Settling In

Today I finally moved into my actual room. The landlord told me yesterday that Achim (who lives in the room I have been staying in) was coming today, but Maksim told me he was coming tomorrow. He showed up right when I was on my way out the door to go meet my mentor teacher (again) so I had to quickly pack everything up, throw it in the third room, and then run all the way to school.

I finally got around to opening up a bank account today. It was your everyday normal bank account opening except that the bank employee opening my account thought it was hilarious that I have an American passport, two German middle names and a phone number from Great Britain. Also, apparently they don't require you to actually put any money into the account when you open it. The whole thing was over and she asked me if I had any more questions and I said, "Um, can I put money in? Don't you require that?" Apparently not. The other random question that I got was whether I smoke. You expect that when your landlord asks you or maybe your employer, but not your bank. However, it has to do with the cigarette machines. They still have cigarette machines in Germany, all over the place (sort of like Japanese vending machines). The way they prevent underage kids from buying cigarettes is that you can only pay with your EC-card (debit card) and it has a little chip on it that has your age information. If you don't have a little chip or you are not old enough, you're just SOL. It's an interesting solution I think.

One more thing that I had forgotten about Germany... they don't have worms that come out when it rains, they have GIANT SLUGS. When you step on a giant slug, you can feel it squish and then it's nasty and yellow-orange and completely creeps me out.