I started my internship two weeks ago, on May 11th. I arrived at the Corscience building (featured above) at 9am, and after some wandering found my way to the ground floor Corscience office to find a locked door and a secretary who had no idea who I was. After explaining I was there to see Manuel Seufert, she told me to go to the office on the third floor, and following a very puzzled look on my part, she took me up. Manuel was in a meeting, so she took me to the HR person, Ute, instead. A few forms and one electronic key demonstration later, Manuel was out of his meeting and showed me around Corscience. The company occupies 'Haus 7' in a medical tech building, meaning it has 4 offices stacked on top of each other. As far as I can tell, marketing is on the ground floor, hardware is on the first floor (the floor numbers start with 0 here), software on the second, and administration is on the third floor. Manuel introduced me to everyone on all 4 floors, all of whose names I promptly forgot. I then headed out to apply for housing at the student dorms. They didn't have any rooms available, so I headed back to work wondering where I was going to live. I spent the rest of the day setting up my computer, and at lunchtime my coworkers took me with them to the Mensa, the university cafeteria.
Tuesday I began my housing search in earnest. Manuel had given me the numbers of some landlords, and after calling all of them I made an appointment to see the only available room with (the infamous) Herr Loy, who turned out to be the epitome of a sketchy landlord. The apartment consisted of a room in the basement, with a toilet in a closet down the hall, and the shower two floors up. The real dealbreaker, though, was the one hour walk to work combined with the lack of internet.
At work that day I met my other supervisor, Robert, who got me started on my project: designing sound software for a personal EKG monitor. He also explained that my first assignment was to find a place to live, so I was free to focus on that and leave the software for later.
Wednesday I saw another apartment. Words cannot describe this experience. An "eccentric" Japanese-American woman (referred to here as "Yoko Ono" for its descriptive nature) showed me the apartment, which was not even close to what had been described in the online posting. There was a main apartment, which was cluttered and small (the washing machine was IN the bathroom) and the bedroom being offered was actually outside of the apartment on the next floor up. This room was full of broken furniture Yoko was going to 'fix', the only working piece of furniture being a tiny cot. She barely spoke any English or German, and claimed to be even worse at Japanese, which really made me wonder how she communicated anything to anyone. She was also pushy, tactless and gave a whole new meaning to absent-minded. I wanted to run away as quickly as possible, especially after she asked me if I was "insured" (against what, or why she needed to know, I never found out) but she insisted on walking me back to the hostel, and even threatened to show up at the Mensa the next day to finalize our "deal". I never called her back.
That night was definitely the low point of my stay so far. Alone, with one day between me and homelessness (the hostel was booked the coming weekend and I had no place to go), I seriously wondered why I had bothered crossing an ocean for this experience.
Thursday I made another apartment appointment, and my coworker Kemal also arranged for me to visit his friend who had a spare room. The first place was ok but very small and unfurnished, and was almost impossible to find, one highrise in a maze of highrise buildings, but I was ready to take anything I could get. Then Kemal picked me up and took me to Ahmet's apartment. I knew as soon as I entered the cozy apartment and met Ahmet that I wanted to live there. The room had no real furniture, but Ahmet said I could sleep on the (very comfy) sofa the first night and he would buy all the furniture I needed on Saturday, since he wanted to use the room as a guest room when I went back to the US. I moved in the next day. Below is a picture of our living room and the comfy couch:
Saturday we bought a futon and other Ikea furniture and spent the rest of the day building it. Ahmet's car is pretty tiny, so he actually had to leave me at Ikea to get the futon home, and came back for me and the rest of the furniture. That night, Ahmet's coworkers Aykut and Dehlia came over to watch the Eurovision song contest, and Ahmet cooked us all dinner.
Sunday was beautiful and hot, so the four of us went to a lake and grilled lunch and generally enjoyed the sun. There was an actual swan boat amongst the sailboats on the lake, and later on there was even a real swan! I'm still getting used to the increased lack of clothing here, so it was strange to see little kids with no pants on and very large men sunbathing in nothing but a speedo. My neighbor Tommy also seems to have a fundamental opposition to clothing, most of the time he wears nothing but boxers. He and his girlfriend are about my age and live across the hall, and Tommy comes over a lot to use the dishwasher or watch soccer with Ahmet. In return he is very helpful, and was instrumental the Ikea furniture assembly (luckily this was a task that did not require a shirt, or I'm sure I would have been on my own).
Last week was a short work week because Thursday was Christi Himmelfahrt (the German equivalent of father's day), which is a national holiday, and I had to be in Frankfurt on Friday for the CDS orientation, so I headed out Thursday and met up with Greg. More on that next time though, since this post is more than long enough already!
As always, there are a lot more photos on Flickr, especially of my new apartment and shots taken around town in Erlangen. Check them out! Until next time, here is a picture of my beautiful daisies from Ikea:
