#WhereILivedWednesday: Haidhauser Straße

Turn Down the Music and Read: One Way... Full Disclosure

#WhereILivedWednesday: Haidhauser Straße

Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants has a meme called “Where I Lived Wednesdays” in which bloggers are invited to reminisce about hovels of bygone days, and link up on her site. Want to play? Just click here and leave your link so everyone can find you…

I moved to Munich at age 22 for my first post-college job. In what I failed to recognize as foreshadowing of how free he would be in imposing outrageous demands on his employees, the company owner promised that I could lodge with one of my new co-workers and his girlfriend for as long as it took to find an apartment of my own. It was very kind of Gerhard and Anna to house me temporarily, an imposition that I’m sure made them as excited to help me look for my own place as I was to not share another dinner that ended with them licking the insides and lids of the yoghurt containers when spoons were no longer enough.

My co-worker somehow found a girl my age who was moving back to her native Brazil from Germany, and was eager to cancel her lease and sell the contents of her apartment, lock, stock, and strudel. Because the German landlady was a stickler for rules (shocker!) she would likely want the place completely emptied before she re-rented it, and it was going to take some tricky talking to get her to agree to our switcheroo on the lease. So Gerhard and I went to the apartment after work one night to check it out and get our stories straight.

The apartment building was in a neighborhood called Haidhausen, not far from my office in Rosenheimer Platz. The building itself was nothing to write home about: boxy and bland, with a narrow cement block landing that led to the sidewalk. And the apartment was on the ground floor, right next to the main entry, with two big windows into which a passerby could conceivably peek. (Wow. I just found it on Google Street View – the white van is parked right next to my windows.) I had moved from Philly, where an apartment situated like that would be highly vulnerable to a break in. In Munich, I was already realizing, I probably wouldn’t have to sweat it. An efficient, punctual streetcar ran down the main street that was perpendicular to where I’d be living, and could drop me off steps from work.

Gerhard and I knocked on the door and the Brazilian girl opened it. We were, thereby, already in the kitchen. It wasn’t so much a galley kitchen as a single counter on the left with a sink, shelves, and a dorm-sized fridge which she was selling too. (In Germany you have to supply your own appliances in an apartment rental, right down to the ‘fridge.) On the right: the bathroom door. Straight ahead, the single room that comprised the rest of the apartment, cunningly furnished with the best Ikea space-saving furniture the Brazilian girl could afford. A couch that became a bed, a desk that was also a dining room table, shelves that could hold clothes or books. It looked like it would take eleventy seconds to clean the whole place.

While Gerhard negotiated with her in German at a linguistic speed it would take me months to achieve myself, I glanced around. It wasn’t just that I would move into this girl’s old apartment. I’d be moving into her entire life, right down to the immersion blender and the egg whisk. I would be filling the immigrant-new-girl-shaped space that the Brazilian was vacating. I’d come to Germany with two pieces of luggage. I wanted everything she had.

Especially the achievement of living in Germany by myself for two years.

At some point in the discussion Gerhard looked at me and raised his eyebrows, indicating the whole space with a nod of his head. “Ja?”

“Ja,” I said, smiling at the Brazilian. Ja what did you say again?

The Bavarian landlady wasn’t happy, but she eventually agreed to our plan, with one iron-clad caveat. I had to empty the apartment down to the drywall when I moved, whenever that would be. I moved in with a blue suitcase and a green duffel bag.

My Haidhauser Straße apartment was the first place I ever lived by myself, and became home base – in the kid’s game sense of the word, a safe haven to rest – for all the exploration I did when I lived in Germany. I found a back way to walk to the office alongside green parks and chic restaurants and never took the streetcar. I met an American girl who was my lifeline when I just needed someone to understand an American pop culture reference. I joined forces with a group of Germans my age who immediately invited me to join their Stammtisch, their standing Sunday night get together at a pub nearby. I fell in love with a German guy who, even if he lived in a different city, was a rock of stability during my time there. I hosted a parade of visitors, grateful that the foldout couch was endlessly adaptable; sometimes the entire floor of the main room was covered in couch cushions to accommodate everyone who happened to be in town, especially during Oktoberfest.

And when, two years later, I felt the same yearning for home that the Brazilian girl had, I threw a going-away part so big that people came and left through the windows straight onto the sidewalk, sat not just at but on the dining room table, mingled in the bathroom because everywhere else was packed. The goody bag? Everyone had to take something from my apartment when they left to help me empty it out, right down to the mini-fridge. Someone is probably still using my immersion blender.

Taken by the tallest German I knew

So even if it was tiny, I was always proud of my Haidhausen studio. I started out with so little that I had to borrow someone else’s life for awhile. But I ended my time there with enough friends to violate the German fire code.

All these years later I have no idea what was on that party playlist, but I’m certain Redhead Kingpin would have made the cut.