Accomodation and papers

I arrived in Germany. Good. But I have no place to stay! What to do now? Actually, I did have a place to stay for a few days. But, still, the first priority was to find accommodation.
I was really lucky to have a friend that could help me with the local stuff. As mentioned before, the English language is not the strong point here. That is why I started the saga of papers in Germany.
It is a known fact that when you move to a new place you need to make tons of papers for various reasons. And they always go in the same order. You must have a medical insurance in order to register to the University (or get a work permit). After you get the medical stuff done, you need to make a bank account (at least it's not BRD, the worst bank I have ever dealt with). After you finish with the bank (yeah, online banking rullz even if it's in German :)) you can, finally, make a rental contract. However, there might be some permutations in this order, since the rules tend to bend according to the situation. And, so, I found a place to stay in some remote corner of the city. The first thing to ask was about the Internet connection. And there was one. :) Good enough for living...
Good side about the papers was that Romania is in the EU and you don't need to justify too many things to have a bank account or why are you here. Bad side, at least about the bank, is that they don't give you a VISA/MASTERCARD, but an EC card, meaning Electronic Cash, which is a card useless for online shopping. And you have to make a separate request in order to get a VISA card. Also, all the papers or services have only German language choice. Kind of limited.

First impression

First choice I had to make was about how to get to Germany. Since I wasn't going into a big city, but to a rather isolated small city, I had to find some convenient way of getting there. From the multitude of travel routes I finally decided to take the shortest one, meaning a flight from Iasi to Frankfurt with the always "lovely" company TAROM. And from there to take a train directly to Saarbruecken. Said and done. There are a number of different ways for getting here, but this is the shortest route that I could find, the longest being a bus ride from Iasi (not that comfortable or pleasant...).
So I arrived in Germany. First issue: I don't speak German!! Big problem. Since the city is kind of isolated, the people tend not to learn any foreign language, so you are stuck with German. Good thing my sign language wasn't rusted. :) It came in handy while in Turkey. It did came in handy in Germany, also.
As a first impression, I was amassed by the infrastructure in transportation here. What I also liked was the colors. It may sound weird, but living in the dusty Cyprus with mainly yellow colors, one comes to appreciate the green, red or any rusty color different than yellow. :) I really liked that they have so many woods and green places.
And, finally, what impressed me the most was the architecture of all the places in Germany. It is a big change coming from the famous communist buildings with 10-stories crammed apartments. I love the neatly aligned houses with gardens and flowers. The city looks like a well-organized place. There are exceptions, like Frankfurt, but if you just take a train or a car and roam around you understand what I mean.
And the roads are not full of holes. :D

The times before arriving to Germany

About 3 weeks ago I moved to Germany. More specifically, to a small town, called Saarbrücken. This small town is situated in the Saarland region, the smallest in Germany. It looks like a small dot when you look on the whole Germany map.
Why did I move? Because I want to follow the courses of a Master in Computer Science here, at Universität des Saarlandes. This was the first reason. Other reasons would be that I wanted to have a change in my life and that I wanted to see how is it to live in Western Europe. After all, almost two years of living in Cyprus should be enough to get an idea.
While leaving Cyprus I had the "opportunity" to see the true Cypriot working class mentality and stupidity ranging from a "I forgot to send the documents to the bank" excuse and having a climax with "Oops! It seems we misread your travel plan for going home and did not see that you live in Iasi!". I can't say it was such a pleasant leaving, but at least I had some fun with my friends in the last days.
Before coming to Germany, I did go home for a week. It was such a pleasant week. I got to meet many friends and I didn't have to work afterwards. :)
I left for Germany with mixed feelings. On one hand I was excited to try a new life, on the other hand I was a bit scared of going to an unknown place and starting over. But I guess that the excitement was more powerful.