Lydia’s Blog

I am currently searching for the seventh apartment of my adult life. Two at Oberlin, one in Pittsburgh, three in Berlin and now, lucky seven in Stuttgart. The other apartments I’ve lived in have either belonged to friendly boyfriends or been provided by employers during gigs.

First of all, Stuttgart is fucking ugly. It was bombed to shit (like many other German cities) in the Second World War, and reconstructed (like many other German cities) with the cheapest and nastiest possible materials in the years following the war. These new buildings tend to be boxy, small-windowed affairs with low ceilings and bad floors. Many of these buildings were given superficial makeovers in the 1980s, lending them a faded, dirty and sad pastel hue on top of their general unsightliness.

As I’ve written, I lived in Berlin’s most trendy, PoMo bubble for the last year or so…full of preposterous boutiques and crawling with Berlin’s young, intellectual leisure class that, oddly enough, seems to often intersect Berlin’s young, intellectual under- or unemployed class. It’s sort of like a grungy, stylish, vibrant enclave littered with bewildered remnants of the area’s original East German tenants.

From the moment I got here, I tried to find a ‘hood like Prenzlauerberg. In Germany they call it “Kiezgefühl”. I asked numerous people who knew both Berlin and Stuttgart and they would unanimously chuckle, shrug, and say “forget it”. A few of the respondents would, after their initial reaction consider my question for an additional second and then say “well, Stuttgart west, I guess. Kind of.”

I looked at my second apartment today. My first in Stuttgart west (where my temporary apartment is also located. See the second paragraph about ugly apartment buildings). It is not, in any way, like Prenzlauerberg. However, it doesn’t immediately raise bile to my throat like most other parts of Stuttgart.

At times it reminds me of a clean, lobotomized version of Brooklyn without any Latinos. Sometimes it looks a bit like Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh. Occasionally I think Georgetown. Lots of old cut-stone buildings and quiet, leafy streets. I remained stunned at the fact that, in a city with so much disposable income, there are so few shops. I don’t even mean indie-label vinyl shops or $120 t-shirt stores…I mean a serious dearth of the kind of shops Germans traditionally hold dear: Bakeries, Newsstands, Döner imbisses and Pharmacies. Residential tends to mean residential in Stuttgart, without a lot of deviation.

And the prices are seriously disappointing. For any New Yorkers reading this, you might want to quit now so as not to risk projectile vomiting onto your computer screen.

My spacious two room (bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom (with bathtub) and hallway) furnished apartment on the absolute best corner in Berlin was costing me, on average with gas and electric, EU 400 a month (like, $470). My monster studio in the shitty Turkish ghetto the year before cost me EU 250 ($305) a month. These prices allowed me to kind of live like a rock star in Berlin. I could go out constantly, buy shoes at will, travel, take cabs…

The fat years are over, as they say here. I saw a dark, small, ugly two bedroom with a tiny balcony overlooking dumpsters yesterday that would cost, all inclusive, EU 515 ($610 or so) a month. Still not a lot, but considering the prices for everything else in this cursed city, and what I’ve grown accustomed to in Berlin…this will be a huge inconvenience.

I’m about to check out a big furnished place what would cost me an impossible EU 800 a month ($1000). This would eat up well over half of my disposable salary per month (what can I say, this glamorous lifestyle doesn’t pay), and destroy my ability to leave this sick excuse for an urban center at will.

The one I checked out earlier, if the winds of landlord luck blow in my direction, I’d probably take. It’s not all that nice, in that it doesn’t have a bathtub, and there are strict rules forbidding WLAN and cordless telephone use…but there was just something about it. Nice old building. Decent wood floors. Tiny balcony overlooking dumpsters (from a considerable height, however). EU 550 a month.

I just don’t think I can do any better.

In general.

UPDATE: I decided to take the EU 800 place. Sure, I’ll have to either sell a kidney or birth a child to a gay couple–but the place really was spectacular. Like a ray of sunshine through the shitclouds, if you will. Come visit when you can.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 16th, 2006 at 3:38 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.