German Presentations

My boss and coworker are going to present at this big meeting right now...
They're presenting 95 slides in an hour... yikes. fortunately/unfortunately I won't be there to see that.

My heart almost stopped...

I thought it was me....



I don't know what I would do if it actually was....it'd pretty much be the coolest thing ever to happen to me.

Catch up

It's been 2 months since I've updated this. haha...that's pathetic. Although I spend lots of time on the computer at work, for some reason many Internet cafes block access to Blogger and comments...weird.

Anyways, I'll just sum up some things that have been happening since I've been in Germany.

The Apartment - After a whole month of not having a steady place to live, I finally got a positive answer from a landlord in Erlangen. I was really excited to see it, thinking that it was an actual apartment, with a kitchen, maybe a couch, and all those other things that apartments have. Unfortunately, it was just a dorm room. A dorm room in a very unkempt building with broken glass, overgrown weeds, and a somewhat post-apocolyptic atmosphere. I have my own sink, two burner stove top, and mini fridge. I share a bathroom with 5 other people, and have to walk 15 minutes to the nearest laundramat. I pay waaaay too much for it, seriously thinking that little Erlangen Germany rivals Tokyo or New York City for housing costs. But its at least something...and my recently acquired dvd player has made it all the more homey.

But, there is something great about it. Everyday when I walk out the main door, I look and see two mailboxes labelled "Siegfried" and "Roy" right next to each other! haha..how funny is that?! Til now I havn't seen any white tigers roaming around the place, and distinguishing their effeminate german accents apart from all the other would be next to impossible, so its pretty safe to assume that its not the magic duo from Las Vegas.


The Job - My department is Market Intelligence for region EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa). Its a new department at adidas and consists of 4 people. My boss is Dutch, but my other immediate coworkers are German. I spend most of my days creating graphs and charts about product and line performance, and spend way too much time on Excel worksheets. We also study the economies of Europe and use that to gauge what we think our future performance will be. We're also subscribed to all these trend analysis services which are kinda fun to browse through. They keep us informed on what other companies are releasing and give us a good outside perspective on our industry. It's a pretty cool internship, but not something I'd want to keep as a real job afterwards.


Best Bar in Germany? - Well its really not that great, but the fact that the first time I was at it I left in an ambulance makes it sound like it must be a pretty crazy place. Truth is, I'm just a drunk idiot...
After two liters at some super Bavarian beer-fest in Herzogenaurach, my friends and I took the bus back to Erlangen to go out to some real bars. We ended up going to E-werk, which is this bar/club in an old electricity factory, I think. Drink, drink, pee, drink, awkwardly dance, drink, drink...
So then the time comes to leave, and my friends went to the bathroom and I was gonna go wait outside for them. With my tractionless Birkenstocks, I turned around to walk out, must have like, hydroplaned on the beer soaked floor, and came crashing six and a half feet down to the ground.... I got up as quickly as I could...felt my head, didnt really hurt...but I was bleeding all over the place!! So I went outside, and someone stopped me and set me down and sopped up the blood with some tissue, and told me he was calling an ambulance. So yeah, end up at the hospital where they put 4 stitches under my left eyebrow. The next morning the SWELLING BEGAN!! ...it didn't seem as if it were going to ever stop! But yes, it stopped, and in its place came the bruising. It eventually developed into the DARKEST black eye I, or my coworkers, had ever seen.
For three weeks I wore my sunglasses more than Corey Hart ever did, and had to explain the eye to everyone, which was a pain in the ass cause its not even a cool story about me fighting someone and giving them two black eyes, it's just really stupid thing that I did.


Most of my friends from the Transatlantic Program have left now, so I'm getting to know the interns better and going on some company sponsored trips. Interns are mostly german, but its cool cause people are from all over the place. Two weekends ago I went wakeboarding and scuba diving with a big group of interns at a lake near the Czech border, and in a few weeks I'm doing a "Basic Alpine Course" in Austria, where I'll be climbing mountains and glaciers, supposedly.

die WELTMEISTERSCHAFT!!

Well, here we are in Gelsenkirchen for the Czech vs USA game last Monday. Although we didn't win, we had a great time. The atmosphere was amazing with fans from both Czech Republic, USA, Germany, and everywhere else. We started the pre-game with the German beer, but once inside the stadium, things turned American (actually out of necessity), and we enjoyed a taste of home with "Bud" (not permitted to be called Budweiser here because of the Czech brewery's European copyright on the name).

People who weren't even affiliated with us were takign pictures of our group, and even a FIFA camera crew came by to film us! One of the girls in our group actually found this same group picture randomly on Flickr! I bought a red, white and blue mohawk wig too

Tonights the USA's last first round game here in Nürnberg, and quickly after work I'm heading down to the fanfest to watch on the big screens and support what will be the game that allows the US to continue into the next round (KNOCK ON WOOD...big time).

Also, through a woman at the German-American Chamber of Commerce, I was hooked up with a sweet apartment in Nürnberg for the next two weeks to hold me over while I keep searching. Things are opening up now that the World Cup games in Nürnberg are coming to an end, and also something about July 1st causes a lot of places to open up too. I should have a home in no time!

