At the beginning of this past week I was given the task of looking over my company’s interim report and analyzing whether or not it met all of the guidelines that the auditors from EY use when they are going over Sirius’s reports. This proved to be a lot more difficult and time consuming than I was expecting. The list I was given to compare the report to was mad up of a checklist that was over 60 pages long, and all of the wording was extremely dense and hard for me to comprehend. While I was working on this, I was  pretty impressed thinking about all of the German accountants in the company who always had to read these kinds of guidelines in such complex English, which is their second language.

One thing I have noticed more recently in Germany and all around Europe is that people tend to use English as a common language when two people’s native languages are different. This is why it seems like everyone in Europe can speak English. Over the past couple of months, I have really grown to appreciate this and feel very fortunate that I grew up in a country where my first language is English, because this makes it so much easier to communicate when traveling around the world.

After completing the auditing work, I started working on a company presentation for my supervisor. For this I have been collecting a lot of historical financial data about the company and using it to make visuals such as various graphs and charts to use in the presentation.

I have been looking forward to this weekend for a while, because a friend of mine who is interning in Dublin came to visit. It was a good push for me to go out and do some last touristy things in Berlin before going home next weekend. My friend and I spent Saturday walking around the city in the morning, and it just so happened to be Gay Pride this weekend so we ended up in the middle of the parade where there were tons of people, music, food, and festivities happening. By the time we got home that night, we were exhausted. On Sunday we slept in, and then spent most of the day at the Charlottenburg Palace, somewhere I hadn’t been yet. I still find it amazing how many palaces and castles exist in Europe and how beautiful they all are, since structures like that do not exist in the United States.

This week is going to be bitter sweet because I am starting my very last week in Berlin and last week of my internship, which I will miss, however I am also excited to go back to the familiarity of the United States and see all of my friends and family.