of 23:00 - 8:00, selling drinks, playing music, cleaning floors. That's it. But I like it, the pay's not great (it's REALLY not great), and I'm having to do 3-4 shifts a week to stay afloat. But that's fine with me actually - I really like it. Potentially I could be doing day shifts soon, but I quite enjoy the relative calm of the nights: A calm disrupted only by the migration of drunks and early morning tourists.
So, touch wood, this is me settled. It took the best part of a year but I can finally feel a bit more at ease with where I am here.I've not been sat inside for the last 10 months, but I've certainly not been as productive as I'd have liked to have been.
I've been in Berlin for 10 or so months. I moved out here the September after graduation. If I'm honest I'm not sure if I would have had the balls to do it had I not told everyone my plans at university. Come September I really had no choice, and, thank God for that, I needed the push.
So I came here with no plans and a little money. Easy, thought I, I can just go live in a hostel until I find a house, and, being the charming articulate person I am I'll probably find a job in the hostel whilst I'm there. This was a foolish decision and one which left me homeless for 3 weeks, jobless for a further 2 and completely broke for nigh on a year!
Turns out people want hostel jobs. Who knew? Also turned out that people in Germany are much more fluent in German than I am...as in...the Germans are more fluent than I am. So there I was, after not having learnt German for 3 years, fumbling around for what few words I could recall. I quickly realised I was out of my depth applying for reception based jobs straight off. Luckily the hostel had a bar where I could meet people and quickly forgot about this. Mistake one! This meant I was eating up my money and oversleeping
when I should have been looking for a flat. 2 and a bit weeks later, lesson one was well and truly learned. I moved into another hostel in the south of Germany (Neukoelln if you're interested - yes the place where they caught the Canadian killer), this one had no bar and free coffee. Sorted. Except now I was sharing a hostel with lots of interesting people who weren't travelling en masse with those huge Australian travel buses (contiki tours or something I think). So I spent the third week of Berlin nosing around a few abandoned places with some other like minded tourists (an old radar/spy station and a theme park), also fun but - again - not that productive. I had a few house interviews but these were all immensely over subscribed: picture turning up to a flat share interview with 15 other people looking at the same room. Mistake two, finding a house early on would have saved me yet more cash, moving to Berlin when the university semester was starting was foolish - I should have gone either in June or July, or waited until mid October. Lesson learned.
I was lucky though, at one house interview it was just myself and another guy who I recognised from the Starbucks when I was living near Mitte - he was clearly looking for a flat too and we'd both been shamelessly rinsing the free wi-fi. We spoke to the people, they seemed nice enough. I don't blame them for not choosing me, I had had no job at that time and no prospect of getting one in the near future. But, luckily for me, the French guy didn't get the house either. Upon leaving and having exchanged phone numbers with him I thought that was it; pleasantries etc. However I had a phone call a week later, it was the same guy and he'd found a house for us. It was furnished and fairly reasonably priced - think 310€ including bills per month per person. More expensive than lots of places (especially seeing as I would be living in gentrified Prenzlauerberg), but for what we got I think it was fair.
Brilliant! Now for the job. It took a few weeks but I finally found an opportunity in an Irish bar around the corner. I'd walked in with a big smile on my face, narrowly missing Zolltar the automatic fortune teller, as my eyes adjusted to the relative gloom. "Welcome to a wealth of wisdom!" he bellowed; I cringed instinctively at the tourist feel.
Half striding half limping, I'd banged my knee on a table, distracted by the fortune puppet, I approached the bar. An ill looking man with long greying hair was stood there observing me in silence. "I was wondering about jobs" I asked in (what i thought) was fairly proficient German. "Experience?" he barked. I was going to have to try my luck, "not yet" I smiled. It worked, I was to come back next week for a trial shift.
Cash in hand jobby, no job security, and a constant feeling of unease around the bosses. Every shift threatened to be my last, if it was too busy or if one of the other employees wasn't feeling too energetic the burden fell on me as the new boy. This would have been fine had i have had experience...but I didn't and I wasn't the best waiter/drinks bitch! My tips weren't too bad and it was good enough cash-wise...when I got the shifts that is - some weeks I'd have none, others I'd have 4 - but it just wasn't for me. I'd talk too much; rush too little.
It was never going to work out, but it did for 3 months and bought me a bit more time to pansy around here. Went home for Christmas only to come a few weeks later with the boss in an awful mood. Did the shift, was told to come back the next day. Returned to a similar mood, apparently I had got worse since being back in the UK. This was possibly true. I'd spoken no German for 2 weeks and then was coming back and expecting to pick it all up again. But, in reality, I suspected they would have rather have had someone who'd had prior experience. This had arrived in the form of a strange (but not entirely unpleasant) village boy who'd moved to Berlin a few months earlier and who walked into the pub the week before I'd gone back to England. He kept budgies and had done an apprenticeship in a restaurant at his (very German) village.
Either way, the boss resumed giving me shit, then I just stopped caring I guess. The job was stressful, she was stressed and menopausal, and when I cleaned up (according to her words) her plate with some of her"sauce on it" before she was finished she made it clear that we'd fallen out. I probably shouldn't have breezilly continued the shift, I suspect it was this that really pissed her off. Something I've been told by my brothers I have a knack for.Needless to say, I wouldn't be returning there - according to her, not me! I was unhappy there but would have kept working in those conditions just to get enough money to find something else.
Unemployed again I entered the routine of housewife. Louis, the flatmate, would return from University to ask what was for dinner. Partly I liked the cooking, mostly I liked saving money and eating cheap. Discovering lentils was a goldmine.
3 weeks passed, I cooked, I slept, I attempted to make use of my optimistically purchased gym membership. Finally I decided that sending out e-mails might be a better way of using my time. After 5 or so I was quickly bored again and carried on my day in a fit of frenzied lentil preparation.
A week passed. I'd got a reply. It was from a hostel to do night shifts, fair enough I thought. Went to the interview and it seemed like a cool place to work; the gods of German must have done something to me the night before too, 30 minutes chatting away in Deutsch and it felt so natural. I guess your brain knows when to turn itself on, mine figured this out 6 months too late, but it got there in the end...bless him. Waited another week and finally had my first shift: it was now mid February.
4 months in and I've finally got some security. I have a monthly pay check and I know my shifts. The job shifts between the boss's two hostels: one big one and the other 'fun' sized. The big one's nice, it's got a fancy bar and lots of beds. The smaller one's my favourite though, mainly because, as it looks run-down, people don't expect much. That's not to say that I am lazy, although I guess it could be fairly accurate sometimes, more that you get to talk to people. As the larger one is treated like a hotel by some guests it means that you are perceived more as an employee than someone who's just fooling around for a few years. The conversations in the larger one are therefore more stunted and less amusing. At least in the otherone it's a 'what you see is what you get' affair, and people realise this it's not your raison d'etre to send them to clubs and pour pints.
So I work between the hours of 23:00 - 8:00, selling drinks, playing music, cleaning floors. That's it. But I like it, the pay's not great (it's REALLY not great), and I'm having to do 3-4 shifts a week to stay afloat. But that's fine with me actually - I really like it. Potentially I could be doing day shifts soon, but I quite enjoy the relative calm of the nights: A calm disrupted only by the migration of drunks and early morning tourists.
So, touch wood, this is me settled. It took the best part of a year but I can finally feel a bit more at ease with where I am here.I've not been sat inside for the last 10 months, but I've certainly not been as productive as I'd have liked to have been.
