Joram's in Germany!!!!!!

Well I’ve been here in Deutschland for about 4 weeks now and let me tell ya, it’s way different. It’s cool seeing the different landscapes and architecture. Road signs and cars and city planning is completely different, and everyone drives really fast around here. The roads are so narrow too, two German lanes make up one Canadian lane in most places. But the hills and trees and trails where you can go hiking are amazing. There’s just so many of them, and there’s even special lanes just for bikes, so you hardly ever see bicycles on normal roads between cars.

I haven’t really gone out much, but I never used to do that when I was back home, so that's no big change. It will take some time yet to get me out of the house. I’m staying with my grandparents right now, and they’ve got no Internet, no computer, no TV, no stereo, no shower, no concentrated juice, and no air conditioning. I have to take baths, which is not very pleasent. As Kramer would say, "It's like swimming in your own filth!", or something along those lines. So it’s pretty bad staying in that house.

My bedroom is in the storage room, so there’s matresses and food and old clothes and lots of dust all around. Every hour or so the house shakes, because there’s a major rail line a few yards away from the house. I’m also on the third floor, so I gotta walk up these winding stairs every day. It is also super hot up there, compared to the ground floor. When I walk in the house after work, it gradually goes from like 20 degrees to 30 degrees as I walk up the stairs.

So for my free time I do nothing except read a lot. I’m about 2/3 through the Lord of the Rings novels because I haven’t read them completely to the end yet. So far it's interesting to see all the differences and stuff Peter Jackson left out of the movie. All these years I've been playing games and never had time to read, so now when I'm reading a book again it's going pretty slowly! Every Sunday I go to this really boring church where I watch the paint dry. The only good thing is that there’s no preacher, it’s just random elders that go up and talk, so at least there's variety.

I got my job at a company called TeamTechnik through my dad. He designed some stations for one of their machines, and asked them if I could come and work there over the summer and they said sure why not. Because of that, it’s obvious they don’t really need me here. They have problems finding stuff for me to do sometimes. My computer also has no internet access, and it’s slow, and it’s just plain bad with WordXP (which is a major memory hog). What I’m doing is updating a help file for a program they use to control their machines. It’s so boring I sometimes just type one letter per minute to see if anyone will care. Even now as I write this nobody is paying attention to the fact that I’m doing no work, they’re so busy with actual work. Everyone here at work speaks in a weird german dialect (Schwäbisch) instead of real German, so I can only understand about half of what everyone says.

Well May is almost done and I’m missing two cool movies, Matrix Reloaded and X-Men2 because I outright REFUSE to see them in a german theater with all the actors dubbed over in german. I will get the dvd or divx (whatever comes first), that is the only way. At least I only have to work from 8 till 4, so I can be home by 6. Oh yeah, there’s an actual lunch menu that gets passed around each week. We get to choose from about 6 or so different meals for every day. So far all the food I’ve tried is passable at best, and I remember the good old summers of days gone by where I would have delicious Michelina’s microwave food, which is about 10X better than this stuff.

So every day I go home all depressed and hoping a car runs me over as I walk to the train station, because hey it could happen, because the roads are so narrow and I’m a small guy, and there are lots of corners everywhere, so maybe one day I’ll get run down by a typical German driver. The cars here are almost 90% european: VW, Audi, Opel, BMW, Porsche, and Benz represent the Germans, and then Fiat, Renault, Peuogeot and Citroen represent the other European countries. Some Japanese and American cars are here too, about as many as European cars you see in Canada. There’s some pretty ugly cars like the ‘Ford KA’ and the ‘SMART’, check those out on the Internet some time to see how crappy they look. It's funny how they love to drive standard here, even the minivans and family cars like that come with a standard transmission as a default.

Right now I’m copying and pasting crap from a help file into a Word document to pass the time. I wish I had at least a Gameboy Advance SP but I was stupid and didn’t buy one when I had the chance. A laptop would be really sweet right now, maybe that would have been a better investment than a GBA-SP. The Germans run on 220V power and their electrical outlets and plugs are way different, they look really old school, shaped like a circle about 1 inch in diameter. As a result the power bars look pretty funny. They’ve got a crazy keyboard layout too. Everything’s out of whack, mostly the fact that the Z and the Y are switched, which screws me up sometimes. Luckily I can switch keyboard modes through the click of a button, and then my keyboarding skills come in handy because I know by memory where most of the keys on a US keyboard are.

Let’s see what else is different... oh yeah there are no gates that separate the outside from the inside at the train station. You can just walk right in. If you don't have a ticket you have to pay €40 as a fine, but essentially you could ride the train for free if you have the guts. Ticket inspectors dressed in civil clothes get on the trains on random days and check for tickets. The train I take is called the "S-Bahn", which is something between a subway and a real train, because it looks and operates like a subway train, but travels mostly above ground and goes over a larger area than the one in T.O. One time I had to show a guy my drivers's license, because the monthly ticket (145 euros) I bought needs an ID with it to be valid, and he thought I was from the USA!! I was a little insulted at his ignorance, but it's typical to be confused with the Americans over here. There's literally hundreds of graffiti-art along the traintracks on my way to work, it looks really cool. They are mostly just big block words with really undecipherable letters, and lots of colours. The other day I saw grafitti sprayed on the side of a train, coloured in the style of the American flag, that said "Fuck Bush!". It was hilarious!

So yeah it takes me 2 hours one way to get to work and 2 hours back, feeling sorry for me Yet? No? Well ok read on then. It’s so boring that I count the threads in my jeans. The office operations here are so weird too. Every day when a worker enters the office he has to shake hands and say good morning to every single worker in the whole section. It’s so annoying it makes me want to scream... but instead I put on some Rage Against the Machine and that does the trick. Oh but wait I can't even do that, because my computer has no sound card. So basically I get everyone's germs on my hand every day. The situation is actually similar to two years ago, where I took one piece of work and stretched it out over 4 months. But at least then I had high speed Internet and I could download playstation ISOs all day instead of counting the pixels on the screen like I do now!

Well I hope all you who read this are having a better summer than I am. They are paying me €10 per hour to work here and I get to stamp a digital box every day when I come and go to make sure my 8 hours are accounted for. But they take almost 40% off the 10 euros for taxes, so I'm left with about €6 in the end, which is about 10 dollars. In the end if they keep me here till the end of August (!!), I will have made around €4000 . That is about 6400 canadian dollars, which is a little lower compared to the 9000+ I made last year in a smaller company doing MORE work!! So essentially I’ve moved down instead of up.

So my advice is, don't go into something you have no idea about, and do some research before you get trapped in the land of cigarette vending machines.

-Joram

ps they have eliminated Coke cans here. So now you only get Coke in glass bottles.