I gotta say, I was pretty spoiled before.  Not in the way of material things, but more the fact that my parents did all the cooking, laundry and pretty much all the other house cleaning chores.  I don’t think I ever had to set foot in a grocery store either.  All the food my mom bought and cooked, I ate.  She even took the time to make the food that I liked to eat.  That all changed when I came to Germany.  Well, it’s been a time of firsts.

Cooking

To state this bluntly, I can’t cook.  I came here without knowing one of the most critical things to keep myself alive.  In order to avert the crisis of me starving to death, I had to learn this crucial skill.  I already know how to cook like eggs, bacon, and pasta (but not the sauce, unfortunately), but it’s not like I really know how to cook.  I can’t eat that stuff everyday either.  I remember during my first few weeks here, I researched online for different recipes.  I sucked so much at cooking that I didn’t even understand what I was reading.  Marinate? Sautee? What?  Instead of following recipes, I took a different approach.  I started with the easy stuff.  Potatoes.  I was so bad that I even cut myself the first time I tried cooking potatoes.  I think I’ve gone a long way since then.  Now I know how to marinate my meat (thanks to my mom for teaching me that over VOIP), and how to make sauces like curry.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I probably quadrupled, if not tripled my cooking knowledge.  I want to learn some more like how to steam my own fish and cook rice with a stove (too bad I don’t have a rice cooker).  I am by no means a decent chef at all, but it’s a start.

Grocery Shopping

I wasn’t so clueless in this regard, but it didn’t help when I couldn’t read any of the food labels in the supermarket.  Luckily I installed an English-Deutsch dictionary app on my phone before I left Vancouver.  The app saved me so many times already.  It was kind of like, “What the hell does this mean?”, type type type, and then “oh, so that’s what it is”.  I think I ended up eating nothing by sandwiches for almost a whole week.  I mean, I can buy eggs, sausages, bacon and all that, but I had no idea what canola oil was called.  The dictionary didn’t help here, unfortunately, since they used a different word altogether.  Eventually, I figured out everything, and now I’m buying all the food I can eat and more.

Laundry

My flat doesn’t have a washing machine, and I wasn’t about to pay to go to the Laundromat.  I didn’t even know where it was either.  I knew that my mom occasionally washed some clothes by hand and so I consulted her on how to do it.  Her instructions sounded simple enough, but I needed to go out to buy laundry detergent.  Problem: I didn’t know what that was called in German.  I looked it up on my phone and found out.  I thought it’d be pretty straight forward after knowing what laundry detergent was called, but I was so wrong.  I went to the laundry section in the store and saw about fifteen different brands/kinds of detergent.  I had no idea which was which.  I stared at the wall of items for about twenty minutes while looking up various words on my phone before I knew which one to get.

Planning Trips

Since I’m here, I must take the time to travel around Germany and its nearby countries.  Before doing that however, I had to look up the places I wanted to go.  How do I get there?  How much will it cost?  Where will I stay?  Only two methods really exist for transportation: train or plane.  To book a ticket for travelling, I had to use the Deutsche Bahn website and that site confused the hell out of me for the first little while.  But now I know.  Booking flights should have been quite simple, except for the fact that the discount airlines don’t fly out of the major airports.  Now I had to think about how to get myself to one of these airports.  Seeing that I’m not made of money, I try to optimize costs everywhere.  50 euro a night for a hostel?  No way, time to look for something cheaper.  30 euro?  That’s a good deal.  Despite all this planning, I’ve gone to so many places already, and I still have not exhausted my list of places to go.

Drinking

Stereotypes say that Germans like to drink, and it’s totally true.  Although, it’s not really my first time drinking, it is my first time making a habit of it.  Every Thursday is my drinking day.  Sometimes Saturdays too.  I’m never looking to get hammered, but I find that drinking beer and socializing is just super relaxing.  Typically, I try a new beer every week, but a lot of times I just order my favorite beer, Hefeweizen.

Living in Another Country

This is the first time I’ve ever left home for longer than a week.  I used to live on residence at the university, but I went home every weekend.  I could go home every weekend and enjoy my mom’s wonderful cooking.  I have no such luxury here.  I often find myself craving the things I’ve temporarily given up in order to be here.  Besides missing family and friends while over here, I started appreciating the little things.  It’s just things like sleeping in my own bed, sitting in my own computer chair, and eating Chinese food.

Dealing with A Landlord

I always thought a landlord was just someone you pay so you can live in their house, but I learned to realize that it’s not only that.  A landlord is analogous to a dictator (but obviously not as bad).  They pretty much have total control over how I like to live in their space.  If they’ve got a problem with something I’m doing, they’ll tell me and I have to change my habits for them.  Just like the time where I showered too long.  Luckily, my landlords are pretty nice people, but I could have been really unlucky and gotten some mean ones.  Maybe the mean ones might even try to kick out their tenants if they didn’t like the way their lifestyle.

During lunch, I spoke with a colleague about how I my work term was going so far.  I told him that I didn’t really have a huge interest in Microsystems, but I didn’t hate it either.  I feel more or less indifferent towards the subject.  Because of this, he asked me what I wanted to do.  What field do I want to work in?  What kind of work do I want to do?  Do I want to stay in research or go into design?  I didn’t really know how to answer those questions.  This colleague is older than me by probably seven or eight years so I was quite sure that he had been through the same ordeal at some point.

A lot of advice people typically give are similar in the way that they just say to follow one’s own interests.  Apart from saying that, he also asked me what my goal in life was.  He clarified his question by giving examples such as being super rich, or doing something that people will remember me for when I die.  I already knew my answer to this question.

My goal in life isn’t anything grand.  I don’t need to be able to afford a Porsche or a Ferrari.  I’m not looking to change the world.  My goal is just to lead a happy life.  Well everyone wants that.  But different thinks make different people happy.  For me, it’s the idea of leading a chill life, not how many Porsches and mansions I can buy.  As I said before, money can’t buy happiness, but the lack of money can’t either.  I believe it’s about having enough money to not have to worry about it.  Yeah, rich people don’t worry about money, but that’s not what I’m referring to.  Take my family for example.  My parents own a house, two cars, and are able to send both my brother and me to university.  When we go out to eat, we don’t have to worry about the money.  I’m not talking about only these things specifically.  It’s about not having to worry about every penny being spent.  People don’t have to be super rich to do that.  In a way, it’s like always having enough money to go out with friends for a few beers.  I suppose with a goal like this, I chose the right major.  The next question is what field in engineering I will work in.

After I told him the way I wanted to live life, he told me his view on it.  He started by saying how he didn’t like staying in one place a lot and likes a change in scenery every now and then.  He was born in Germany, but he’s worked in the Netherlands and in Switzerland.  By going to all of these places, he’d get a lot of life experiences and moving around is what he enjoyed.  He’s following his interests and that is certainly good.  He then added when he’s old and sitting on his rocking chair, he will be surrounded by his grandkids that would ask him about his life.  He wanted to be able to tell the kids stories of his youth and listen intently and enjoy his stories until the kids get tired and fall asleep, but he would know he lived a fulfilling life if the kids come back again and again to hear him talk about all the adventures in his life.

I never heard anyone put it like that before.  Everything he said seemed so profound and I probably did a really bad job replicating that here, but the stuff he said really got me thinking.  From something like my future career path, he managed to dwarf that entire issue and expand it to the idea of how to live life.  Telling interesting stories to my future grandkids sounds pretty cool to me.