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.