Benjamina-Natasja

Did a lot of stuff Saturday.. Immi made us be up and ready by 10 and we went to Ikea...everybody has been wanting to go for so long! I finally got some curtains, so now i can actually have some privacy.... They aren't real curtains though... I was too cheap to get real curtains, so i got these duvet cover type things that were on sale for 3 euros... they're light in colour so my plan is for everybody to write all over them, quotes or whatever. I also got a mirror...so now i can finally tell if my outfits match before i go to work :P

And omg i found the COOLEST thing ever there! This little tree plant type thing caught my eye, and i'd been thinking that i wanted a plant for my room.. something to care for you know? So anyways, i pick up this tree and you'll never guess what it was called! It's a Benjamina-Natasja plant. I kid you not! And if you didn't know.. my dad's full name is Benjaman...Ben for short. Isn't it amazing!! TOTALLY blew my mind... so now it's my spirit plant, and i have to keep it alive for once! So far i've got a 100 percent record for killing plants...lets see if i can break it :P

Oh YA! And i went go carting today! But the go carts were sooooo fast! And i guess Michael Schumacher is friends with the owner and has been there a bunch of times. Jimmy, Petar, Immi, Cora, Tara and I all went the first time, and the thing prints out all the stats at the end! It shows everybody's fastest laps, and their averages so we got to see who was best :) I came THIRD!! Beat jimmy lol...he was pissed :P Soooo fun!

After that we just chilled at Immi's. He bought this huge wardrobe so we were busy moving old furniture out and building that one. When I say we...i mean the guys... Tara, Cora and I made food and lounged haha. He had to climb it before he decided to buy it of course. That's how German people choose their furniture. If it's not a good climb...forget it :P Saturday night we went to a campus party with Petar's roommate. It was a spanish birthday party and it was huuuggee! Too much fun.. met several other Canadian, American, Australian, Spanish, German, Swedish...etc students, it was greeaat! Here we've got Jimmy, Petar, Stewert, Tara, Cora and Me.Highlight of my weekend was definitely my little ficus tree though! I still can't get over it!

What is it, exactly, that I'm doing here?

Finally, a little time to update this thinger..

I think I'll talk a little bit about the whole reason that I've got this wonderful opportunity to live in this wonderful country for eight wonderful months.

I'm working at IBM, as most people know but my job is so freakin cool, I feel like I should elaborate. Within the first 2 or 3 weeks I felt like I was being given so much work and responsibility that I might as well be taking over the whole company, but I'm getting the hang of things now, and while ya, it's a LOT...I absolutely LOVE it!

My official position is "Application Developer" and I'm basically developing web tools for internal clients (people who also work for IBM). Fellow Waterlosers, be patient here...I've found that when I try to explain what I'm doing to people without a technical background they get lost and what I do sounds boring instead of incredibly cool, so i'm going to do this slowly.

As I said, I'm developing web tools. Here's an analogy... Take MSN, and consider it a tool you use while on the internet to chat to your friends. It's got certain features, such as allowing you to have video or voice conversations, you can save your message history, etc. Then the people who made MSN are working to figure out what else their clients (the people who use msn) want the tool to do. Once they figure it out, they build it, and release it to the public, and POOF! You've got a better cooler version of MSN. I'm doing the same sort of thing for about three different tools. One of them, let's call it project BOB, is totally and completely my baby. I'm entirely responsible for setting up meetings and negotiating with the clients to figure out the requirements for the next release (i.e. what cool new features they want the next version to have). Once we've got those all figured out and agreed on I figure out all the technical stuff about how to actually implement it (i.e. write the code) and then I do it!! I'm given an enormous responsibility in this position, I totally manage myself, it's amazing! The other two projects (we'll call them Project JOE and Project JIM) I'm just gathering all the requirements and doing the solutioning for... For some reason my employers and managers have it in their heads that i've got these really good soft skills...something about me being outgoing or something...so that's why I've got the job of working with the clients on these projects, which can be very politically sensitive. COOL!!!

Another thing that's cool about this is that I'm working as a member of an international team, meaning that two of the people on my team I work with the most are working out of Austria and New York. All of my clients are also international, so I spend a good portion of time on the phone with one of those super cool headsets. HA...I know I'm a nerd....it's ok to be thinking that right now.

So that's what I'm doing!!! Maybe it still sounds boring to you, but I think I've got a wonderful opportunity to learn a lot and develop a lot of skills over these next few months. Not only am I going to develop my technical skill set, but the business aspects of the job are so cool! I don't really have any past work experience like that, and the amount of responsibility they give me is enormous.

