Sunday 10 August 2014

First Week at Work

Hallo zusammen,

I am currently sat in my room on a Sunday morning, my lie-in rudely interrupted by the little boy from the flat above who is a fan of early-morning tantrums. But no matter, I have the whole day to relax, write this blog and clean the flat a bit more, which right now seems like bliss. 

So my first week at work is vorbei! It went really well and is actually more interesting than I expected. The office is nice, there's about 9 of us, though I've only met 7 so far, and we speak a mixture of German and English, though mainly German.

I do a mixture of translation and checking other people's translations: currently more of the latter but I like the puzzle of trying to figure out if what is on the page in front of me is the best it could be. It usually is, but sometimes you get a little thrill when you spot something to improve. (Sad, I know). My German and French are getting a workout too, I've already learnt a lot of new vocab, it feels like such a natural extension of my degree.

The best bit is that, when I don't have any big projects on I can search out my own smaller projects to translate/correct. You are constantly communicating with people in the other branches and it's such a friendly atmosphere.

Anyway, I feel like I'm going to learn a lot about the translation business here, giving me a very informed decision about if that career is for me, which is the one of the main purposes of this internship anyway.

But of course, I'm not one for hanging around at home in the evenings: I've been doing plenty more city-exploring, see photos below!




The Elbe strand beach at Blankensee. Very strange, as you'll be sat there sunbathing and then a MAHOOSIVE freightship will come past, and the water recedes by about 30 metres before coming back in a huge wave, soaking a poor family that was busy enjoying their belegte brötchen.

Not very clear in the picture but this is the Rote Flora house in the Schanzenviertel, which has been squatted since 1989. My couchsurfers and I attempted to go in during the "Offnungszeiten" on a Monday, before it was kindly explained to us that those times were for people who had business at the house, as being able to randomly wander in wasn't really the point of a squat. Oops.

The harbour is a lovely place to hang out at night, I've been to several bars of an evening lately but this photo was actually taken just sat on the wall with a friend, our feet dangling over the water, drinking an Astra (local beer) and watching the sun go down, very nice.

One of the best things about Hamburg is the sheer amount of parks - I keep discovering new ones and during the summer they have plenty of open-air cinemas, waterfall light shows etc. You really get the sense that the Hamburg folk get the most as possible out of their harbour, industrial city. Southampton could really learn A LOT from Hamburg on these matters!

A few little anecdotes from this week:

Geldbestrafung der HVV (fined by the local transport)

Typical German story this: I was shattered on Thursday so got the u-bahn to work and back, which is only 3 stops. I had it in my head somehow that 3 stops or less was a Kurzstrecke (short stretch) ticket, at €1.50. The next ticket up is local transport ticket at €2. Anyway, I got home and blocking the way out of the station was a wall of people. A bit startling of course but I had my ticket still in my hand, and happily passed it over to the middle-aged woman with an official badge and an expression like dirt. Of course, I wouldn't be telling this story if it had gone well, and of course it transpired I'd bought the wrong ticket - the kurzstrecke is calculated according to distance travelled, and I figured out I'd travelled 200m too far. As the Germans say, pech gehabt (tough luck). €15 euro fine and treatment like a criminal followed, because I'd made a genuine error and paid €0,50 too little. Gah, Germany. 

Lesson learnt though! 

Expat world:

I went along to a meet-up for a facebook group called "20 Somethings in Hamburg" on Friday night, which is mostly a way for young expats from around the world to make friends in Hamburg, though there were some locals as well. I'd been looking forward to going along to this for a while (I even mentioned it in an earlier post) and had had such good experiences with CS meet-up, so had high hopes. Anyway, I got there and after an initially friendly meeting I started to feel pretty uncomfortable: I can't think of a better way to put it other than the people were well, pretty full of themselves. Most of them had been living here for over a year yet seemed pretty proud of the fact they had learnt next-to-no German. One British guy was so drunk out of his mind at 10 pm even I could barely understand him. Another guy attempted to get into an argument with me about how the Welsh identity didn't exist. A third conversation ran thus:

Me (in German): so where are you from?
Girl (in German): [A city in Southern Germany] but I study here. *awkward silence, she stares at me*
Me (in German): oh cool, so what do you study? 
Girl (in German) Film. *awkward silence*
Me (in German, panicking slightly): oh cool, so what semester are you in? (which means how long have you been studying)
Girl: (in English, angrily): Wow, why all these questions? You'll want to see my birth certificate next. *another long awkward silence, while she evidently expects me to continue the conversation without asking her questions, yet without asking me anything*
Me: Erm, I'm going to go get another drink? Want anything? No? Oh well! Tschüß!

I left soon after that. I might give the group another chance but otherwise, I think I'll stick to CouchSurfing.


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