It was 3:45 AM. I was sitting outside a barely-post-Soviet train station in Slovakia with everything I owned in two barely-intact suitcases beside me, waiting for the train that was going to carry me to Fuck-Only-Knew-What. It was at this point when I finally began to ask "is 'having a story to tell,' really worth this?"
So, it's been a long time since I wrote. A spate of depression will do that I suppose. And in between being bombed by the Russian Army, bouncing all over fucking Europe for half a year, never able to put down roots without a visa clock ticking over my head, and finally having to formally liquidate my company (because Chinese students are assholes and Europe's wifi connections are too shitty to complete a single lesson without an interruption), depression is rather unsurprising.
To make a long and idiotic story short, from the day I landed in Romania I started losing Chinese classes at a rate of about one per week. By the end of July I'd had to lay off both teachers who work for me and I myself was making a grand total of $1200 monthly, working a grand total of 8 hours a week. The whole "live off of online lessons" paradigm presumes you will be able to get enough students to survive. Of course all my usual clients kept insisting they were recruiting and more classes were "coming soon," but "soon" never comes for the Chinese.
I closed my tutoring company completely. I went back to Ukraine, accepting a job at an international school (housing on-campus). The school was hit by an artillery barrage including three Kalibr missiles the day I arrived. My US passport was in my apartment, which was destroyed. The US embassy's response was "Germany takes refugees from Ukraine even if they are non citizens. Go there."
Such helpful advice from my own government. Oh, and they wouldn't process a replacement passport at the US embassy in Ukraine either. For that too, I had to go to an embassy in Europe. Well then, Germany it is... as a fucking refugee. I think the route leaving Ukraine was something like Lviv - Bratislava - Budapest - Vienna - Frankfurt - Antarctica - Kalamazoo - Mars - Jimmy Hoffa's Grave - Atlantis - The End of the Fucking Rainbow - A Baboon's Ass - Dusseldorf, in that order.
So, I arrived in Dusseldorf, Germany, on the 8th of August. From there I registered with Germany's Ukrainian refugee system and was told to start off by going to a nearby city called Bohum. I went to where they told me the bus to Bohum was. That was 9:30 AM and I had been on train after train after train with naught in between but rat-infested stations for the past 38 hours. After waiting there for 7 more hours, I finally asked "when does the bus come?" The answer was "wait a minute, I'll check...
...
...
...Oh, I'm sorry. That bus doesn't run anymore."
This set the tone for the whole fucking experience here in Germany. I have learned that the company's refugee system has a help center in a place called Hellenwaite. So if anyone from Ukraine who is seeking a new life in Germany has a problem, they can go to Hellenwaite (say it out loud and you'll get it).
Anyway, after making my own way to Bohum via Germany's train system (which makes the God-damned Chinese look like masters of organization and efficiency), I arrived at 8 PM and the in-processing staff had gone home at 5 PM. How nice. So I went BACK to Dusseldorf where they had overnight emergency accommodations and went to Bohum the next morning at the asscrack of dawn. Once I got to Bohum, I went through five hours of "hurry up and wait" going from line to line to line, before being put on a bus that then began a four hour journey up into the mountains. When we got to what had once been a resort but was now run by the Red Cross (a tiny little burg called Schmallenberg), we were all dropped into another waiting room. I was there until 3 AM, when they finally put me in a room.
By the way, this was Wednesday (now Thursday morning), and my last meal had been a McDonalds hashbrown on Monday morning, and before that, lunch on Sunday. When they finally showed us where the cafeteria was, it turns out that every "meal" in the place was a roll, a slice of cheese and a slice of salami. If we wanted to buy anything ourselves, it was a 4 km walk up a mountain through wolf-infested woods to the nearest Rewe grocery store (and having made the trip there and back too late one night the following week and ending up coming back under no illumination except the ironically full moon, I can vouch for the wolves; God-be-thanked for a passing convoy of semis).
I won't go into what a nightmare it was to discover after all this that I rooming with a 21 year old Kazakh who spent every night with his hands down his boxers grunting and moaning and drooling while he jacked off and stared at me.
Needless to say I spent the entire night in the chair on the opposite side of the bedroom, VERY much awake. When I complained about the situation to the administrators, I was told "homophobia has no place in European Society" and was threatened with arrest if I, quote, "continued showing a discriminatory attitude."