Sweeeeeet!
Here's a pic of me and Michael at the Office. Michael is one of the guys I work really closely with from Austria, he was in the office visiting for a week. Super cool guy, we'll meet up again when the team goes to Vienna for a vacation at the end of February. Notice that there are no cubicles or anything! Just an open office, we all sit at long tables...it's different :P

Mineral Bath

So before I left somebody sent me an email, and I think I probably passed it on to some of you....but anyways, it was basically about all the stupid questions people ask about Canada, just because they don't know any better, they aren't familiar with the culture.

I pretty much laughed my face off at some of them.... Sunday afternoon I found myself on the other side of this....I was asking the ridiculous questions...although they didn't seem so ridiculous to me at the time!

I came home from wherever i'd been....i can't even remember where anymore, i'm never home. But anyway..... One of my roommates asked me if I wanted to go to a bath. I'm sorry...do i smell funny? Ok, so after a quick second it registered that he wasn't asking me to take a bath. They call pools baths here. But it was a mineral bath...ok so sounds like fun.... my muscles are still complaining rather loudly from snowboarding the day before, I figure a swim would be nice...but I still wasn't sure quite what to expect...

I thought for a while...then said that all i have is a bikini that i wear to the beach in the summer, would that be ok to wear? My roommates response was to laugh at me, and ask if i expected to maybe wear some sort of diving suit or something instead.

Does that sound ridiculous to you? Let me explain why i thought it was legit at the time. First of all, I know at places like the pool at the PAC at UW everybody wears a sports suit to the pool...bikini's look funny....it looks like you've gone there to pick up the jocks or something. Second (and more importantly), on one of my first days here Immi (co-worker) was telling us about how many baths here are "textile-free". This means...you are not allowed to wear clothes. It's not even an option....you're just plain not allowed. Now I'm a pretty open minded person, but there's something about getting naked in a public place with people I've only just met that makes me feel a little shy..... so maybe now you can understand the motive behind my question lol.

Anyways, this mineral bath thing turned out to be fantastic. There were several different pools and the water was all salty, hence the term 'mineral' bath I suppose, and it was pretty much the most relaxing thing I've done in a looooonngg time. There was one pool where the water was relatively warm, and there were shallow areas with jets you could lay on, and one part where you could swim through a spot in the wall and be outside! That was cool, the water was warm and the air was freezing, and there was a round part in the middle that you could swim into and there was a current that would push you around. Inside there were freezing cold pools, hot little jacuzzi's....it was soooo nice! I got to know 2 of my roommates better and a couple of their friends as well, it was great. They teach me all the "important" german words and phrases....such as "I don't care" (less polite version) and "I have a hangover" lol.

Ahh good times

I want my own mountain

Omg i'm never going snowboarding in Ontario again. I've been spoiled.

Today I took a trip (with Cora, Jimmy, Jarrett, Petar and Erik) to a ski hill called Fellhorn in Oberstdorf, which is right on the border of Austria and Germany, and it was the most amazing thing! I had to get up at 4:30 to catch a train at 5:14..yess....in the morning....but sooo worth it! It was a little over a 3 hour train ride to the mountain, but here they stop running at about 5. Probably because it'd be too expensive to light all the runs, whereas for all the hills i've been on in Ontario... well, lets compare them like this. A lady bug is to an elephant, as Blue mountain (in Barrie...best hill in Ontario) is to Fellhorn. And Erik told me Fellhorn was relatively small!!

So I threw myself at this particular mountain all day, and determed that i couldn't, after all, move it... No, it was ok, I didn't fall too hard :P Honestly though, the view was absolutely breath taking. I've never seen anything like it... I couldn't get over how incredibly gorgeous the mountains were..

There were a few times, including when we'd just arrived at the hill and were walking towards the lift pass.... I turned around and practically lost my breath at the view... To give you a better idea of the size of the mountain, my ears would pop when I went up the lifts. The weather at the top, was totally different from the weather at the bottom. It was amazing! There were times when i was actually looking down on other mountains.

And not that expensive really! 20 euros to rent the boarding equiptment, 24 euros (with my student card) for the lift pass, and 10 euros for the train. Score! I'm so going again... as much as my body hates me right now and will hate me tomorrow for what i've done to it today...it was sooo much fuuunn!

