“Good morning Berlin; you can be so ugly, so dirty and grey.” The song pumped through my headphones as I sat on the bus and tried to stay awake. “Guten morgen Berlin; du kannst so hässlich sein, so dreckig und grau.“ Ten in the morning on a Sunday is a perfectly reasonable time to schedule an appointment, right? On an average Sunday I might agree; getting from Zehlendorf, a district in southwest Berlin, to Friedrichshain, a district in the east, should take no more than an hour. But Germany was in the midst of yet another Deutsche Bahn strike, which left the buses and trams the only available modes of transit. Great. Now that hour-long trip was going to last two.

Seven a.m. in Germany in mid-February is by any definition awful, but I desperately needed to make that appointment. Since September I had been living in a student apartment in Zehlendorf. It was barely in Berlin (I could have easily walked to the next city over) and I had to share a kitchen and bathroom with five other students. However at 230€ a month the rent was unbeatable, and the building was nicely situated amongst the small garden plots dotting the city outskirts. I had no plans to move until my return to the US in August. Of course that would have been far too simple, and directly before the December holiday everyone living in the building received an email; our contracts couldn’t be renewed for the next semester, and we would all have to vacate the building by the end of February. I was terrified. I had barely learned to cook.

So to the Internet I went, specifically to wg-gesucht, a house-hunting website that’s essentially a German Craigslist. I didn’t think that speaking German in Berlin would be a plus at all; I thought that it would simply be an expectation. Oddly enough the opposite is true. Thanks to its reputation as both a party city and startup hotspot Berlin attracts thousands of young EU citizens. The tech startups, since they recruit talent from all over the world, use English as the language of business. That combined with endless groups of partiers from the UK (a London-Berlin round-trip flight can cost just $35) has created a dual society in the city. Germans who work in tourism or are university graduates can move between both groups with ease but average German shop owners or plumbers now can’t communicate with many of their customers. Berlin is now a city where job advertisements for baristas or bartenders read “English required – German a plus.”

I quickly learned that the rental market in Berlin is brutal. I sent out about two hundred inquiries. I received four responses. One was an instant no. The last three were willing to grant me viewings, more or less group interviews with everyone trying to outdo the other applicants. Two of these didn’t pan out. As I rode the bus to the last one the only thing I could think about was the threat of not having anywhere to live in two weeks. I was running out of time. So after two hours of travel and five flights of stairs I arrived at my last appointment feeling desperate. The landlord met me at the door; when I introduced myself in German his face lit up as he chatted rapidly with me, but switched to slow and broken English when speaking with the other applicants. I thought little of his relief at first. He had agreed to rent me a room in the apartment! I finally had a place to live!

Speaking German, as it turned out, is what got me the room and made life in Berlin much easier. When the water meters in the apartment had to be replaced, my new non-German roommates couldn’t communicate with the guy from the water company, but I could. I could understand conversations that happened in cafes and on traincars. I could understand when the man leading tours of a former Stasi center spoke of his own experiences being imprisoned. The Berlin I got to know wasn’t the Berlin of nightclubs and hipsters. I got to experience a different city, where the water guy cracks jokes about socialist plumbing, where the elderly woman selling the best Apfeltaschen around has lived under three different governments. It wasn’t the Berlin of movies and music videos; it was the Berlin of Berliners.