Work

So work has been uh, interesting this week. So I finished up writing my research paper at work on Monday and gave it to my supervisor. So he sends me off to another office that is about 7 minutes away by train. They printed out directions for me and everything but of course I still went down the wrong street and got there kind of late. Anyhow, I get there and I meet Mr. Meyer who is in charge of the group there. Not the most talkative guy. The first thing he asked was do I speak German, even though I'm pretty sure Prof. Fischer had told him I didn't. He then said, "So uh, this is the former DDR and everyone learned Russian as their foreign language. There's only 2 other people in this office who speaks English besides me." I was pretty sad. Now I wish I'm working in Frankfurt. I was really happy to find out that I would be working in Berlin since there's so many other MIT people here. It would've been so hard for me to be the only one in Frankfurt but my coworkers would speak English....

Anyway, he hands me off to another guy, Michael. Michael speaks English because his wife is from Ghana where they speak English. His English is okay. He showed me some of the projects that they have been working on and tells me about what he does. We ended up talking about ourselves for about half an hour at the end.

Today I went back to the same office and met another person, Bastian. Bastian's English is really good. He's young and did an internship in South Carolina years ago. He was really confused as to why I was at their office. He actually works in the Central office, where I worked before. He comes to this office sometimes since he's got 2 positions. He tells me that everyone finds Prof Fischer really cryptic. He never tells them what he wants and they can never guess. Bastian thinks that maybe it's because Prof Fischer is a real professor at a university and professors are generally very cryptic people. Anyway, I tell Bastian that I wanted to do something useful and he said he totally understands. He felt the same way at his internship. So he actually gave me some stuff to do. It's just research but it's okay. I'm working at the same office as he is so I can ask him all the questions I want.