On the way there actually there were a lot of train parties going on.... Remember that this was at about 5:30 in the morning. People were having so much fun, laughing, being loud, DRINKING BEER....at 5:30 in the MORNING!!! It's such a different culture from that of say, Toronto. In Toronto nobody speaks to anybody at all. A group of friends ride the bus, and eveyrbody is silent. I slept on the train this morning...but! We had a little train party of our own on the way home. I have a feeling I'm going to go back to Canada at the end and forget that it's illegal to have a drink in public and get in big trouble :P

So now i'm back, and just a few seconds ago started to fall asleep at my desk.....Big mountains rock my socks (thinking of you jan, as I write this phrase ;) ) and make my body feel as though somebody has thrown rocks a ME all day!

love you all,

Coolest table in the lunch room, no doubt

So friday all the co-ops were sitting at the same table at lunch at IBM. It was your average lunch....absolutely amazing food for very very cheap, average chat, you know how it is.

Then somehow, conversation migrated from the ordinary to the not so ordinary. By that I mean, we somehow started talking about all the weird things we can do with our body parts, some of which, totally grossed the others out.

For example... myself and Feraz have no problems touching our eye balls. You know how you can touch your eye, and push on it so it moves around? Then people were showing off their tongue tricks, crazy things we could do with our joints...

And then we realized....omg...we're totally the coolest table in the entire lunch room! Anybody watching us would TOTALLY think one of the two following entirely logical thoughts:
1. Man, I wish I was cool enough to sit at that table with those super cool people
2. Dude, I wish I WAS one of those super cool people.

Ya, I think we're def bringing some new flavour to the IBM lunch room.

Where'd my arm go?

So I woke up in the middle of the night last night and my arm was asleep. Not just a little asleep, but practically dead! I tried to move it and I couldn't. Then I realized, I couldn't even tell where my arm WAS it was so far asleep! I had to feel around with my other arm until I found it, which was scary for a minute, cause i thought it was down by my side or across my chest or something, but it was over my head and I couldn't find it lol. I had to actually move my sleepy arm with my other arm. I think that was the most bizarre body sensation ever. I lost my ARM!! Ha!

Crazy Train Party

Saw the weirdest thing on the train on the way home from work tonight.

So I'm sitting on the train talking with Michelle, Jarrett is sleeping as usual and i hear this big BANG!

I look around and see this man holding an open bottle of champagne, he'd popped the cork out of it. So i thought this was funny. I'm used to the fact now that you can drink anywhere you want to....they sell booze in the train stations, in the grocery stores, everywhere and you can walk down the street or sit on the train as you like and enjoy a beer.

Then this man started passing out plastic cups to a bunch of people they were with, and they were enjoying champagne... These were older people, maybe in their 50's...picture this. Next stop a handful of people get on and were all excited to see the people drinking champagne....they joined them... and then the man started passing around appetizers! Like, you could tell somebody had taken the time to prepare them.... it looked like meat and fruit and cheezes on toothpicks. It was like a planned and hosted party....on the train!

Imagine seeing this on the subway in toronto....too weird. We were so curious about what was going on, so Michelle asked one of the ladies... She said they were going out on the town for the night, and this was the start!!

I want to have a train party!! Just get on the train, with no particular destination in mind, and eat and drink!! Ride the thing back and forth all night lol.

crazy folks.

Week 2, in a Nutshell (p.s...I know I can't spell)

Wow so i've been gone for 16 whole days. I feel like it's flown by so quickly, and at the same time like i've already been here a year.

This weekend was a fairly relaxed one, I stuck around Stuttgart. Still waiting on my bank card so that I can access my account and spend money!

Friday night was pretty low key, we tried to go to the city centre to go skating and try the traditional hot wine, but when we got there it was already closed. BUT! Somebody has gone and erected this enormous soccer ball in the middle of this U-shaped castle in the city centre because of the World Cup....which for those of you who don't know...is being held in Germany in June!! I've ordered tickets, but so many people want them that they do it by way of a draw.... I'll find out in a few weeks if I got them....that'd be ssoooo sick!!

So anywas...this enormous soccer ball.... turns out you can go inside it! So, inside we went... The (gold) world cup Germany won in 1990 i think is in there, some other sports paraphanalia including one of David Beckhams cleats.... All i know about that guy is that he's married to Posh Spice (Spice girls foreva yo!) and they put his name in a movie title..... it was a pretty good movie, i thought.

