The First Couple of Days
I should post this now because more and more time is passing since I first got here. I will post my blog on the perks of business class later. Maybe tonight, maybe not. This blog was composed in several sittings over 2 days, so there is a decidedly different tone from start to finish…bear with me.Greetings from Berlin, Germany!
I wish that I could tell you that everything here is going along great, but so far it has been difficult. Yes, things could be a whole lot worse, but things weren’t quite as smooth as I had hoped for either.
First off, the disconnected feeling coupled with the isolation is very difficult for me. This entire experience would be nearly infinitely better if there was just one other person with me who I could share it with. That would give me someone to talk to, share my joys and frustrations with, and it would provide such a sense of security. I don’t know what it is about me that needs that sense of companionship in order to feel secure, but that is there and I have a feeling that it is there for a reason.
In any case, God has provided many friends to me who I know are praying for me and who do love me, and he has even provided one who called me while I was on the way to the airport, text messaged me while I was in O’Hare, and was available for me to call for a very short conversation when I finally got my work cellphone and was able to make a personal call. I was so appreciative of that. It made this huge world feel suddenly a whole lot smaller, and the people that I love seem a whole lot closer.
I know that in my post before this one I did some lists of things that I liked about my flight over, so I won’t cover that again. But I will just give a brief overview of the past 34 hours since I’ve been here in Berlin.
I arrived at 10AM on Tuesday morning, or 3AM Wichita time. I didn’t really get to sleep on the plane, except for a very brief 20 minute nap right before landing in Frankfurt. There was almost too much good service on the plane to let me sleep. It seemed like just about everytime that I was about to settle down for a nap, they offered something else, whether that be a meal, beverages, or a movie. It was a great flight, but it meant that I got into Berlin tired.
My rental car turned out to be an Opel Zaphoria or some ridiculous thing. European cars are nasty looking, for the most part. How a Porsche can come from the same country that makes these, I have no idea. It is like a cross between a minivan and a car. Sort of a much less cool Subaru Forrester. It seems to be able to move though, so I won’t knock it too much. I’m not sure exactly where the autobahn is, but the speedometer goes to 260km/h, so we’ll see how high it can get.
I got to the hotel at 11 and went to my room. It was a plain-Jane hotel room. Nothing too exciting. There is a nice big bed, a small tv, a large bathroom, and a balcony. My room is on the 5th floor of 5, so my balcony is actually cut out of the roof. It is kind of neat. I’ll try to remember to take some pictures. The hotel is located south of Berlin, in the village of Dahlewitz, where Rolls-Royce is. I have no idea if I’m supposed to say that I am working for them or not, but if you really wanted to find out then you could. It has been leaked to the papers anyways. But back to the story…Berlin is very strange in that as soon as you hit the city limit, everything just ends. There is no transition area. One minute you are in the city, and the next minute you are surrounded by fields. A co-worker told me today that the transit does extend down this far though. There is a bus that will take me to the train, but the bus does not run very late, so I imagine that once I am feeling settled in and want to head to downtown then I will drive to the train station and take the train to downtown.
I was physically and emotionally exhausted by the time that I got to the hotel though, so stepping into the quietness of the hotel room was almost shocking. I was here, a quarter of the world away from where I started out. It hit me with a moment of panic. That didn’t last long though. I composed myself, unpacked, and took a shower.
Then I got up at 3:30 and went to the hotel bar to watch the Germany soccer game. Sure, I didn’t get to go downtown like I had hoped, since the game was being played downtown and that would have been crazy, but I was just too out of it. So I just sat down in the coolness of the basement where the bar is located and watched the game in German, with a bunch of Germans. I didn’t understand a word that was spoken, but I was too tired to care.
After that I ate dinner down in the hotel restaurant and read some of tthe book about the DaVinci Code and how to make arguments against that which was handed out in church a few weeks ago. Dinner was good. The hotel restaurant is pretty fancy. I ate slowly, and read a lot. I had nothing else to do that night, and didn’t feel like spending any energy. I was still just feeling exhausted.
After dinner I went to my room, watched some CNN and some soccer and eventually went to bed.
Then, the strangest thing happened. Even though I was exhaustedly tired, I woke up at 2:45 in the morning and could not get back to sleep. I was awake for over 2 hours! My body just wasn’t ready to got to bed (in Wichita it was only 7:45 still), even though I had only slept a few hours in the previous 3 days. It was very strange.
When I finally got to sleep, it was almost impossible to wake up. My alarm when off and I reset it for about 30 minutes later because I was finally sleeping well. Well, true to form, I set it wrong and it didn’t go off again. So I didn’t get up when I needed to in order to shower and get everything ready that I needed to. At 8:50 I was startled awake by room service starting to open my door. I jumped out of bed and hurriedly put on my suit and ran out the door. Being late on my first day wasn’t my idea of a good impression.
Thankfully, Rolls-Royce is right across the road from my hotel, so I made it just after 9 and with all of the waiting that I had to do to get through security, no one knew that I was late. Start and end times are flexible anyways. My largest complaint was that with the heat of that day and from the previous night, I felt pretty nasty because I didn’t get a shower.
Work went well. I got into the office and was re-united with the company laptop and cellphone that was left here for me. I don’t have internet at the office, and likely will only get e-mail access once I get a tech PC on my desk, but that is okay. As a result I am allowed to get internet in my hotel, so that means that I have more freedom to use it for personal use and I can freely do my blog and do e-mailing off of company time.
The office that I work in is brand new. It is on the ground floor and is on the corner. It also has nice big windows, so there is a gorgeous cross wind that blows through. It is quite comfortable. There are 4 other people who work in my office room at the moment. One is the project manager for the project that I’m on, so I have to work hard around him, but that’s not hard to do because he keeps me hopping. The other 3 guys are seemingly newer guys and work hard, but I think that’s because they don’t all speak each others language. They each know a functional amount of English and German, but one is Italian, one I think is Russian, and the other I think is German. The Italian guy has been working closely with me to show me around and he seems pretty cool. His English is pretty good too, so we go to lunch together and the canteen and meet with others of his friends. Also, after lunches it seems that everyone who works here goes for a short walk around the campus. So in these walks I get a chance to talk to some other people around here. Most are only somewhat functional in English, so it is a little bit hard to have a good conversation, but the work atmosphere in general is much more open and social than at Spirit.
But that pretty much ended my day. I worked until 6 and then went to the hotel and set up my internet. Once I did that, I did some more work that I needed to do now that I had internet, including checking my work e-mail and making sure that all of my accesses worked. In the end, I spent between 10 and 11 hours working, which isn’t a whole lot, but I started out pretty tired, so it was nice to relax at the end of it all.
Things are starting to seem a little bit more settled now. I’m not nearly as jetlagged, and I’m starting to feel a little more confident about being here. I am sure that this weekend I will start to venture out into the city. I will likely head down to the fan mile, by where the soccer stadium is. First I have to figure out how to get there, but I’m sure that I’ll have no trouble doing that. I will definitely update on how everything goes.
Peace and blessings,
JZ.
posted by JZ @ 3:17 PM
Comments: 1
