madhatter’s coffee.

Right. I’m back in Berlin. This could be a wonderful line if the town I had to leave wasn’t Edinburgh. Not that Edinburgh compares to Berlin in any way, but even then – you leave a lot behind. It might not be the ultimate insight, but one year does not only mark you with all those nice wrinkles that make a middle aged man attractive – you leave marks somewhere as well. And since everything man produces he also seems to see as a sort of possession, I definitely lost some stuff.

(And that doesn’t include the 12-year old whisky bottle those bastards took from me at the check-in. I’d forgotten that one litre of schnaps is definitely more than the 50-something mililitres of liquid you’re allowed to take through the controls. (OK, – since this seems to become a longer story, i’m going to start a new paragraph.)
A n d  I find it ridiculous that just after the controls you’re free to buy another bottle. Unfortunately not one that was as good as the one I just got robbed of. I’m sure this bloody security guy just took it because he knew what he held in his hands. Bloody Scots. And sure, how would a duty-free area survive without a security that confiscates every ounce of alcohol before you enter it.
Excuse me. That had to be said. Stream of consciousness it is, isn’t it?)

Anyways… you leave a lot behind. Apart from so obvious things as friends and my Baby … I left home, for example, once again (this seems to develop into my most favorite subject) and the feeling of belonging somewhere. Security also, because suddenly you have to readjust everything – which is language in my case as well – and the side of the street.

You win: a new life.

Illustration by jaqian

Everybody has a weak point. A point that other persons ought better not to cross. A point were one gets angry. I, for example, don’t like to be fucked over.

Not that Iris did. Well, I guess she didn’t really intended to. Or I still try to stick to that belief. It’s gets harder after what happened, I admit it. She basically took my rent – twohundredandthirty quid – and my deposit – another twohundredandninety quid – and run away with it. I’ve been told that Bristol is a very expensive place and I am certainly overpaid regarding that I only work twelve hours a week. But I’m still pissed.

But that only turned out when I was already considering the idea of moving out. I’m no angel, I considered moving out long before I mentioned it to anyone. Long before I actually acknowledged it to myself. What would also be a pertinent observation about me is that I am a lazy bastard. Which was more or less the reason why I didn’t care, why I didn’t move out. I had a nice room, I had just moved in, I had a stunning view on the Edinburgh Castle, I simply saw no reason.

So I stayed.

And got fucked over another time. This time it was the agency.

Kingford Estates Ltd. is that sort of company people around here would call a ‘bunch of fuckers’. An interestingly good description if you ask me. What happened unfolds like this: If I wasn’t an angel my flat-mates definitely were devils. Their philosophy was as simple as ineffective. The agency wasn’t very obliged to their duties so they decided to drop their’s. Not smoking in the flat was, as I already mentioned, one of them. And after the agency didn’t really care about the state of their property we stopped to do so, too. How could we have, anyways? With no hover cleaning was definitely out of question. It was cold outside, so we stopped smoking out there. And, what none of us did know: Mario stopped paying the bills. That he spent the money the others gave him for his own purposes if he needed to is another story.

Nevertheless, after a wile and many complaints things started to turn out positive. Or so we thought. We received a letter from the agency telling us that we would be relocated to a hotel for three days in order to complete the final repairs in kitchen and bathroom. Which was a brilliant idea. There was only one problem. The problem was small, had long hair and a German nationality. It was me.
As a subtenant your landlords don’t even know about the amount of tenant’s rights you can claim is ridiculously small. You’re basically homeless. And of course it is a little bit difficult to check into a hotel if you’re supposed to be a) Spanish b) female and c) beautiful. Assumed of course, you don’t match those criteria.
Since I didn’t, I chose the way of making myself official. Being official is something expensive in Scotland. And compared to Germany it is just crazy. In Germany there are no agencies. I’ve been a subtenant for my whole life, I never signed a contract and if I payed I simply handed over some cash.
Well, at least this didn’t change. The amount of cash I payed to Kingsford Estates summed up to exactly onehundredandtwenty British Pound Sterling. For staying exactly one month… but let’s stick to the storyline. At least this made me a rightful tenant, for good measure even a tenant that was internationally credible, since I had to pass a so called international credit check which should prove that I never committed the crime of running away without paying my rent. So far so good.

