Hello Internet, I haven’t been around for a couple of days. That’s like, so totally not cool, I know. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing offline lately and whenever I logged on, I had to deal with the whole apartment problem.

Tomorrow, finally, my parents and I are going down to Maastricht and Aachen to look at at least three different places. Some of them are in Maastricht and some are in Aachen, although those in Maastricht are way more expensive and I’m kind of leaning towards Aachen, anyway. Then again, I was checking out Aachen-Maastricht train and bus schedules and I couldn’t find any good and affordable connections. As my dad keeps saying, getting to university should be priority one. And while I agree with that, finding an affordable, nice apartment in Maastricht just seems to be impossible.

We’ll be leaving at 7 tomorrow morning and since I’ve been staying up until the early morning these past few days, that should be interesting. I’m kinda sleepy but there’s no way I can go to bed at, I don’t know, 10 tonight.

Also, I haven’t received the application forms from Maastricht University yet and that bothers me because I really want something to be settled already. Right now, it just feels as though I had been doing so much… stuff for this whole Maastricht idea and yet nothing is definite.

I’m off to hit the shower and then start reading New Moon by Stephenie Meyer. I’ve been looking forward to reading the Twilight sequel forever and I really need something to do because even though my mood constantly changes from depressive to excited to scared to easy-going about Maastricht, I do feel a tiny bit nauseaus about going tomorrow.

Two of the people whose apartments I was going to take a look at on Friday just cancelled on me because they already gave it to someone else.

So now I only have one apartment left. It’s exactly 2.22 at night and I have emailed four other people who didn’t upload pictures but are my only chance now.

Seriously, WHAT THE FUCK.

This is what my future home looks like from above. Well, not my apartment but the excitingly international heart of Europe I’ll be moving to - something I’ll get to in a minute. Now, note how everything is majorly confusing and just screams subway exhaust, headache, stuffy air, and GOOD GOD GIVE ME TIME AND SPACE TO BREATH.

Everyone has probably seen one of those public transportation plans, most likely on a school trip or a vacation to The Big City. I remember these from London, Paris, and Berlin.

Paris, especially, because I was caught riding le métro without a ticket since the ticket scanner ate my ticket upon checking in and my friends all still had theirs and so I decided to crawl in through the exit doors since, come on, people like me never do illegal things and surely I woouldn’t get caught, anyway. It’s not like they check each and every métro exit in Paris 24/7.

Turns out, that night they did. We walked right into a freakin’ wall of huge, black Frenchmen who immediately started checking everybody. Now, my French is good when I’m at home reading a text, it’s okay in class. But, as everybody found out soon, it sucks during crisis.

I kept telling one of the policeman - who really looked more like a Turkish nightclub bouncer - that, l’automat, il a mangé mon ticket!, il l’a mangé!, while gesturing wildly. And then I started yelling at my friend S who actually speaks French quite fluently to tell the swell French guy that THE SCANNER ATE MY GODDAMNED TICKET AND SO WHAT WAS A GIRL SUPPOSED TO DO?

I ended up being heavily scorned and, well, bitched at by what seriously appeared to be the French army and paying a fine of 36 euros ($56) which, as should be added, was all the money I had on me for my trip to Paris. This, I had realized long before, was an ridiculously small amount to begin with but that’s another story for another time.

This is where Aachen is on our lovely map. It’s in Germany and very likely going to be my future home town. It has 260,000 inhabitants and I can’t think of anything it is famous for right now except for the fact that it is located right there, smack dab in the middle of, uhm, the aorta of Europe. Or something to that effect. People in Aachen, as I’m certain you have guessed already, speak German.

This is Maastricht. Look very closely and you will find that it’s more or less across from Aachen, it’s on the same latitude as Aachen, only moved a couple of inches to the left. Or the west, actually. And not inches but kilometers. But I don’t have time for those kinda details tonight.

Maastricht is in the Netherlands and has 120,000 inhabitants and is famous for being the center of Europe. There’s a pattern here, I’m sure you can tell. Obviously, people here speak Dutch. It is also home to Maastricht University where I will enrol as a full-time student as of next fall.

Now, to avoid confusion on anyone’s part and clarify what in tarnation I’m talking about when I repeatedly mention the heart of Europe, I blanked out the complicated public transportation part. Only now, one can tell what a crazy place this really is.

There we have Maastricht and Aachen again. Aachen is really close to the Dutch/German border. Maastricht is close to the Belgian/Dutch border but it is also close to Germany because that weird little piece of land belonging to the Netherlands as seen above? It’s only 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) wide. With all this going on, we shouldn’t forget, though, that Aachen is also close to Belgium because it is actually situated right within that Dutch/Belgian/German triangle. And, you know, the Dutch speak Dutch, the Germans speak German and the Belgians speak French.

So, either way you look at it, you feel very unprepared.

But - WILD, right? Fascinatingly perfect and international, to say the least. And convenient, because from Maastricht Brussels (which is Belgium’s capital as any third grader knows) is only a short train ride away. France is a little farther than that but it’s close enough.

If only I will manage to figure out how to get from point A to point B using public transportation, I’ll be good to go.

Picture source for images used in graphics: here.