As I came back from Berlin today (have been there again this weekend, but more about that in the next post), i had to stay at university all day to stay for various obligatory affairs. And when I finally came home tonight (about 15 min. ago), I had a new neighbor! I figured it out when I opened the outer door and saw that someone had put a water cooker and a candle inside a bowl of mine on the shelf inside the kitchen. “Oh, crap!” I thought, “I’m pretty sure I hadn’t cleaned the kitchen sufficiently when I realized hat I had way less time than calculated to run to the airport express train Thursday night.”

For about 4 seconds I just stood there in the entrance, the door half way open, not knowing how to procede. I could hear voices, and the green candle made me guess that it would be another girl who had moved in. And sure it was! As I didn’t move, she dragged the door open from the other side. “Hi, is it you who lives here besides me? Then I’m your new neighbor!” she started. “Yes,” I tried slowly, “but I’m not sure whether this wasn’t a huge mess before I left it.” “Oh it was, ” she smiled broadly, “but I cleaned it all up today.” Oh mine, how embarrasing could this get! “I really hadn’t planed for anyone to move in right now,” I trying to be convince so hard. Then I went inside and stood in front of my room, glancing into her room to discover who she had spoken to while walkign over there. At first I thought it would be her boyfriend – which could have been a wonderful opportunity to communicate to her that I was just friendly of character and not interested in her in some other way (well, you know what kind of interest boys can have in girls they have knwo for about 10-15 seconds).

(while typing this, she knocked on my closed door (her door is open), to ask me how to get onto the internet – I showed her the nerdy way of logging in – without using the widows program by typing funny things on the DOS prompt.)

It was her father, and he was quick to come out of the room and greet me. Now I had to look profesional, I thought, and so I started talking about practical matters of how to divide the space – that is after she had finished telling me that two out of three light bulbs in the kitchen didn’t work (yes, I knew that, but the exotic kinds of lihtbulbs they use in this “designer” student house are extremely hard to get anywhere outside of Asia). I thought about asking her what she was studying, but I decided that it might be too personal, as it had been with the last girl. When we came to the question of how to divide the fridge, and I asked her what part she had taken, she said: “oh, I just put a little bit here and there … I had to throw out a little bit of your stuff. SOME OF YOUR STUFF HAD TURNED A BIT GREEN [emphasis added].” Oh my, could I sink any ower! Green stuff? I had no clue what she was talking about, I had been pretty sure that I had not kept anything overdue in there for a very long time now. “But you can just take a bit of my stuff, if you don’t have enough yourself,” she continued smiling. Yes, she was definetely out to crush me big time! I tried coming up with a few excuses and apologized as much as I possibly could without seemingly excessively strange.

And then she started asking me what I a studying.”I thought: ‘ maybe he is one of those who just pretends to study’,” she explained her first reaction to me not turning up at home ever – still smiling. Now I thought I could ask what she was studying. “Masters in Biology!” – something that actually can give you a job afterwards (and try to compare that to social anthropology)! When asking how far she had come, she misunderstood a bit: “X years in Trondhjem, 1 year in Australia, Y years in Z, …” Impressive, impressive.

Suddenly the freckle face let me leave with the remark: “I think I’ll let you unpack now.” well, and that’s when I started typing this. And not before sitting down did I realize that my clothing probably needed washing as well. Oh well, more about that later, but right now I had a French friend of mine ring the door bell. He does that at nights, and then we walk around discussing life and politics until I get so cold that I just have to go back inside.