That nothing was done, when we came back is a different kettle of fish.

to be continued…

…peep… peep… Well, I think I’m more or less back to live. The past two months were a little bit stressful. But no worries, slowly but in time I’ll retell the adventurous story how a naive stranger in this city was robbed, thrown in the gutter and continued fighting with fierce adversaries to emerge as a new hero for a bunch of twelve-year old pupils.

Everything began… when I moved in. Moving into another city is always a risk. The main problem isn’t to find a home or new people to talk to, the problem is to find someone you trust.

I’m easily fooled.

When the innocent teacher moved into a flat with a bunch of Spaniards he made not just one mistake. He mistook the whole situation. Iris, the girl that inhabited the room before I moved in was smart and totally stupid in the same moment. I suppose she mistook the situation as well as I did – the difference between me and her was that she had criminal instinct.
Her error was to trust the Mexicans. And to think that a letting agency should be professional and costumer orientated. The agency’s name was Kingsford Estates Ltd. and the assumptions proved fatally wrong.

Kingford Estates is as far as I experienced professional in doing exactly one thing: sailing very, very close to the wind. But the fact that they did not even know that they had Mexican tenants before my flat-mates moved in really swept me of my feet. This small incident resulted in my flat-mates being accused of causing damage in the flat they weren’t responsible for.

But back to the beginning of this story… Once upon a time my flat-mates moved into a nice flat in Leith, offering a magnificent view to the castle and being hilariously cheap. They head heard about this flat from some Mexicans who wanted to move out and were looking for new tenants who would start a new contract for another twelve months. The landlords seemed to be more or less reasonable and further doubts were resolved by the already mentioned view.
After they moved in they realized the contract they signed had some handicaps. For smokers it can be a small problem to live inside a nonsmoking flat. And then there were all those small damages that the agency had promised to repair. Two months later the small damages were still there and had bred a few siblings. Three months later the flat still missed the repairs and also a hover plus a microwave.

This was the point when the plumbing in the bathroom exploded. I don’t know how it looked like, it was mid August and I was backpacking through Sweden. But if you ever lived in a house where you had your own private waterfall in the kitchen you probably get an idea of the situation. Well, the plumbing was fixed. The damages were… cladded.

So when I moved in everything looked more or less alright. And if you’re desperately looking for a flat you don’t care about a little hole behind the sink or some dark spots at the ceiling. And you definitely don’t ask, if they have a hover. Who for Christ’s sake doesn’t have a hover?
So I moved in, a naive newly-born subtenant, gave my money to Iris who moved out and my deposit as well, because she promised to change the names in the agency. Nice. Everything is settled. Let’s start to live again.

to be continued…

One thing that struck me, when I first arrived in Edi was not only the fact, that almost every building had a front- and most of them a rear garden (a totally new perspective for someone who grew up in that concrete desert named Stuttgart) but that almost none of the street-facing living rooms had curtains. (Whoha, kinda typical kalckhovian marathon-sentence!)
And being one of the more curious dudes of these times I of course cannot control my peepers from gazing into other person’s private lives. What I observe may look trivial to most of my honored readers. To me it offers the whole range of humanity with all its benefits and deficiencies. There may sit an old lady watching the evening news or whatever, a young man bowed over a set of drawings, middle aged women doing the washing up, ol’ guys having a siesta… just in front of my inquisitive nose. Aside from the fact that each of them offers a whole bunch of stories with a gracious character included for free… you know, I could really make use of a superheroes standard ability: being invisible. With a super sized digital SLR in my trembling hands.

It rains. It rains since yesterday. Actually it started on Friday. It didn’t stop. My laundry is still wet. I finally arrived in Scotland.

Well, it’s not that bad: I had nearly three wonderful weeks with the sun burning down like she wanted to make up for the spoiled summer. But when I climbed up North Berwick Law at Friday the clouds approaching from the west did not look like they planned to stay for a short rest. Nevertheless, the view was fantastic and I first discovered what Captain Haddock would have called a guano hump. A gigantic pile of bird’s shit accumulated on a rock just a few houndred feet from the coastline.
Less shitty but also quite a quest are my pupils – which is not primarily because they are so terrible as pupils but because they are so unbelievable shy. And I certainly don’t look like the big hairy monster with the long teeth, do I?
Most times I don’t. But even, or should I say, especially the Advanced Highers don’t dare to speak a word not to think of asking a question. I feel like a clown who’s only purpose is to entertain those guys sitting in front of me their eyes widened like rabbits facing a cobra. The children from the lower ability classes are a bit more selfconscious: they even gimme a cheer when I enter the room.
Maybe that’s why I prefer to teach them – even if their attention span is about ten minutes. Every additional minute just ends in total chaos. Someone gets up, starts hitting someone else or just goes to the bin to stuff away his chewing gum. They know exactly what they are allowed to and what is definitely a step to far – and throwing away their chewing gum is a duty as well as fetching the pencil or whatever just fell from the table. It’s just, that the pencil sometimes fell a bit to far away from the table.

