How I moved to Germany to study and work as a journalist
My move to Europe is associated primarily with the profession: I traveled here to become a journalist. I did not strive to move to Germany, but now I understand that it is she who suits me the most: I like her rich cultural life and that you can reach any end of Europe in a couple of hours.
Study abroad: from Shanghai to Hamburg
Before Germany, I managed to live, in addition to Russia, in China and Denmark; I had the idea of going to study in Europe for about a year. In the summer of 2012, when I lived in Shanghai, I wrote the first articles about China and realized that I would most like to do journalism. But the summer in Shanghai was over, and I returned to Moscow, on the final course of the Institute of Asian and African Countries at Moscow State University. All that year (perhaps the most nervous one in my life) I completed my studies at the university, wrote a diploma and looked for a magistracy in the specialty I needed in Europe. It was then that I realized that I did not want to go back to Asia for a long time and continue to study at Moscow State University. I slept five hours a day, studied exclusively and snapped at everyone around me — my mother affectionately called me "my porcupine."
The lumen came at the end of spring, when I found out that they had taken me to the Erasmus Mundus Journalism master program. The first year of the master's program was to take place in Denmark, at the University of Aarhus, and the second - in Hamburg. My family agreed to pay for my studies (its price is comparable to the cost of studying at a Moscow university), since I did not get the scholarships; I later learned that less than 20% of my classmates got it. Fortunately, the university took all the paperwork and even the search for housing in Århus; I just had to take the documents to the Danish embassy and have a short interview there.
I devoted the first year of the master's program in Aarhus exclusively to study - besides her, there was still nothing to do there. This year has benefited me: after the nervous atmosphere of my last year in Moscow, the life of a small Scandinavian town, ordered to the smallest detail, affected me like a medicine. In addition, in Aarhus, for the first time in my life, I appreciated the advantages of single life. Shortly before my departure, I broke up with a young man who was desperately in love and with whom I was brought to a nervous breakdown, and now for the first time in three years I was happy about the feeling of inner peace and self-sufficiency that gives solitude.
As soon as my studies in Aarhus were over, I moved to Hamburg. I did it even in the summer, three months before the start of my studies, because I was lucky to get an intern at the UIL, one of the UNESCO institutes. In practice, this meant a beautiful entry in the resume, a useful experience in the press office, pleasant colleagues and the complete absence of salary. After Aarhus, Hamburg seemed to me almost a megalopolis: a huge port, a street crowd speaking dozens of languages, and a vibrant nightlife.
New acquaintances and job search
My move to Hamburg was simple: I arrived there, having already found a job. In addition, an internship contract and a letter from the university were necessary for me to obtain a visa and temporary residence permit in Germany. I settled in a cozy semi-basement room in a suburban house with a neglected garden and an eccentric but sweet owner and began to actively look for new friends. The advantage of Hamburg, as well as other large cities, where there are many foreigners, is that it is easy to make new acquaintances through special communities in the network: you just have to follow the announcements about parties or walks and feel free to talk to those who are close by.
Informal meetings for professionals, who often organize here through the MeetUp website, helped me a lot: they all come specially to meet and share experiences. It turned out to be easier for me to communicate with other foreigners than with local ones: we were all strangers in this city, and we had something to share. Most of my Hamburg acquaintances are somehow connected with the university where I studied - they are young people from all over the world, communicating with each other in English, and the Germans who were nailed to our company are neighbors and occasional acquaintances.
After talking with colleagues, I finally realized that in order to get a decent job or orders, I need to work for many hours for free and publish a dozen articles. It was then that I understood why there are so many student publications in European universities: everyone needs a portfolio and a resume entry. Having filled my hand in the journal that my classmates were doing, I was able to get in touch with the editors (oddly, first of all with the Moscow editors), with whom I still work.
Rental housing and stereotypes about punctuality
In total, I lived in Hamburg for a year and a half. Looking ahead, since the beginning of this year I live in Berlin, because I found a job here. I am an intern at a data journalism agency: we do a lot of investigations, study topics such as emigration, housing prices, and government spending on construction. Before the move, I was in Berlin several times and managed to get friends here. Berlin and Hamburg are very closely linked: from one city to another you can take a couple of hours by cheap bus, and many live and work in two cities.
