I know I haven't written in quite a while, weeks actually. And I'm getting back to writing soon but as I was starting a longer entry on what had been going on in my life, it turned out that most of the things I needed to write about actually dealt with one topic specifically, my living arrangement. So this is something I need to let you know before I proceed with the regular fun stuff.
And yes, I know I shouldn't put too much energy into this but God knows there are some things to be said out loud so that I can let them go.
Have you ever seen a postcard with a grinning couple on it that says something like, “Sorry to see you move but hopefully the new neighbors aren't creepy”? I have. In fact, I have one, and if I had found it in the short run I would've scanned and posted it here.
I know that I have been shouting out loud how great my living arrangement was and how much I felt at home. I did. I don't any more. This place is neither great, nor do I feel home here any more, and it's about time to rethink the whole setup, for a variety of reasons, my neighbors certainly being one.
A few words to start off with for those of you who don't know yet how I got this apartment. My landlord is American, and he had lived in Frankfurt for approximately 20 years. He owns this apartment, and coincidently he was offered a job in Jordan while I was offered my current one in Frankfurt. I heard of the fact that he was moving out and might be looking for somebody to “live in his place” through another American friend of mine back in Düsseldorf. The apartment was supposed to stay, and still is, his apartment. I sleep in his bed and use his furniture (apart from my desk). The remaining pieces of my furniture are in the garage. My rent is way below the market price because we agreed I would take care of his mail and deal with some other things around the apartment, keep it clean and such. We have no written rental contract.
The apartment is on the top floor on the right side of a six-party house, and this house has been strange from the start. Everybody locks the front door 24/7 because they're afraid of burglars. “It happens regularly here”, I have been informed, but when you care to ask how it happened, you always hear that they never get in through the front door but through left-open balcony doors and such. Locking the front door is therefore not only a useless means to prevent this but it is also against the law because you need to be able to get out of the house without a key in case of a fire or so. And here's another thought for those who actually are afraid of burglars: Just imagine somebody armed gets into your apartment, and you're in your night gown and want to escape. If you don't have your key handy, which is rather likely unless you sleep with a key chain around your neck, you end up trying to escape but can't get out of the house. Very handy solution, I must admit. But hey, they lock the door anyway for the good old German reason, “We've always done things like that.”
When I moved into this house, I met two women from the house very briefly, the first of which (pronounce, “witch”) excelled at bad behavior immediately by questioning my landlord about me while I was standing and smiling right next to them. I secretly started calling her “Frau Obersturmbandführer” (a title from the Nazi regime) because of her rudeness. She is in her sixties, extremely slim, and has a face that only a mother can love. The second of the two women had a fake smile but was at least nice enough to let us into the house after I explained to her smilingly and nicely that I was the new neighbor but didn't have keys to the apartment yet. She was obviously hesitant to let my father and me in. After all, you hear so often about people who carry their stuff into other people's houses in moving boxes and then leave without comment only to never be seen again. Who knows, we could've easily been that type of people. I hated having to ask for being let in. My dad and I had showed up on time but my landlord apparently hadn't made it in time. One thing that I loved about that first day, however, was that my dad peed into the bushes at the side of the house when we had arrived and it had become clear that we couldn't get into the apartment. Of course, just that very moment, one of the rude neighbors from the first floor came out and saw him. I was embarrassed at the time but God knows I'm proud of my cool father.
But back to my lovely neighbors. At the end of the first weekend my landlord and I put a letter into all neighbors' letter boxes in which we introduced me to them, giving them my and his contact information and a brief summary of my job background, like I had had an obligation to let them know. No response whatsoever. We sent a copy of the letter to the “Hausverwaltung” (caretaker of the house). No response, other than the request to remove my landlord's business from the letter box sign, “as the home owner's association had agreed”. Strangely enough, the guy on one side of the first floor who had seen my dad pee into the bushes has a business as well, and he has never removed the sign, and nobody seems to care. Makes you wonder, doesn' it?
The Bicycle Affair
Let's move on to an apparently huge deal for the neighbors, and I am actually typing myself into rage with this crap here.
I take my bicycle to work. Takes me approximately eleven minutes because I adapted to the Frankfurt way of bicycling, which is essentially not stopping at red traffic lights. The bicycle has to be kept in a special basement room with all the others. Bicycles that is, not neighbors. Most of them are unlocked, by the way. My landlord's racing bicycle has been there as well. It's relatively old, and if anyone was to steal a bicycle from this room it would very probably not be his.
