October 3, 2014 — a month has passed since arriving in Munich. The current arrangement is sharing a one-room apartment with the landlord, and the room itself is quite comfortable.
Rent runs 350 euros a month, roughly 47,000 yen, which seems reasonable. From there it is a two- or three-minute walk to the bus stop at Trappentreustraße, and on to the Rolfing training school. The bus pass costs 50 euros a month, about 6,750 yen, and covers trains and trams as well.
Buses come every ten minutes, so there is little waiting. Twenty minutes later comes the stop near the school, Barbarastraße, and a six-minute walk from there.
The school occupies the third floor of a building.
The day begins half an hour before the nine o’clock start, with breakfast taken at the school. There is free wifi, along with fruit, cereal, milk, coffee, tea, and bread, and a refrigerator — convenient. There is a dishwasher as well, and the cups get handled on a student rota, with everyone taking turns at cleaning up.
The room where classes are held is spacious enough for several tables. In class, the teachers write out the sequence of the work by hand on large Post-it sheets, and everything from past sessions is photographed and stored on Dropbox. Related papers and the key points of each class are compiled as PDFs and available digitally — a sign of the times.
Classes run from nine in the morning until six thirty in the evening, with three breaks. The longest, the lunch break, is an hour and a half. There are plenty of organic shops and places to eat nearby, so lunch is never a question.
The group consists of eight students and two teachers, ten in all. Bodywork tends to draw more women, yet for whatever reason every student here is male. It makes for a very concentrated training. And since people have gathered from countries with different cultures, the languages are various as well — a good occasion for encountering different languages and learning about different cultures.
With transport and meals presenting no difficulty, and Munich surrounded by nature, the conditions for concentrated study are fortunate. The training has entered its second half. There is much still worth learning in this place.