Today I wanna share with you guys some series I’ve watched on Netflix and really liked. I love suspense/thriller series, so this post will be based on these type of genre.
I also love documentaries, but I decided to make a separate post for that, so it doesn’t get mixed.
Another thing you should know is that I don’t have the patience for long series or series that ends without an explanation, demanding a second season. If the show is from Netflix is even worst, because you will usually finish watching the show in one week (or less lol), and the second season usually comes up after 2 years. By then, I will have forgotten everything about the story and the chances of me watching it are zero.
So the series below are short, with a proper end and perfect to binge-watch on the weekend!
Quicksand
Quicksand is a Swedish show (btw, I’m loving that Netflix is producing more series from different countries) based on a book by the same name.
“In the aftermatch of a school shooting, 18 year-old Maja Norberg is taken into police custody and told she’s being charged with murder”
It’s a very short show with only 6 episodes of 40-50min each. It really gets your attention and makes you want to know what will happen with Maja. Although the show is centered in teenagers, it has the right amount of suspense that doesn’t let it be too teen or even too silly to watch.
Unbelievable
Unbelievable is a US show based on true events about a series of rapes in Washington State and Colorado.
“Unbelievable follows on Marie, a teenager who was charged with lying about having been raped, and the two detectives who followed a twisting path to arrive at the truth.”
The show has 8 episodes of 40-50min each. It’s very evolving, the fact that is based on true events, makes everything more interesting, and revolting as well. The series also shows a bit of Marie’s past to make you understand why people do not believe in her.
The Stranger
The stranger is a British show and very new – it was released in Jan/2020.
“Adam Price is a happily married father of two whose life is turned upside-down after a stranger tells him a secret about his wife. The revelation catapults him into a world of danger.”
Is the type of show that I was sure that it would need a second season to unfold everything. For my happy surprise, the main questions are answered in the 8 episodes, yet leaving some cues for a second season, if ends up happening.
The Sinner
The sinner is quite famous and should definitely be in this list! Starring Jessica Biel, who is also one of the producers of the show, the drama starts when Cora, a young mother, stabs a man to death with no apparent motive and without later being able to remember committing the crime.
It’s very intriguing and it makes you wanna watch one episode after the other! The sinner has 2 seasons, but one season is not related to the other one, since it tells two different stories having only the detective as a permanent character.
The second season is also very good and worth to be watched 🙂
That’s it for now! I think that those series are quite good and makes you do not leave your couch until you finish!
I hope you liked and if you watch any of those series, please let me know, I would love to hear your thoughts!
Today I wanna share with you the amazing Saturday I had discovering a new place in my own city!
The initial plan was to take the train (I love taking trains! And since the lockdown, I wasn’t able to go anywhere) to go to a nearby city called Haltern am see. It’s a 20 minute train ride from my city and it has a little beach in there, so my boyfriend and I thought it would be the perfect mini getaway.
When we arrived at the train station, we found out that for a round trip in a 20 minute ride to our destination, it would cost us 24.00€! It’s not extremely expensive, but we think is not worth it for such a close destination and that we could go to a bigger city for the same price. So we decided to abort the plan 😦
Our disappointment lasted only a few minutes since we started to check the map and first we thought about going to the Zoo (which was also vetoed due price as well lol) and then we decided to just walk in the lake we have here in Münster – the Aasee. The lake is quite famous and we always go there, but this time we decided to go beyond our usual place and explore a bit better.
For our surprise, we had the best time discovering this part of our own city. We found out a mini forest which is something we love so much and have been looking for a while now.
A mini farm we found in our way
Happy explorers!
I have been living here for two years and to still find new places to go is always amazing 🙂
We spent the mid morning/early afternoon walking and after we were done, we found a bar and decided to stop for a drink and to eat something.
I must say that it was not the best pizza of all times, but the view + our hunger, made it great!
After that we made our way back home happy that our train ride didn’t work out!
