Greek Reading and a Recycling Yard Journey

Waking up for an 8:30 a.m. class on a Tuesday has turned into a far less gruesome prospect, by comparison, now that I am also waking up for an 8:15 a.m. class on Mondays. So I arrived at the university this morning, only around 3 minutes late, in good spirits.

The previous professor had left the chalkboard written upon, although the Greek professor is allergic to chalk dust – a simple misunderstanding in her eyes that was easy to fix, but an awkward beginning to the day nonetheless. And three windows gaped open and let in the triumphant roar of lawn maintenance machinery shortly after class began: the first two windows were easy to close, but the last one would not budge.

Nonetheless we forged ahead and began reading a 20th century children's story together.

I'd already copied out a little over half of the story by hand, and annotated the vocabulary, last year. Fortunately I rediscovered the notebook I'd used, read it through again to refresh my memory yesterday, and felt superbly prepared this morning.

A beautiful wine-coloured golden light poured over the turn-of-the-century buildings and the trees, on the way to and from university: yellow leaves rustling down in the breeze like gold flakes in a river, while the sky was a faint autumnal blue.

Afterward, I took the U-Bahn to drop off rags and an old/malfunctioning(?) Intel Pentium processor at the recycling depot. The orange dumpsters at the recycling yard harmonized bombastically with the autumn colours. But the sight palled because the depot was temporarily closed: two flatbed trucks, with pincers that fit into loops on the metal holders and lifted them, were edging forwards and backwards gingerly in the enclosure, switching out the dumpsters and containers. Bitte haben Sie Geduld ('please be patient') said the sign on the locked orange gates.

A long queue of pedestrians, cars, and soon a cyclist had formed at the gates, Fast bis zum Krematorium! ('almost to the cemetery') as a woman who had been waiting for over an hour commented.

A little drama was had.

It was almost as good as a play to wait, as blue-and-white Hertha BSC flags waved at us from inside the recycling yard.

A random assortment of people brought a random assortment of unwanted items: wicker chairs, IKEA dresser drawers without the dresser, a faux-bronze floor lamp, roughly a cubic metre of broad-leaf hedge trimmings, a pair of holey socks, an unglamorous grey wall-to-wall carpet roll that was taller than the man who carried it, ...

We exchanged amused or irate glances — I'd been through the process before and had only had to wait 15 minutes or so, so I chose to be amused. A few of us indulged in more obvious drama and swapped gossip.

Then the dreaded Containerwechsel was done.

An orange-suited recycling expert courageously ventured closer, and unlocked the gates for us. We squeezed in through the gateway rather like a reluctant marshmallow through a narrow tube. Then, one heave of an item into a dumpster at a time, good humour was restored and our physical burdens vanished.

"Es is' jeden Tag det Gleiche," a woman had murmured to her companion while passing us on the sidewalk.

(And now I need to go off, to do more Spanish homework.)