This is the routine I go through every day, twice when I want to get to work:
- unlock and pry open (so that I can carry the bicycle through it) the house door,
- walk the stairs down to the basement,
- open and pry open the metal door to the basement,
- then open the wooden door on the other side of the hall,
- get the bicycle out and put it next to the metal door,
- shut the wooden door,
- loosen and close the metal door again,
- carry the bicycle up and out of the house, and
- go back and close and lock the house door.
When I get back from work, the order is reverse but the effort is almost the same, with the small exception that when I carry down the bicycle with the right hand I can open the metal door with the left and go through. Neat, huh? Underneath the stairs facing the metal basement door, however, there is enough space to put three to four bicycles. There is never anything there, the space is completely unused. Just keep all this in mind for later.
One month after my move into the house, the dust had finally settled and I didn't spend all weekends away any more. That month I had been dealing with all sorts of things, my old apartment, the remaining stuff at my parents' place, my teaching job at the technical college in Cologne, etc. But I also dealt with a variety of things that dealt with the apartment. One of them was – and still is –
The Guest Bathroom.
A number of things about this apartment weren't done right when it was built. One of them is the insulation of the bathrooms. The guest bathroom has a shower while for some odd reason, the master bathroom doesn't. So of course everybody used to shower in the guest bathroom until about a year or so ago, fungus stains appeared on the other side of the shower wall, in the office. The first owner of the apartment must have forgotten to have insulation put onto the walls, just like he forgot a noise cancellation layer underneath the floor tiles, which I am sure causes Ms Obersturmbandführer to freak out every time I move a chair even though I have attached felt gliders to all of them. So my landlord had to have all the tiles in the shower removed, the walls insulated, and new tiles put on. Too bad that at the time he decided to go for cheap and bad rather than reasonably priced and right.
The guy to do the job – let's call him Jimbo – should've completed his work long before I moved in, but didn't. He also didn't show up after that, or returned my calls, for that matter. I don't know how I managed to get him to deliver the new shower door at all that he had bought because the old one allegedly had to be exchanged, but when he did delivery it I met him once. He was wearing a cowboy hat and should've probably rather spent his life on a cow meadow as well instead.
Time after time I became more unnerved because Jimbo never showed up up to finish the job. He did some work at one point but as it turned out, this was rather an unwelcome opportunity to figure out how little it would ultimately look like it was supposed to. However, I found out how little money my landlord had promised him (and paid in advance), and from this moment on it was clear that we were waiting for Jesus to fall from the sky.
So I suggested to hire a professional to put an end to this never-ending story. My landlord and his expert girlfriend were hesitant because of the good money he had spent on the bathroom already, but ultimately agreed to having me get a price estimate. Like it was my responsibility to arrange for his bathroom to be fixed. Mind you, at that time they didn't know yet how bad the work had been and that the expensive and ill-matching blue glass mosaic tiles would have to come off again, wasting the spent money altogether.
I had been dealing with Jimbo so it seemed just downright appropriate for me to arrange for a craftsman to show up, assess the work and give a price estimate. So I did. It allowed for an expert opinion on Jimbo's work, but on top of being unhappy, my landlord did not seem to be very trusting about the credibility of my word or the craftsmen's expertise. So it was clear he and his girlfriend who had done lots of craftsmen work (I am sorry but that is so cliché-lesbian), would have to assess the situation themselves.
Now, the latter part might sound a lot easier than it is. With my landlord being in Jordan and his friend living about 40 minutes away by train without a car, things are much more complicated than you'd think. You might assume that if she is the expert he trusts, it might just be enough for her to arrange for another appointment of her choice and show up for it, right? Well, that's not counting in the fact that she seems to have difficulties thinking a straight line. I'll spare you the details of this one appointment that I tried to nail down with the sanitary guy, the pavior, my landlord and her a few weeks ago. Let's just say that after about half a dozen phone calls, a short night and having the craftsmen agree to come back in the afternoon when my landlord and she would actually be able to show up, I don't know any more how it worked out. Ultimately, however, they somehow had both come to know that neither any of Jimbo's work nor the new shower door was usable, that all the expensive glass mosaic had to be tossed, and that all work had to be done from scratch again.
Another appointment had to be planned back then, by the way, at which my landlord was supposed to choose a tile for the upcoming work, and we agreed that he should pick it himself because it was his money. Now, does it surprise you that he “couldn't make it”, and instead I had to pick one that should be included in the price estimate? I am still waiting for this estimate, and I can't even begin wondering what's next in the never-ending process of fixing this bathroom.
