It's Off to Work I Go

Today was my first day of work! I guess this makes me officially a German employee, huh? (Well, probably not, considering I'm not making money and I'm just an intern, but a girl can dream.) It was really nice that I already had a chance to visit the office. I decided to walk this morning, since my workplace is very close to my apartment. I probably almost died three times crossing the street (German cars and cyclists wait for no one). I mean, you would think crossing the street in a herd would increase your chances for survival, but taxis and buses would still screech to a hault within feet of hitting large groups of people (who had the right of way, might I add!)

Anyway, work! I arrived and couldn't figure out which door to use, but it all worked out in the end.

I got to set up my own little workspace with a second monitor and a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. I feel like a real computer scientist!! (Except we’ll leave out the part where I sat there for 5+ minutes trying to figure out how to connect everything)

The first day I spent going through an online Angular 2 + NodeJS tutorial. It was a video lecture that you follow along with. So I had my code on one screen and the video on the other. I took lots of notes while I watched and for the most part didn't encounter any issues. My office has free coffee, so I definitely took advantage of that!!

At the very beginning, I felt so cool. “Navigate to the source folder and run npm build” said the video. I put on my imaginary sunglasses, whipped up the Windows command terminal (that black thing with white text), and made it happen. BAM. “Open up a connection on port 3000” the video instructed. Oh yeah, I know how to do that. "Add the component decorater." You got it, video tutorial!

I had come in expecting to feel so lost and hopeless, but here I was totally understanding all the concepts that were thrown my way. It was so amazing. Maybe I have picked the right field after all! :)

It was just me, my supervisor, and another intern from Luxemburg named Claire in the office. The others were out on holiday. For lunch, they introduced me to an app called ResQ. Hotels and restaurants sell their leftover food for a discounted price, and you can get a cheap but nice meal out of it. Unfortunately, we had to wait until after the lunch hour, so we didn't leave the office for food until 2.

We headed down the street and were handed little takeout boxes at the front desk. We proceeded to graze from the hotel buffet. It was actually really good stuff. Lots of fancy cheeses and breads and salads! The meat had been picked over, but I did get a little bit.

Then it was back to the grind. Man, I had so much trouble staying awake after lunch. My free airplane headphones had died, so I was just watching the video with subtitles and no sound. The feeling of power had drained away, leaving just exhaustion in its place. The minutes ticked slowly by until I was finally able to leave. Even though the job was supposed to be until about 6, I didn't want to get up before my supervisor, so I hung around until 6:30 when he finished up.

I was so tired when I got home. Luckily, there was some leftover bulgogi from Sunday! We heated that up and had Kinder eggs to celebrate our first day at work. I tried to work on my travel journal (I’m still so behind), but the day had just taken away all my energy. Christine and Victoria wanted to go out for ice cream, so I reluctantly tagged along. Unfortunately, everything closes really early in Germany. (At least compared to the US). We wandered the streets for a good half an hour, and all the places with giant ceramic ice cream cones outside (gotta be dramatic) were closed. We went to the Mall of Berlin to try and find something. The place closed at 9, and we stepped through the doors at 8:40. No sweat! Except, well, we got lost, I picked up a map in Hebrew, and by the time we found somewhere with ice cream, they were already packing up. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so we ended up going to the Hit Ulrich grocery store and picking out ice cream from the little freezer.

I crashed pretty soon after our failed ice cream adventure. (Not until I’d finished my heavenly vanilla ice cream bar though). I’m still not used to those thick German duvets (I miss my sheets), but luckily I haven’t had any issues falling asleep. It’s hard to say how my internship will pan out this summer. I really like the people I’m working with, but it’s going to be hard to stay motivated after lunch. Hopefully things will get better as I get more challenging tasks! Either way, I’m looking forward to my coming adventures!

(PS - We passed this really pretty building during our ice cream adventures. If I remember correctly from class, this is one of two identcial churches. One is German and the other is French. They were built in 1701 when Berlin had a large French population.)