American in Berlin

New Job

Day number two at my new internship and all is going well so far. I arrived at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on Monday morning and was slightly surprised that my boss wasn’t there and the secretary was unaware I was starting work. But the secretary helped to get me settled and my boss showed up after about an hour. The Ebert Foundation is the liberal sister to the Adenauer Foundation, where I was this fall. I wanted to work at both in order to see the different political perspectives.

After going through the “what exactly do you want to do here,” “how can I help” questions again, my boss and I seemed to settle into a good system of working. I ask him questions as they pop up, he takes time a couple times a day to tell me anecdotes that he thinks will be helpful for my project and he passes along any documents that he thinks I would be interested in. I’m also speaking almost exclusively auf Deutsch and have expressed my wish for that to continue.

All of the colleagues are very relaxed. Most introduced themselves and immediately said, “we use the informal ‘you’ here,” a very clear German sign of how laid back the office is. There is a great cantina, with a veggie option every day, and all of the colleagues in the Middle East dept. eat together. The building itself is very modern. The offices surround a circular auditorium/atrium that is used for lectures. All of the stairways are glass and the doors open automatically when you touch the handles. I feel like I am back in Woodley Park in a way because the building is across from or next to the UAE, Japanese, Italian and Saudi embassies. Located on the border of the Tiergarten (Berlin Central Park), apparently the Japanese and Italian embassies are located here because it was a nice spot for the axis powers during the war.

I’m also slowly but surely adjusting back to Berlin time, it’s snowing today and I had cheese spaetzel for dinner. It’s the little things in life☺

posted by Erin @ 3:55 PM