But back to the neighbors. You were yearning for more, weren't you?
So after this first month I invited all my neighbors to coffee and cake on a Sunday afternoon, again trying to get to know them better so that we wouldn't have the same old misunderstandings that you just have when you don't know who lives next door. After my landlord's warnings about how strange some neighbors were and Frau Obersturmbandführer's odd initial questioning, I should've known better but I was trying to make a change.
For the coffee-and-cake date, only two parties showed up, amongst which were Frau Obersturmbandführer and a woman from the first floor who showed up with her whatever-he-is-as-long-as-he-nails-her-for-good. One other neighbor lady had sent an e‑mail saying that she was away for the weekend, and the lady who let me in the first day said that they had guests themselves and couldn't come.
During this two-hour Sunday meeting, I asked the few appearing neighbors whether they had a problem if I put my bicycle underneath the stairs because it would spare me a lot of the everyday hassle. They replied they “weren't the home owner's association” but didn't mind personally. So I started doing it like this the next day. And you guess it, on Thursday night I had Frau Obersturmbandführer show up at my door in her pajamas, letting me know that “the home owners” had complained about my bicycle. I expected the complaint to come but wasn't expecting her to show up personally like that. I could've hardly cared any less about “the home owners” that were too cowardly to talk to me directly but I told her I wouldn't put my bicycle there any more.
And I didn't. However, some time later I noticed that sometimes the (never locked) door to the basement was pried open without my doing, and I liked the idea very much because that saved me at least one door to overcome every morning and night. So I left it open for a few days when I took my bike.
This time, “the home owners'” reaction wasn't so nice to send Frau Obersturmbandführer. The caretaker sent a letter to all parties of the house in which they were requested to lock the basement door at all times. “The home owners agreed so. Obedience is requested.” Yes, sir! Kill jews, sir! Yes, sir! It's the law! I have no doubt that if things were to get as bad as in the 1930s today, the German people would go to war and kill innocent life again without questioning orders. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
I was furious. Why would those assholes care about that fucking basement door being open? The house door was locked all the time! And besides, nobody had ever locked the basement door, and what was even more, none of my keys matched the lock either. How were we supposed to lock the door at all? Was the caretaker uninformed or ignorant? I decided to write them an ironic letter in which I underlined everybody's unfounded fear of burglars coming through the house door, asking them to replace the lock and hand five keys to me.
Speaking of keys, here's another nuisance. You remember our friend Jimbo, right? He had a set of keys to the apartment, and now that my landlord's friend is convinced how bad his work was, she wanted to demand him to return the keys as he is no good any more. One other thing I, politely, marvel at is how she was always confident that Jimbo's work would turn out alright (and she had months to figure out how bluntly see how wrong she was), and how now that an expert confirmed my suspicion, she all of a sudden has always known how bad his work was. But either way, she told me she would ask Jimbo to return the keys. I never heard back from her but one day I found a set of keys in my letter box that I assumed were his. They keys looked right but I just wanted to make sure they were. So I was standing in my apartment and tried the apartment key on the inner side of the door. It wouldn't go in. “Oh”, I said to myself, “it is the wrong key somehow. How strange.” But it still looked right so I took my own and tried it in the same lock. Wouldn't go in either.
I was flabbergasted. How on earth was that possible? I examined the lock and saw a small piece of metal in it. Somehow a piece of metal had gotten into this lock. Since the house door is always locked, no matter what time of day, and since my apartment door is made out of metal that would be thick enough to safeguard Fort Knox (and the lock shuts four times when you turn the key), I never lock it from the inside so I had never even tried whether the door would lock from the inside. I remember that guests of my landlord's locked the door from the inside back in May but never checked again.
So I wrote my landlord an e-mail about this, sending along a macro photo of the lock.
But now, back to my crazy neighbors.
Guess what, a few days after my ironic letter to the caretaker I came home from work, and my landlord's bicycle was gone. I checked the other unlocked rooms in the basement and the space in front of my garage, just to make sure nobody had put it there because for some reason they had become tired of “my bike being there unused”. But his bicycle was nowhere to be seen. Somebody had taken it, and since it was one of the least valuable in the room, it was extremely unlikely that somebody external had taken it. The only plausible possibility, I figured, was that somebody wanted to teach me a lesson, whichever that was supposed to be. Frau Obersturmbandführer was in the basement at the time so I went over to her and asked her whether she knew what had happened to the bike. For the first time, my tone was not friendly anymore. I was polite but it was time to let them know that I would not be Mr Niceguy if all they did was pissing me off.
