Silke meets me at the train station, with a car borrowed from a colleague to transport myself and baggage to what will be my home for the next three months, described in the e-mail correspondence as an apartment at the university guesthouse, with a completely furnished living room, a small kitchen and a bathroom. I imagined a quaint modernized two-room flat in an antiquated building with a common lounge where I would meet people from all around the world.
The reality is a large dormitory building, circa 1970, with empty vestibules, long deserted corridors and no character. The one room has a single bed, a desk with drawers and shelves, a coffee table and chairs. It is clean, has a balcony, a decent bathroom and plenty of storage space, and is just across the road from the Institute (http://www.egm.med.uni-goettingen.de/). But the kitchen is a cubby, the floor is stained gray linoleum, the curtains are
orange, the bed is a single, and there is no dressing mirror. I am taken back to my student days at Yale. The only faces I see as I leave and return to the building are of 18 year olds. I hesitate to unpack, thinking I can do better than this, but efforts to seek more comfortable accommodation arrive at nil. So slowly I settle in, accepting this basic abode as a suitable place for being in solitude and practicing humble simplicity.
After a while I see other grown-ups who seem to live also in the building, and there are other small comforts. So that although there is a noisy main road just a stone’s throw away, and the room overheats and becomes uncomfortably stuffy in the afternoon sun even on cold days, the balcony faces on to a patch of grass dotted with yellow and blue flowers and surrounded by trees that all of a sudden, with the first warm days of spring weather, burst into fresh foliage. Beyond the balcony is a grand tree that is shedding dark-brown curly pods so as to belatedly bud, and as I watch for it to come into its own blossom and leaves, wondering what will come first, a red squirrel scurries along its branches. Or, exploring for a short cut to the bus stop, right around the corner I find a lovely green space with a dry fountain and a statue of a slim curved female figure carrying a pitcher on her shoulder, and there I practice qi gong under the generous canopy of another grand tree that is blooming thick and abundant with luscious pink flowers.
The reality is a large dormitory building, circa 1970, with empty vestibules, long deserted corridors and no character. The one room has a single bed, a desk with drawers and shelves, a coffee table and chairs. It is clean, has a balcony, a decent bathroom and plenty of storage space, and is just across the road from the Institute (http://www.egm.med.uni-goettingen.de/). But the kitchen is a cubby, the floor is stained gray linoleum, the curtains are
orange, the bed is a single, and there is no dressing mirror. I am taken back to my student days at Yale. The only faces I see as I leave and return to the building are of 18 year olds. I hesitate to unpack, thinking I can do better than this, but efforts to seek more comfortable accommodation arrive at nil. So slowly I settle in, accepting this basic abode as a suitable place for being in solitude and practicing humble simplicity.
After a while I see other grown-ups who seem to live also in the building, and there are other small comforts. So that although there is a noisy main road just a stone’s throw away, and the room overheats and becomes uncomfortably stuffy in the afternoon sun even on cold days, the balcony faces on to a patch of grass dotted with yellow and blue flowers and surrounded by trees that all of a sudden, with the first warm days of spring weather, burst into fresh foliage. Beyond the balcony is a grand tree that is shedding dark-brown curly pods so as to belatedly bud, and as I watch for it to come into its own blossom and leaves, wondering what will come first, a red squirrel scurries along its branches. Or, exploring for a short cut to the bus stop, right around the corner I find a lovely green space with a dry fountain and a statue of a slim curved female figure carrying a pitcher on her shoulder, and there I practice qi gong under the generous canopy of another grand tree that is blooming thick and abundant with luscious pink flowers.