The problems in these two cities are also similar in many respects, and the most obvious among them is the search for housing. Finding an apartment or a room is really not easy: the competition is huge, the prices vary greatly, and the chances of quickly finding something decent are few. However, they grow significantly if you look in several ways at once: on special sites (there are a lot of them here), in social networks and through friends. The latter helps the best: it was thanks to my friends that I found three of the four rooms in which I happened to live.
Unlike ordered Denmark, where everything is predictable and on schedule, Germany is much more chaotic. In addition, no one here will help or give you information unless you specifically ask for it. You have to change habits and plan everything in advance - sometimes you need to wait for weeks at the reception of the right doctor or official. Another unpleasant discovery was that the information posted on the Internet is not worth trusting. For example, it is sometimes easier to make an appointment by telephone than online: it may very well be that the electronic system has already run out of space, but the operator has no (and maybe vice versa, so experienced people use both methods).
Rumors of German accuracy and punctuality are also greatly exaggerated: the masters called to the house often have to wait more than one day, and my residence permit was done twice, because they first confused the number in the passport number. In addition, one has to get used to the fact that shops, banks, hairdressers and cafes close at seven, and late in the evening only large supermarkets and bars work. On Sundays, too, almost everything is closed - however, the general holiday and the custom of preparing an early lazy lunch and chatting with friends over a glass of wine or beer I even like.
The romance of Berlin and dates through "Tinder"
By the time I moved to Germany, I was tired of being alone and wanted to at least go on a couple of dates with someone. It turned out that here, as elsewhere, the easiest way to meet is the big parties and the dating applications. It’s not very common to meet at other events or just in a cafe: according to my observations, most of the locals are embarrassed to talk to strangers and violate their personal boundaries. Although for some reason, many people like to look at each other from afar in a subway car or cafe for a long time.
Perhaps it is difficult to find a more suitable city for novels than Berlin: there are many lonely people from different countries living here. They enjoy spending time at concerts and exhibitions and, as it turned out, they love dating apps very much. In Tinder and OkCupid, everyone sits here first, they discuss dates with colleagues, bikes from tinder are exchanged as anecdotes, and friends like to play matchmaker - take away your phone and look for suitable pairs for you under the neighbors chuckles.
The German straightforwardness and the habit of discussing everything in advance were very useful to me. I never knew how to communicate with hints, but here you can just write to a new acquaintance: "I will be glad to meet you, but I promise nothing. Let's drink some wine and chat, maybe we will remain friends." So far this has worked, and I have come across pleasant interlocutors; some of them have become my good buddies. We even met with one nice resident of Hamburg all summer — managed to eat a ton of ice cream and parted as good friends.
In Germany, it is not customary to make beautiful gestures or give flowers (unless, of course, the girl herself says that she loves receiving them as gifts), but men prepare a rich breakfast or dinner if they invited the girl to visit. Once I ended up on a date with a sexist stereotypist — unfortunately, such men often specifically seek out meetings with girls from Eastern Europe, since they are supposedly not as independent and self-confident as German women. Which, of course, is ridiculous: any person who has the spirit alone to move to another country and go through all the circles of the immigration system hell must possess these qualities. But even such situations do not cloud my mood: I think to include this episode in my first performance in the stand-up genre.
Russians abroad
I don't feel like one of the “Russians in Berlin” - despite the fact that there are conditionally Russian areas in the city. There is no real Russian diaspora in Germany - it’s too heterogeneous. I got the impression that the majority of Russians living in Germany are not trying to specifically keep in touch and address each other only from practical necessity, for example, in the search for housing, for psychological help or legal advice.
The Russian diaspora reminds of itself, rather, through numerous stereotypes - a legacy from previous generations of émigrés, and when we meet we like to complain about how we are tired of jokes about vodka, cold and Putin. Much more noticeable in Germany are the other diasporas, especially the Turkish, but in Berlin and Hamburg there also lives a large community of immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries. In addition to them, many British have recently moved here, primarily from London.
Now I plan to live in Berlin for a couple of years, but I do not think for a long time. I don’t want to leave this place at all, and I feel that it will be easy for me to grow here. But if you ask me where I will be in five years, I will not be able to give an exact answer.
PHOTO: 1, 2, 3 via Shutterstock, Daria Sukharchuk