About ten minutes after our neat little talk she was at my door, letting me know that she had a problem with my tone of voice, that if I a bicycle was missing I would have to talk to the caretaker, etc. I didn't argue but fended off each of her sentences with, “OK” and “I have talked to the caretaker”.
So after my last e‑mail to my landlord in which I couldn't explain how the piece of metal had gotten stuck in the door lock, now this one saying, “Somebody took your bicycle” that I also sent to his friend. At the time I tended to send her all e‑mails to him in CC so that she could arrange for things to be done if they saw fit.
That night I was very angry at my neighbors and felt out of place in this way-too-big apartment of which I wasn't allowed to use the office because my landlord wanted this room as a retreat when he'd come by, whose living-room was huge and most of which I didn't even use, and that kept me busy with all the things you now know about. So I decided to go for a bike ride, and I came home pretty late. When I came home I saw a message on my voicemail. It was my landlord's friend who basically said, “WHAT THE FUCK!” Like I knew. But her utterings about ongoing things were always "Yea, that's very bizarre" or "Yea I was like, oh my God, what the fuck", depending on her mood. Until then I would've sworn that only California girls were "like, oh my God!"
And, guess what, it's just not stopping. A day later my landlord sent me a very brief e‑mail asking whether I knew what happened about the bicycle. I couldn't help but think he was suspecting that for a reason still beyond my comprehension, I had taken it. And a few minutes later he replied to my “there is something stuck in the apartment door lock” e‑mail, saying that in June when he had been here for a visit, the lock had still been working, and especially here I could plainly hear between the lines that I had caused this. In my reply I told him that I have a liability insurance that would easily cover for accidents like this, and that I would have no problem whatsoever admitting that it was I. If I had done it, which wasn't the case.
The Caretaker
One of the most bizarre conversations, however, I had with the caretalker himself recently. While I was on a business trip in Munich I saw that somebody whose number I didn't know had tried to call me and left a message on my voicemail so I checked and noticed it was them. So I called them up. The guy told me that the keys to the basement door's lock were in my landlord's possession, which I am sure is not true because if they were he would've told me about it and given me at least one key. But talking to the caretalker already, I assumed it was a good idea to stop the frenzy going on among the bitchy neighbors, so I asked him who had made the input about the basement door, assuming that it would probably make apparent who'd be behind the bicycle theft. The guy answered he wouldn't tell me, and replied, "What kind of caretaker are you? We're talking of a vanished bike here. Somebody took it, and I'd prefer to talk to the person who took it rather than going to the police immediately." And his reponse to that was ultimately weird. It was something like, "Well, if you're claiming theft here, you need to go to the police here. Where would we be if everyone just went from door to door and beat up people? I'm just a Democrat!" Honest to the God I don't believe in, this man gave me the oddest line in a long time.
However, guess what happened subsequently. When I got home that night, the bicycle was back in its place like nothing had happened. No note, no nothing. Needless to say that I informed my landlord and again had no clue of what was going on in my crazy-ass neighbors' heads.
For a while I was pondering hanging up a note in the hallway in which I would let my neighbors know that I was amazed about their bad manners and that my parents had always taught me better than to just take other people's property, which would be called theft in Germany. Then I decided it wasn't worth the effort. But I have made the decision not to interact with anybody in this house any more than absolutely necessary and dictated for good manners' sake. You know, the manners that they don't have. But I want to stay away from their level of behavior as it'll only befoul me if I don't.
And All the Other Things
And all this adds up to the innumerable other small incidents that turn living here into a nuisance, and all those things I have become tired of. There are more, like my landlord, now, after months of me living here, approaching me with his desire to charge extra for heating in the winter that he never used, or with cost for the telephone line, or the fact that his apparently mentally ill ex-boyfriend who used to beat him up and stalk his friends sometimes calls at night to check whether my landlord is at home, always twice in a row, always without caller ID, and always hanging up when voicemail or I answer.
Now that I am writing all this, I am noticing how tired I have become, both in general and actually right now. It seems that I am not supposed to live here for long after all, and strangely enough, I do not care about having to pack everything again. In spite of all the nuisances related to this living arrangement, Frankfurt is after all a gorgeous city, and I have started to feel very much at home here in comparison to quite some other cities I have lived in. It was a good choice to come here, just maybe not this very apartment.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Fields of View
