Living in Bremen, working in Hannover - still can

Bremen, Germany

25th March 2003

These past few weeks have been pretty busy. I"ve been getting up at 6am, on the train by 7:14am and I haven"t been getting back home until 7pm.

During my free time I"ve been doing a lot of walking around Bremen and hanging out at the Irish Pub (which happens to be mostly full of Canadians and Germans).

Monday I got up at 6am and headed down to Braunschwich, from their I met my college Maic and we drove in a nice company Audi to a client site in Knesebeck. The Audi comes with a GPS Navigation system and shows your positon on a map and gives audio directions to any given address. Usually it"s smack on but this time it drove us to the wrong village.

We finally arrived at the clients site after some directions from an old farm lady. It was a little strange. Maic described Knesebeck as "If the earth was a disc, we would of fell off of it by now". My interpretation was that we would of fallen into a hole by now, hense, Ash von der Welt.

I sat during the meeting confused and trying to pick out every word posible from the discussion between the client and my co-worker. At times you could see farm equipment driving up and down the street. Eventually we got the specificatons, met with some of the employees and we were off back to Hannover to get started on everything.

I ended my day by meeting Anja at work and heading over to my new landlord"s place to sign my tendancy agreement. I pay ?10 more and I get free cable TV from it and a much larger flat to live in. It"s too bad my company moved offices, my new house is only 10 minutes from our old offices. At any rate, this move will prevent me from having to commute 5 hours a day like I am right now.

Afterword, Anja and I drove back to Bremen, had a nice dinner at a really homely greek restaurant and then called it a day.

My project list is pretty packed full at the moment. I was going to work over the weekend but I caught food poisoning from Nordsee in the Hauptbahnof in Bremen. It was nice though to be able to chat to a few of my friends this weekend, it"s usually hard to get ahold of so many people when they all live in so many different places.

Anja notes how my German is coming along but I don"t think anyone has quite noticed how much my UNIX and Programming skills have flurished since I began working for COMbridge. Then again, I don"t think anyone had a good overview of my skills to begin with. One thing I found is that it"s a good thing English is my native language, almost everything technical is in English and if it isn"t, it"s been translated from English.

For example, I had to write an email generator that created RFC-Compliant MIME attachments and then encrypted everything before it was e-mailed off. All the documentaton for learning how to do these things was in English. It"s too bad everyone that pays my boss whom pays me speaks German. Life would be much easier.

German has been easier to pick up now that I"m surrounded by it a bit more. I guess you could speak any language in any country if you were a shut in or worked from home like I had been for my first few months here. But, when you travel everyday, here repeditive annoucements and have colleges talking around and too you constantly, it makes the words much more recognizable.

I"m not quite sure when I"m going to complete my circumnavigation. Amsterdam made me tired of travelling. Purhaps I"m going to start again in the fall when it starts to get cold in Europe again. That will probably be the best time to head to a nice tropical island somewhere in the south pacific.