Just seen at Annandale Street. Seems as if someone was a bit in a hurry tonight.

Diharoe simply does not describe the way I’m actually feeling. I feel like durchfall. Which may connect to the fact that I have some. And I tell you… never has a loo been so far away.

Damn the pupils.

It’s easy to feel at home…. All you need is a bed, some nice people to talk to and a decent coup of coffee. That’s basically everything. Every additional bit is already luxus.

If you miss the people you’ll feel lonely. If you miss a place to sleep you’ll feel outcast. And if you’ll miss the coffee you’ll find that you need something to bridge the moments you don’t know what to do next.

If found a home: the Forest is were my folks are. My flat-sharing community is were my bed stands. And both places serve coffee.

Sometimes I’m really tempted to trust in fate. Finding the Forest was such a moment. I was looking for was a nice internet cafe. What I found is a fluctuating family. Sort of. “The Forest” is a student run cafe that sets up the infrastructure for a whole bunch of projects ranging from darkroom for amateur photographers to the free shop – an institution entitled to make people swapping stuff. They would put it differently, of course:

a volunteer run collectively owned free arts and events space masquerading as a veggie cafe.

But it’s not the stuff you can do at the Forest, it’s the people that are drawn to this place. Open minded, creative, mostly alternative, of all ages and often students. The Forest somehow seems to be a weird but nice mixture of all places that I chose as second homes: a bit of Stuttgart’s Uni-WG, the people resembling the folks I met in the Ping-Pong Bar in Kreuzberg, the Coffee as good as in the Kuenstler Cafe and the veggie-green experience of the Bio-Cafe at the FU.

My flats-sharing community is different, but not less kool. At the moment we are four Spanish and me as the only German teaching them English. And I’m learning Spanish. No, in fact Edu and me created a language learning tandem: from the beginning of October, I’m going to learn Spanish. In exchange Edu’ll get some of the lessons I prepared for my  pupils. And coming home really feels like belonging there. Especially when Victor’s at home. Victor is our chef de la cuisine. And a fucking good one. And when Victor’s at home the main subject we’re talking about is food. Valencian food. And Scotish beef. From Angus cattle.

It’s easy to be at home. All you need is a nice place and a cup of coffee.

… stands short for Edinburgh and will be mu hometown for the next nine months. The standard question I got after that statement in the past few weeks mostly sounded like: “Huh, why didn’t tell that to me?”

The answer is, I forgot. I didn’t knew it either. Well, I planned it since last September but life goes strange ways sometimes. This personal course led to Berlin and the question where I would be in September mysteriously seemed a bit unimportant. Finally, somewhere in the end of July, a letter arrived, stating that I was determined to stay the next months in splendid isolation together with a bunch of pubescent kids pretending to teach them some of my mother-tongue.

Right now I’m sitting in an Internet cafe somewhere on Leith walk bored to death and wait for my future landlord to reply to my e-mails. Nevertheless, Edinburgh is quite a nice city, if you know someone. I think I don’t have to tell you that the cityscape is wonderful, the hilliness of the landscape stirs the blood of an ol’ Suebian and weather is quite nice – for Scotland, I assume.

The folks around here is quite nice, too. Though I’m not sure which is the original one ’cause there is the Edinburgh Festival taking place. Actually EDI holds more tourists than real inhabitants at the moment. And the only ones that really leave no doubt about their heritage are the shopmen who talk a Scottish accent as broad as an American bullfrog. Everyone else is quite easy to understand and once more I feel ashamed for my American. Especially when I sat in the most alternative cafe I could find, with free internet-access, (whooohaa!) the possibility to work there (which I consider) and of course a German medical student. Who not only talked broadest American, but even had the attitude of the connected stereotype. And talking such to the stereotype of a Scottish Highland warrior. Long Hair, short speech. And the calmness of an ox.

And since I’m not a bit better I’ll now leave for this exact cafe… with the prospect to talk a bit less.