I then spent the entire day today being lectured by Security Guards because the fucking pervert from Kazakhstan, who spent all night jacking off and staring at me, complained that I was making him feel uncomfortable by complaining to security about him. My response was to demand a meeting with the head of the facility. When he appeared, I didn't bother with preamble. I stated, calmly, "you know, I realize my grandmother was Jewish but I really thought Germany got over this shit in the '40's."
His face turned a delightful shade of purple, and the Kazakh was moved to another room. Well, for a while. And when they brought him back a few days later, he at least went into the bathroom to jack off instead of doing it while lying on the opposite bed and staring at me. One small step toward civilization.
So anyway, this was the situation for about two weeks. On Wednesday the 24th, I was awakened at about 6 AM by a security guard beating on the door asking "yoo ah A-r-r-r-r-toor R-r-r-ro-beard?"
"...Uh, no, but if what I've seen of Germany so far is any indication that's probably as close as you are going to get to getting my name right. What?"
"You are tr-r-r-r-ransfer. Five minute. Pack now!"
Well good morning and fuck you very much.
So I packed and went downstairs, and I have no idea why the bastard was in such a fucking hurry because when I got downstairs, the out-processing staff wasn't even there. Turns out they clock in at 8 AM if they're on time, and they weren't. By 11:30 AM, I was standing in front of a clerk who handed me a packet of papers and a nine-euro-ticket (an all-pass for Germany's trains, which is only available in summer) and said "you will go to... eh... Hellenthal. It is a smaller place than this so you probably will have your own room. Follow these directions."
I wondered for an instant what kind of place was smaller than the village of Schmallenberg and my mind conjured up images of a handful of Mongolian yurts surrounded by yaks. I think I would have preferred it that way, though where I ended up does have goats roaming free in place of the yaks. The "have your own room" part turned out to be a bald-faced lie but I'm getting used to that from the desk-gremlins who run Germany. Anyway, looking at the paper there was a convoluted set of directions including six busses and nine trains, ending at a bus stop which, I would later find out, was at the end of a dirt road in the middle of the woods. I'm not saying that in hyperbole either. So, after travelling for the rest of the day, I arrived at Ye Olde Village in Ye Olde Woodes at 7:30 PM. It was a Christ-forsaken little hamlet that looked like Hansel and Gretel would have said "let's get the fuck out of here and take our chances with the witch." Fortunately there was one random dude there who happened to speak a bit of English. When I asked him where I was and explained the situation, he pointed to a nearby house and said "that's the inn. They have taken a few refugees from Ukraine."
Went inside. Nobody speaks a damned word of English, Russian, Ukrainian, Chinese, Latin or French. I tried all of the above. When I finally got through to them using Google translate, turns out they have no record of me and nobody has contacted them about booking anyone from Ukraine since May. Oh, and they're fully booked. And they're the only inn in town. And the last bus was the one I rode in on.
They called the mayor of the village (I shit you not), mainly because he was the only government official who spoke English, and when he looked at my papers, he said "I see the problem." Now brace yourselves, dear readers, for this because I will now introduce you to Germany's crowning cultural achievement: they have achieved a new and hitherto unknown level of dumbfuckery, even for government workers.
The place I was to be transferred to from Schmallenberg was in the town of Hellenthal (note the 'thal' at the end), in the state of Nordrein-Westphalen [North Rhine - Westphalia] and they had given me directions to Hellental (note the 'tal'), a village in the state of Saxony. And after checking the directions, after explaining each step to me, after checking their computers multiple times, NOBODY noticed the error. Imagine if the authorities in America arranged for a refugee to stay in Miami, Florida, and then gave them detailed, step-by-step directions to Miami, Oklahoma.
To get where I was supposed to be, from where they sent me, was going to be a 17 hour train trip, and it would have to begin at 5 AM the following morning. Meanwhile, there was no place in town where they could house a foreigner except a police-operated refugee shelter. I must say with no small irony that the police-operated refugee shelter was the least shitty accommodation I have stayed in since arriving in Germany.
Fortunately the cops were not assholes. They seemed shocked, and were sympathetic. They paid (or rather, they had their department pay) for me to get a meal at the diner (one of only three hot meals I have had since arriving in Germany, and the only food I had between Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon that week) while they waited to find which city's shelter I'd be at that night. Oh, and they spoke English. So, the ride to the shelter in the thriving, cosmopolitan metropolis of Holzminden was pleasant enough. The next morning, they brought me to the train station bright and early and I caught the first of a stupid number of trains that would take me to Hell........enthal.