I’m now starting to plan our first trip since the lockdown! I’m thinking about Hamburg, which is very close by and with lots of nice things to do. So I will definitely come back to tell you about that too 😀
That’s it 🙂 a very short post to just show a bit of my weekend. Ah, if you liked the nature pictures, you should check my bf’s instagram @pimbaholic and check out more!
Today I would like to share with you some tips for those who want to find a place to live in Germany or just have the curiosity to know how the process works in here.
I need to start by saying that I will be telling my experience in finding a place in the city I live, Münster, but the websites, tips and process applies to the whole Germany.
And before we really get started, another thing I have to point: IT’S👏🏼 NOT👏🏼 EASY!👏🏼 – I live in an university city and it can take you several months to find the right house due the high demand.
Where to Start?
There are a few ways to find a flat/room/house around Germany. The first one – and probably the best/most effective one is, through people. There’s always someone who knows someone that is offering a place. So as soon you get here, let people know you are searching for a place!
Besides that, here are the main websites where you can take a look and start your search:
Yes, eBay! When you live in Germany, eBay will be your best friend! You can find everything, second hand furniture, free furniture (this deserves a whole new post, I need to tell you how I furnished 90% of my house on eBay!), clothes and flats!
This is how it looks like 🙂
You can first register (pink highlighted square on the right) and then click on Immobilien – the second pink square on the left, and start looking for what you want! You can select a lot of filters to find the type of place you want.
Unfortunately this eBay doesn’t have the English version available What I do is to open the site in Chrome, then activate the translation to English and voilà!
I must say that this is not the most popular website to find houses, but it was the one I found mine (I will share my experience at the end) so it’s the reason why I included here.
WG is one of the best ones when you wanna find a place, specially if you are looking to rent a room in a shared flat/house.
They also have the option to switch languages to English and Spanish – just scroll all the way down on the website and you will see the option to change languages, which makes things a bit easier for us 🙂
As you can see from the image, is kind of the same thing as eBay, but here you can choose to find a flat-share, 1 room flat, flats or houses.
I like this website because it’s very easy to navigate and people really put an effort when advertising their places. They will tell a little bit about themselves and also tell what they expect from you as a flatmate or as a tenant.
This one is very similar to WG-Gesucht, but you won’t have the option to change the website to English.
Just an extra info: WG-Gesucht and WG-Suche are mainly focused on shared flats. Of course that you can still find flats and houses, but that’s their main focus 🙂
This one is a very broad website to find places, you can find places from flat until nursery homes!
Writing your Profile
Once you know where to find a place, you need to have a good profile. Make sure to have as complete as possible, with pictures, your e-mail, phone number and the most important: a nice letter!
Present yourself, inform where you are from, you age, the languages you speak, your hobbies, what brings you to Germany, for how long you are here for, what you like to do in your free time, if you are a smoker or not and if you have pets (very important info in here, since some places don’t accept smokers and/or pets).
After that, read carefully people’s ads, since in some of them they will ask you to inform something extra that you might not have it in your standard letter. Is also nice to make each application personalized, insert the person’s name and something else you found nice about the room/flat that got you interested in applying for the place.
Visiting a Room/Flat
After you apply for a room/flat, the landlord/room owner will schedule a day so you can visit the place. Most of the times they will inform the same day/time for a certain amount of people who also applied for the place, so don’t be scared if you get there and you see 4/5 people checking the place as well – as I said, is not easy and the competition is high!
Make sure to check everything and ask all the questions you have! (I can make a separate post just for the most common questions when renting a place). This is the place you will live, so make sure you know everything about it!
If you are visiting a room, make sure to talk to the flatmates as well, see if you like them and if your interests are aligned with theirs – it’s very important to have flatmates that you get along with, makes the whole flat sharing experience better, or less stressful hahaha
Documents for Application
After checking the place, you will apply for it. The required documents will depend a lot from place to place. But from my experience and the people I know, they will ask you for a copy of personal documents, an income proof, the SCHUFA (SCHUFA is a German private credit proof that you can request in your bank – it costs around 30.00€) and sometimes they will ask you to have a house insurance as well.