Sweetnaaassss

I just picked up 8 tickets for my friends and I to Game 10 of the World Cup, USA vs. Czech Republic!

I still havn´t found an apartment, which has kinda cast a shadow on all the other good things going on right now. I may end up having to take something in Nürnberg, which, despite being an awesome city and one Id love to live in, is about an hour commute with train and bus to work each day.......

But, Friday has come and the celebration throughout Germany has begun! Ive got a long weekend to have fun, sleep at friends places, drink crap American beer at the game (purely in spite of German apartments, and their not being available), and then Ill resume my temporary frustrations and apartment search on Tuesday...

till then, Ciao biao

Anyone got an Apartment??

Well I finished my one week of the Transatlantic Program in Berlin on Sunday. I met some great people from around the US, visited some very cool places (Porsche, DaimlerChrysler, HafenCity in Hamburg, German Foreign Ministry, etc. etc.), and bonded with new friends over excellent meals paid for by the German American Chamber of Commerce and fine German beers paid for by ourselves. It was a taxing week, with 12 hour days, long winded german presentations, little rest, and yet still the need to go out at night to explore Berlin and consume American quantities of alcohol and shisha. We went to the "White Trash Bar" which was great, definitely not the white trash I was hoping for, but instead more like the Kevin Federline/Mohawk Dude white trash....

So after our temporary goodbyes, we all split up and departed the newly opened Berlin Train Station for our individual internships. I got off the train in Erlangen, which is 20 minutes from Herzogenaurach (where Adidas is). Carrying my 74+ pounds of luggage through the rainy european streets, sad violin music playing (actually not, but really, it´d have been great if it were), i stumbled into the Hotel Frankischer Hof. I booked two nights, and that is the extent of my housing situation in Germany for the next 6 months...

So, the housing search has begun, and checking my email this morning sadly resulted in zero replies from the emails I had sent. I think I may have to actually start calling people, which is always this lame-ass thing of me that I fear when I´m abroad. Im also having a hard time decidiing where I want to live: Erlangen is a University city of about 100,000 people and so far from what I´ve seen, its very nice--but 20 minutes away by bus. Herzogenaurach is the city of shoes, both Puma and Adidas are located there, who are arch enemies and have been for years... (http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article359772.ece) It´s a lot smaller than Erlangen, and certainly lacks the young population of Erlangen, but it´s right by work and most likely cheaper....

So, if the rare chance happens that someone who reads this knows of a good place for me to live here, let me know! Otherwise, Stay tuned and either you´ll hear from me soon regarding my new address, or you´ll just know that I´m naked and curled up sleeping behind the Döner stand while the cold German rain (every day since Ive been here!) washes the dirt and sorrow from my tattered clothes to the sweet, yet sad sound, of a violin solo.

Pause to breathe

My last few weeks have been nuts. I'd really like to have been updating my blog on the recent chaos, but a definite lack of time or motivation at the time held me from that.

Anyways, its Thursday, and I've got one quick paper to write (which this post had to interrupt), and tomorrow I take my last exam to complete my 5 years at UW-Eau Claire and get myself a degree in Business Administration and a degree in German for Professions. I've not had time to get sentimental about this being the last time I'll see many of my friends who have been a regular part of my life for the last couple of years. I generally don't get sentimental at all, so maybe that too is why its all seeming to just not be happening and it just being the beginning of another summer vacation, where I'd see them all again in September.

But this year it's not.

My parents are coming at 5 tonight to completley move me out of my house and take me to the airport in Minneapolis. At 2:30 tomorrow I'm flying to Berlin, Germany to begin a 6 month internship. The first week will be spent with 25 other American students in Berlin leraning about the German Business/Political environment, a bit of travelling, a bit of brushing up on our business german, and then we all go off on our own ways to start the actual internships.

After a roller-coaster of a placement process, I was placed at a company and given a pretty lame internship, "address-management" was the name of the department at this mail-order catalog company. I was offered a very nice salary and the company had found me an apartment already. As attractive as the pay and the apartment were, they were merely superficial benefits of this job, as I'm going to Germany for the experience to learn and grow professionally, not the money. Although this internship was given to me about two weeks ago, I had to tell the organizing group that I couldn't take it, and I wanted them to find me something else...even if it meant not starting right away. It was a hard decision to make, because this organization had already done so much work for me in the placement process, and I felt like a dick for not accepting it, but I told them my feelings on the position, and I believe they understood.


Two days later, I got a phone call from Adidas, and I eventually got offered a position in their European Business Development Department! Pay had not been mentioned, and English is the official office language, which was disappointing, but now I'd be in an truely international environment with people from 40 different countries working together--that's what I want to do, and that's more valuable of an experience. After I accepted the job, I found out that it, INDEED, is paid!! Although its nothing extravegant, its 50% more than the previous internship, and having thought I was accepting a non-paid internship, it feels like I just won money!

I've got that nervous excitment thing happening right now. With this door closing a new one is definitely opening, and I'm very much looking forward to exploring in it.

Anyways, I've got a paper to write, a shithole of a room to clean up, bags to pack, passport pictures to be taken, farewells to bid, an exam at 9am tomorrow, and a flight to Germany to worry about...