I won't bother with the journey. Trains I was on were late, making me miss connections and have to catch later trains. Trains I was supposed to catch, were cancelled. If you've travelled in Germany, you know the drill. In the end I had to sleep in a tent shelter at Koln banhof Thursday night and catch an early train from there to Kall, where I boarded a bus to Hellenthal, the following morning. Once I got there to the office of the rathaus bureau (for those who are unfamiliar with German phonetics, it's pronounced "rat house," I shit you not) I got treated to a "where were you? You were supposed to be here Wednesday" chewing out by their staff. By this time, I was through being nice. I dropped my bag and screamed "I fucking know that! I was late because YOUR colleagues in Schmallenberg were too fucking stupid to know their way around their own God-damned nightmare of a country, and they gave me a day's worth of directions to a city in the wrong fucking state, you cock-sucking son of a piss-puking neanderthalic bitch!"
He was apparently not accustomed to any reaction other than shame and contrition, and he backed down. Thus began another several hours of sitting in front of a government muckity-muck as his incompetent fingers went clickety-clickety-clack all over a keyboard typing absolutely fuck-all for several hours. HE did attempt to make what he seemed to think was pleasant small-talk. For instance, he asked "have you ever visited Germany before."
"Nein."
"Aaaah you speak some German. Gut, gut.... Have any of your family ever been to Germany before?"
"Well yes. Several of my great-uncles came here with a lot of their friends once."
"Oh, gut! When was that?"
"1944."
It was like a movie, watching the imbecilic smile slowly fade from his sheeplike face as what passes for realization slowly came over him, culminating in him visibly swallowing and audibly clearing his throat before suddenly finding that his computer screen required more attention than he'd been giving it.
Anyway, they ensconced me in what I will generously call a dorm, in a village called Udenbreth on the Belgian border. There are two busses per day in and out of this place (three if you count the one that is only for students), and they only run if you call the bus terminal and say "yes, I need bus 839 to actually run." And even then, whether they send it or not depends on whether enough people call to request the daily route, to make it worth sending the bus. Oh, and the bus company has 2 employees who speak English and it's a gambler's throw whether they are there to answer the phone.
The bathroom sink here has no pipes so the water drains onto the floor. We're told to collect it in a bucket and use it to flush the toilet since the lever rarely works. This is the situation in the one bathroom that is on a floor for 26 people to use. We have an oven that occasionally works, no microwave, and it's a moot point because the only so-called "grocery store" nearby (at the opposite end of the aforementioned bus route) doesn't really sell anything but pretzels, onions, potatoes, kit-kats and beer. The church right next door has an ungodly loud bell that chimes every hour on the hour and the half hour, including through the night, and at 6 AM, noon, and 6 PM it rings about 120 beats per minute for 9 minutes straight. No idea why.
I have been in this country a month. In that time, have eaten three hot meals, two of which came from McDonalds. Most meals have been missed altogether because I was sitting in a line at someone's desk during the brief period when the cafeteria was open so I was not able to get my prison-ration. I've slept an average f five hours per night, and that five hours has not once been uninterrupted. I am for all intents and purposes in confinement, in conditions that would not be considered acceptable for a prison in the US (as a former Corrections Officer I say this from experience and I am speaking quite seriously and literally), despite having committed no crime, and have been denied access to the Consular offices of my country.
I used to think China was the most pathetically backward, idiotically bureaucratic, disorganized third-world clusterfuck of a country I would ever have the misfortune of living in. Then I saw Germany. To be honest, I really, really wish I'd stayed in Kharkiv and just dealt with the war. For now, all I want from Germany is to just survive long enough to get to the US consulate in Frankfurt to get a replacement for my passport and then I am completely, fucking, DONE with Europe. I cannot truthfully say I have had a single positive day anywhere on EU soil, and I'd sooner go back to China than deal with a union so revolting that even its initials are pronounced "Ewww!"
The experience has helped me understand a missing facet of American history that I used to wonder about though. I used to wonder "you know, for most of the last 500 years, North America was a bunch of wilderness. What made people in Europe look around and say 'fuck this place. I think I'll take my chances in the woods with the bears.' " Well, after 3 months in Poland, 2 in Romania, and 1 in fucking Germany, I can finally say "ah. Now I get it. And the bears aren't looking so bad right now."