The documents can variate from case to case, but those above are the most common ones.
After this, they will analyze your profile and your documents and will give you an answer if you got it or not 🙂
My Experience
I’ve been living in Germany for two years and lived in two different houses. My first house was a rented room in a shared flat with a german girl. A person in the company I work was leaving the room and I was informed that it was available. I lived with this girl for one year until we both decided to leave the apartment and move to another place – she found a place closer to her work and since she was moving out, I decided to look for a place for myself instead of finding a new flatmate.
The story of my second flat is an exception, because things happened very fast and the place is a rare find.
I found my flat on eBay Kleinanzeigen. I sent a message to the landlord and the visit was on the following week. When I got there to visit the flat – I kid you not – there were at least 10 people checking the place as well. The flat is very well located and with a good price for the location/size.
Everyone was speaking german and I was the only non-german speaker. My boyfriend who went with me told me, “Lari, there’s no way that you will get this place, forget about it”. OH WELL, I sent my application and on the following week I was signing the contract! lol this is really an exception because usually it doesn’t happen this fast and landlords usually prefers people that can speak in German for communication purposes.
BE AWARE OF SCAMS!
Before I finish this post I must warn you about scams. They exist and very much common in those websites.
If the flat is very nice, perfect size, fully furnished, low rent – be suspicious! They will usually ask you to make a deposit into another person of your trust in western union or any other transaction website. They will also claim that they are not in town, therefore they can’t show you the flat and they will be so very very nice with you. So be aware of that and don’t fall for this, if you’re in doubt, start asking more information to the person you are talking to, like their phone number, a contact of the previous tenant… I’m pretty sure they will stop replying to you 🙂
I guess that’s it! I hope I was able to cover most of the process of finding a house here in Germany.
Please let me know if there’s anything else you would like to know! In the future I can make a post about what to ask in an interview to your landlord, and another one on finding cheap/second-hand furniture – which I love doing it! 🙂
It’s been so long since my last post (3 years, to be more precise)! To maintain this domain, I pay an yearly subscription to WordPress, and every May I receive an e-mail informing that I will be charged for the domain.
This year I got curious and started checking my blog again and it gave me a feeling of happiness that was very weird. I got an urge to do something with this blog and to write about everything and nothing at the same time lol
I can admit that consistency here is not my best quality. But every time I write, or come back here and see everything, makes me really happy so I decided to once again give it another try.
With no pressure or commitment, I will write again. To talk about what has been happening with me and share tips with whoever is interested 🙂
A lot happened since my last post and slowly I will share a bit of what happened since 2017. But for now, I would like to say that I left Italy 2 years ago – in 2018, and since then I’ve been living in Münster, Germany! It has been a very crazy experience and I can’t wait to share the most I can here 🙂
I know that these days with Instagram, Twitter and Youtube, blogs lost the majority of their readers and no one has time or desire to stop their lives and read a blog, even if it’s just for 5 minutes. – A little thought here: it’s crazy how we’ve become so lazy with internet, no? the less to read, the better. Information needs to come fast, easy and with not much effort, please. Sometimes we don’t even have the patience for more than 5 Instagram’s stories. Crazy times.
But for those who are interested, I will be sharing my thoughts, a part of my life, some tips regarding living in Germany, traveling around Europe and whatever more that comes to my mind!
This time I will write in English. The majority of the people around me these days has either English as their main language or is the only common language with me. And it will also be a good practice for me as well 🙂 So yes, grammar errors will come! Please feel free to correct me 🙂
I’m feeling quite rusty, I must say! But I will keep this blog updated and try to make the best out of this 🙂
What I do is to open the site in Chrome, then activate the translation to English and voilà!
larifreitas.com 