Then upstairs they've got these interactive games, most of them have you interacting with a tv screen in some way....everything was in German so i just had to guess. They had this one crazy game...there was a monster thing on the television who was supposed to be a soccer player, and from what i could figure out, he was injured and needed you to massage various parts of his body in order to make him feel better. The monster i chose....really liked me to rub his butt. I kid you not!! I'll attach pics soon. These monster guys would press the body part they wanted massaged up against the screen and then welll....you rubbed it! I dunno....

After that we came home and there was a massive party going on on the floor below me. I stopped in for a bit, chatted up another Canadian guy i met living here, and then called it a night. I'm so lame, I know, wimping out on a friday night.....but you have to believe me, I did sooo much during the week i was dead. I spent the rest of the evening talking to loved ones....so hard with the time difference!

Saturday was club night! One of the full timers from IBM was supposed to meet us at this club called Bravo Charlie, but we never actually found him. The bar was designed to look like the inside of an airplane, but with all the seats taken out. You know how the pilots have that special alphabet for spelling things over the radio..."alpha, bravo, charlie, delta....." Well that's why the bar was named so. It was actually a bit of an older crowd, so I felt a little out of my element, and they played house... I couldnt' tell if the whole night was just one biiiigg long song, or if all the songs just sounded exactly the same. I think it was the later...who knows. And apparently dancing isn't so popular here in Germany as in Canada. There was a dance floor, and a few people dancing but mostly just standing around and chatting. Or yelling...since the music was so super loud. I left smelling like a tobacco plant, but i had fun anyways :)

Sunday!! Wanted to go to the Mercedes museum, but found out it's closed till May. Did you know, that Mercedes and Porsche are made in Stuttgart where i'm living? The street cars here are Mercedes....it's ridiculous. Instead Immi took us to a cultural museum, where we arrived to find everything in German....but we could still look at stuff, it was pretty cool.

That'd be my weekend...low key, as I said.

But the week was so damn crazy! Micheal, our system architect from Austria was visiting for the week to help with training and such, so we were hanging out with him most nights. Wednesday we went to this cool little lounge/cocktail bar in Stuttgart for dinner and drinks. They actually serve sheesha there....it was so bizarre to see people smoking huka's all over the restaurant.

Shots! Shots here...sooo much bigger than those ridiculous little things you get in Waterloo. It's no short fat plastic little cup...it's a big tall sexy 2 ounce shot! I stayed away that night, but they boys thought Bacardi 151 would be fun... Oh it was fun for the rest of us alright, watching them try not to vomit :P I drank my fill of beer though....mmm German beer is so good! And cheap!! Usually cheaper than water here...

The full-timers here are a blast... I love IBM....I love Germany!

Oh p.s.. If anybody is interested in the whole snail mail thing, here's my address

Allmandring 26C, Zi. 43202, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany.

And i'm on skype too, for voice video convos add me! Should be able to find me if you search for Natasha Berger, or natasha_615

Anndd finally, some special people have been calling me (so sweet :) ), there's a number that's pretty cheap, only a dollar to talk for half an hour, then 8 cents a minute after that. This is exactly what you'd dial if you wanted to bless me with your sweet voice :P

101 888 011 49 174 437 5915

love you all and miss you all so much!

Feelin' Fine

My roommates have all finally moved in! They were on holiday for the last week, and now with the place full of people and background noise it makes it a lot easier to not be lonely. I’ve been doing much better than I thought I would. I think maybe I was expecting to feel the same way I did when I was living in France for the first little while, but things are about a hundred times better. Immi has kept us so busy in the evenings, I haven’t had time to be bored during the week. I just got back from dinner and drinks tonight, tomorrow we actually don’t have plans, but Wednesday we have some other sort of dinner…maybe touring inside this enormous soccer ball they’ve erected in the middle of a castle in downtown Stuttgart in preparation for the World Cup, Thursday night will be some sort of party to see off a co-worker who has been visiting from Austria for the week…. And then it’s the weekend! Apparently there are Rez parties every weekend, or we might try to go snowboarding somewhere…who knows.The other co-ops are all fantastic, my roommates are so nice and they all speak English so we can communicate….They’re so helpful to me so far… they told me I can use everything in the kitchen and Julian helped me fix my internet because it wasn’t working…..really nice.

Ya, I miss a bunch of people a lot, but I'm doing so good.....i'm really loving it all :)

Fussen

This weekend we took our first trip! It started out amazing, and ended in disaster. We are NOT having good luck with transportation so far. We travelled to Fusen which is right near the Alps along the border of Switzerland to visit two castles. The ALPS!!! To see CASTLES!!! I’ve decided that I want my own castle.

