Hallo alle! Willkommen zurück! I can’t say I did anything particularly exciting this week except go to work. I have Fridays off, and I’m usually overwhelmed whenever I have large amounts of time to myself, believe it or not. Today, I also had a free day because all of my coworkers and boss decided on a communal vacation day. I didn’t do much except go to a few parks and journal. And then I thought, I’m in Berlin! I should be maximizing my time! I work best with a schedule and consistency, largely in part due to my OCD. So, I’ve decided that making itineraries for my days off will help me greatly. However, I made a stop at the Mall of Berlin this past Friday to buy my roommate a gift from the Miffy Store. Miffy is a character in the Hello Kitty universe. It took me a while to find, considering how large the mall is. I must admit, the store was very cute, and I’m not even a huge Hello Kitty fan. I’ll include a picture below (excuse the two people who got caught in the photo, oops!). Anyways, hopefully I’ll have something more exciting to talk about next week.

Regarding new hard skills I’ve acquired, I can’t really think of anything super specific except using Canva. I will be the first to admit that this is not an impressive feat; I feel like everyone is comfortable with Canva to some degree, as it’s not particularly difficult to use. So far, I’ve made two Instagram posts dedicated to a specific pride flag. I explain the history of the first design, cover alternative flag designs, explain the meaning of the flag colors, and introduce lesser-known alternative designs. The first post I made about the lesbian flag has the most likes out of any other post on L-Support’s page! They also gained quite a few new followers. I was very proud to see the fruits of my very minimal labor! Regardless of how much work I actually put into these posts, I’ve become very comfortable in using Canva and designing aesthetically-pleasing yet informational posts for the queer public.

Also, I suppose you could say I’ve been dabbling in some project management. Regarding my classism workshop (which I’ve mentioned a lot recently, apologies!) I’ve been thinking about how to actually gather an audience. It’s especially important to actually reach a queer homeless population, because that’s who the workshop is for! We’re planning on paying for some advertisements in newspapers, but we’ll see. I’ve decided that it will be more of a panel-style informational meeting with other queer homeless organizations. I’m not done planning the actual context of the workshop, but it’s a work in progress. However, we are planning on inviting Francis Seeck, a nonbinary author who specializes in classism and queerness! I’m especially excited about this opportunity.

As I’m sure everyone has talked about several times by now, communication is key. I’ve stated before that my coworkers have started speaking more English to me so that I can understand important details about our schedule or a random task they have for me. However, I still try and speak as much German as I can. I’ve recently picked up two new vocab words, which I’m a big fan of: “mitbringen” and “gleichweis.” Sometimes my coworkers don’t know a certain word in English, so I help them out. We all know that communication and comprehension is crucial when speaking another language. It was a bit reassuring to see that they also have their own struggles when speaking English. In conclusion, I’ve definitely improved on my communication skills, which I’d say were good already.

Regarding my coworkers sometimes struggling to recall a certain English word, I’ve certainly bonded with one of my coworkers, Charlotte, over this. She is at the office every day and shows up at the same time I do; she’s also my internship coordinator. Just last week, we had a nice conversation about cultural differences and vocabulary. I talked to her about how Germans are relatively unfriendly, but not mean. It’s sometimes difficult for me to back off in niceties, which I mentioned in last week’s blog post. Going into this internship, I was initially a little hesitant in being too forwardly friendly; I wanted to test the waters and see how my coworkers interacted with one another. But since it’s such a small organization, everyone is pretty close with one another, so this luckily wasn’t a problem for me.

Anyways, I hope you’ve all been successful in navigating your own cross-cultural situations and honing some new skills. I’ll see you next week! Tschüßi!