My brother's visiting me in Germany for five weeks, starting in May. When we were booking the tickets and looking at travel dates, that seemed like a reasonable amount of time. It makes those plane tickets really worth it. As soon as the tickets were booked, I put the official dates into iCal, counted the weeks again, and started second-guessing that final week we tacked back on.
Five weeks of my brother? On my floor, in my room. My highly-dependent-on-other-people-when-in-a-strange-place brother. Without a cell phone. Stuck in my room. For five weeks.
That's not true. There are trips planned for almost every weekend and ten days to be spent in beautiful central European cities. And yet, I was worried. I need to do my homework, I consider myself to be a fairly private person...and what if I got a German boyfriend? (This whole concept of 'getting' boyfriends—ex: "My Mitbewohner tells me I just need to get a German boyfriend, and then I'll really know German."—is strange. But now I'm off track.)
Then I went to Berlin and forgot about my brother amid the excitement of vampire teenage romance movies auf Englisch, sparkly modern architecture, hatred for tour guides, and most importantly, POLAR BEARS. The trip home was almost the entire study abroad program in one train car. I was sick of them. When I got back to Freiburg, I was alone in my room again. Hours at a time. Almost days at a time. I was sick of myself.
I am so excited to have a roommate for five weeks. And he's my brother—I'm used to living with him, day in, day out, even if I haven't for almost a year and a half. He'll yell at me to do my homework (that won't help), but he'll also provide the necessary brief distractions that allow me to keep on working.
Plus I'll always have someone to hang out with. For five weeks, he gets to be my new best friend. I never would have considered myself a "people person." My friends probably wouldn't consider me one, either. But lately I am extremely aware of how much I need people.
2 comments:
I would send him off into the wilds of Eastern Europe with a backpack and 50 Euros. Then again I've never been to Europe so maybe that's a bad idea.
Having a longer-term visitor is definitely an adjustment. Surprisingly, even though Matt was here for 3+ weeks taking up pretty much all of the empty space in my room (feel lucky you live in Vauban, your room is much bigger), I didn't get sick of him at all. But it was really, really nice to have my room back when he was gone...
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