It was about a 4 hour train ride (we had to take 4 different trains but it was super cheap since we got a group pass…like $6 each to go anywhere all day long). There are 2 castles right beside each other, since as legend has it, this King Ludwig guy was crazy and he kept taking people’s money and building castles all over the place. The more famous of the two, Schloss (castle) Neuschwanstein didn’t get finished inside because the King died, but it’s actually the castle that Disney modeled their castle after. Yep…that castle you see in all the movie previews and in commercials for Disney Land….I’ve been to the original!! We had to hike about half an hour up a mountain to get to it. The other castle, Schloss Hohenschwangau is less impressive on the outside, but we got to tour the inside of that one, it was pretty cool. The king and queen slept in different rooms on different floors, and the King’s room had paintings of naked women all over the walls. Go figure. And then of course there was a secret passage way to the Queens room…

The trip back turned into a total nightmare!! We got stranded at a train station in this tiny town about halfway between Fussen and Stuttgart for TWO HOURS in the freeezziing cold!!! What is that stereotype we have about the Germans being very particular, especially about always being on time? Omg I thought we were all going to die out there. No, I exaggerate. It was freakin cold, and we were all vibrating from shivering so hard, our muscles hurt from being so tight from chill for so long, but we made the absolute best of it :) Nothing ever gave me any clue that I’d be spending two hours kicking around ice balls like a soccer ball, and huddling and singing backstreet boys and spice girls songs to try to keep warm and entertain ourselves. Yep, and dispite our bad choice of songs in (at least on my part) totally off-key voices, I think we inspired a few people that night. There was a group of German girls and a big group of Chinese people also stranded that night, who all started singing after we did :P It really could have been a lot worse, at least the company was good :)

So many planes....so little sleep

Finally I have internet! Sooo much has happened in the last week, I hardly know where to start. I guess the beginning will do.

The journey here was an adventure in itself. First was the 4 hour drive to the airport where we weighed my bags and discovered that my carry-on was sooo overweight! We had to unpack and repack all three of my bags and keep weighing them until they all just barely met the requirements. It was pretty stressful…my dad was totally spazing out. Then it was time to say goodbye to my family…that was the hardest part and the part of the whole trip that I was most afraid of. It was fine though, my mom managed to hold her tears until she was out of my sight, and so I was ok.

We (Cora, Jimmy, Jarrett and I) got on the plane around 6 but it was delayed for 2 hours due to snow. Leave it to Canada. We finally got into the air around 9:30 and they served us champagne about an hour later for New Years….it was pretty mellow. No real celebration like you see on TV. We missed our connecting flight in Amsterdam because of the delay, and they made us run to catch a flight to Paris. When we were boarding, for some reason they took my carry-on bag…they said it was because the plane was totally booked, but nobody else had to give up their luggage, it was so weird! From Paris we caught another connection, where my bag was fully searched by a man who was very curious to know how old I was and if I was married….whatever….and then finally arrived in Stuttgart to find that our luggage, had not.

What else could go wrong? Well the person living in the room I was supposed to move into hadn’t moved out yet, so I got to sleep on the floor in a random room. The keys I needed to access my laptop for work were supposedly hidden under some bookshelf somewhere in Stuttgart….all kinds of crazy little things. But everything worked itself out pretty quickly, I only had to go one day trying to wear Tara’s clothes (Tara is another waterloo student, who is very very small.)

The next day consisted of waking up very very early and running around the city getting set up. In Germany you have to register in the city you’re living in, and we had to apply for all kinds of permits to let us live and work here. Thank goodness most people here speak English or I’d be superscrewed right now…

My room here is awesome, way bigger than UW residence! I’m on the top floor in my building and we have a balcony. A big one with an awesome view! Only thing is, I don’t have any curtains, cause the Hausmeister (guy in charge of rez living…a landlord of sorts) ran out… I started out opening the doors of my wardrobe thinger and changing in between them…but I’ve quickly grown too lazy to bother. I figure A, I’m on the top floor (the 4th) so it’s pretty hard to see in, B, it’s Europe…arent’ Europeans stereotypically supposed to be more relaxed about the whole nudity thing?, and C, changing in between the cupboard doors is a pain in the butt…

Thanks a million to you guys who have emailed me.....it's so so so nice to hear from home when you're across the ocean and 6 hours ahead...

more to come...