The flatmate

I am the first to admit that I have never lived in a share flat before - in Germany, they're known as WGs. Well, not for longer than a month anyway. I've seen my fair share though from hanging out with friends in Berlin, and crashing on various couches - from small WGs with only one or two flatmates, to the relatively huge, with up to five flatmates. I've heard about a lot of different styles of flatmate, from the socialites to the hermits, from the cleaning freaks to the slobs, and everything in between.

My new flatmate though - strictly temporary, so don't get all worked up that I haven't yet sent a Hamburg address out to everyone - is... well, interesting. He's about in his mid 30s, I think, Bangladeshi, and works the afternoon/night shift in a restaurant on the harbour in Hamburg. He cooks a lot of curry - understandable, being from that area - but the way I knew wasn't by him telling me. Rather, by the yellow stains in the kitchen. Not just around the stove from the night before. No. These are stains that have been there for months, if not years. I know - I tried to scrub, and started to destroy my fingers before making any impact on the stains. And it's not just a few. They're all over the stove, on the rangehood, on the counter, on the side of the fridge adjacent to the stove, on all of the light-coloured utensils, and on the bottom of all of the crockery.

And then there's the cutlery. Most people use the cutlery drawer, some people use a cutlery dispenser or a rotating hanging contraption for their forks, spoons, etc. No. In this flat, there is a bucket half full with water on the kitchen floor: every utensil in the kitchen was in this bucket of water when I came into the kitchen to cook on the first night I was there. No idea if they're clean or dirty or somewhere in between. I removed my jewellery from my right hand, gritted my teeth and reached in to grab some essentials: one fork, one sharp knife, one wooden spoon, and a normal spoon. None of the crockery matches, so after having washed all four of these carefully with hot water, detergent and a scourer, I put them in the drawer and made note of their identifying marks.

Like I said, this place is temporary.