It’s really hard to believe that I am already going into my fourth week here in Germany. It honestly feels like I’ve been here longer then that and that’s completely fine with me. This last week was my first week working in Berlin and it wasn’t so bad. I walked to work every morning which gave me time to see a lot of the City. I’m working at this hipster working space called B-part in the middle of this beautiful park. The people are incredibly friendly, there are dogs everywhere, and best of all they provide free coffee. You can catch me filling up another cup every two hours, I have to say I really like how they do coffee over here.
This past weekend was a long one, Thursday was a bank holiday so everyone was off and I decided like many others to take that Friday after off as well. It was a nice weekend, you would think, oh long weekend, I bet he spent it in some crazy place like Paris or Prague, but no. I decided to spend the long weekend discovering Berlin. There was a smaller group of us and we got to have a relaxed couple of days. On Saturday however, we did end up making a day trip to Hamburg. Hamburg is definitely a must see while visiting Germany, you can pretty much spend a day there walking around and see a lot of the city. It’s really not that big. We took an early morning bus into the city and headed right for the Rathause and other incredible buildings in the city center. From there we walked to the Hafenstadt, which is the port area of Hamburg and home to a lot of its museums and restaurants. After some debate we ended up seeing about 2000 too many ships at the 9 floor Maritime Museum.
On Sunday, the smaller group that had stayed in Berlin the entire weekend spent a relaxing day at a market near our hotel and then biked around the Tempelhof. That night was also when we went out and celebrated my birthday… I won’t go into much detail but fun was had.
Now to answer the question that was posed for this blog regarding flexibility and adaptability. I am definitely dealing with a lot of ambiguity in my work pretty much everyday. This is my first desk job, every job I have had so far has been back breaking physically intensive work. I was a farmer for a spell, after that I delivered and set-up party equipment by the truck load, and for the last year and a half I’ve been a line cook at a sandwich boutique. I’ve never not been on my feet, so right off the bat, being at a desk was something I needed to get used to.
The start-up I work for, Brili, is very much in it’s starting stages, trying to figure out what works best for them. This means I am involved in a lot of the creative work like developing their image, identifying customers, and our value to them. This is the kind of work that I want to do going forward so it was a perfect fit and easy to get used to. To add even more icing on the cake of ambiguity both my supervisors work full time everyday of the week, at other places. Brili is a side project for them for now. That doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly important to them but their main job always comes first. This makes for an interesting day for me, because even if I have a question, I’ve got to figure out my own answer most of the time. I do a lot of googling, looking through past documents for inspiration, but I get stopped up from time to time. At the beginning of the day to try and counteract that, I do my best to get all my questions and throw any hypothetical situation of problems I might have at one of my supervisors in our morning skype or phone calls. That way I am usually equipped to at least partially solve my problem or work on another project they want me to take a look at. Flexibility is also a big factor in my internship. I’ve got to be ready for whatever they want we to work on or whoever they want me to talk to. On a day-to-day basis I am moving to new offices and meeting new people. In the last two weeks, I’ve worked in two different cities and while here in Berlin at three different locations. I can deal with it pretty easily because I bring everything I need in my backpack and as long as I have Wifi, I can work from pretty much anywhere. I guess having experience as an entrepreneur and being so active in my work as helped me with that factor.
Overall, I think I’ve adjusted to the work environment well and am excited to see the work to come. Brili has a big marketing campaign coming up and they want me to be really involved, its going to be really interesting.
