I know what you did last weekend

No, frankly I only know what I myself have done this weekend. Friday evening was not spent alone, I've had one of the new colleagues over at my apartment for dinner and watching some movie or something on my laptop. Finally we decided on watching the newly acquired episode of Heroes, but first I had to explain everything that happened between the pilot episode my guest saw and the newest one - it was a quite tiring talk, but at least I had my own recap with it. The show was okay, nothing too special, interesting as usual. After the show somehow the topic of our final university projects came up, which led to me having to explain mine in great detail, up from the basics. Which was an interesting experience, since I basically did not even think about that work in detail since early last summer. Strangely enough I managed to come up with new examples, some of which were not even that bad. Even though it was a very long talk, about one and a half hours long of me speaking and answering questions, it was somehow quite worth it. But then I really had to get my sleep so I threw my guest out :D
Saturday... nothing special, around noon I decided to go out to the Sony Center on Potsdamer Platz to check if there really is some free wireless internet as I figured. And there was. So I spent there some time answering emails and reading news, in the middle of the usual crowd of tourists, but at least here there's a more comfortable place to sit than compared to the wall next to that cafe I visited a few times before. I even saw some people from Aachen, the first German town I was to in my life last year, they were there for a football game between Hertha BSC of Berlin and Alemannia Aachen. Of course I did not know the Aachenese people in person, but it was fun to see them. BTW Alemannia was beaten 2:1 :) After lunch in a cafe I headed back home, and even later my guest from the evening before and his newly arrived girlfriend came up with the idea of finding some nice bar in the city. So that's just what we did, we hung out near Hackescher Markt, a place where quite some bars are. Our's wasn't particularly good or bad, it was a bit pricey but beer was good. There was even some classical music playing nearby on the street, so it was quite comfortable. One of the waitresses even stopped at our table when she heard us talking, and spoke to us in broken Hungarian - I even asked where she learned the language that well. Quite embarrassingly she was originally from Hungary, she was just here in Berlin for like 4 years to study and make some good money. She was a nice person, and I think we made her eve a bit better simply by being Hungarian :) Of course we could not stop laughing later, realizing that we got a real Hungarian service: slow and with mixed up orders :) But it was nice nevertheless, and made me sleepy enough to just fall unconcious the moment I entered my room again.
Sunday was also slow, as all weekends, the other guys left for some general sightseeing I've done already before, and I went to check out the East Side Gallery. This would be the longest original portion of the Berlin Wall, I guess I even mentioned it in one previous post. Well, this was supposed to be painted all over wit graffities, which it surely was, 15 years ago. Now the "historical" side is pretty run down, but the other side looks good, with very new paintings. I even photographed some Spanish speaking tourists there, since they asked me to do just that. I think they were glad I at least pretended speaking their language :) Then I crossed the rive Spree on the lovely red Oberbaumbruecke, made a picture of the Molecule Men in the distance, and headed home again, since it looked like it was going to rain soon. Which it of course did not. But I had a short walk in Eastern Berlin before getting home, well, that part was pretty run down, especially compared to the Western part where I live. And I had to give directions to a local kid :)
In the evening I had dinner at my colleagues place, his girl cooking and us watching TV :) After dinner (basically the same sweet-sour thingy I had last week just not as good :P ) we watched the School of Rock movie on TV...well it had good music, but otherwise, not a very complicated movie :) I like the part where Jack Black's character hands out the "home work" CDs to listen to, and mentions some of the greatest bands I listen to, Rush, Pink Floyd and the like. Good movie in this aspect :) Actually there were only a few other parts that actually made me laugh, which is not much for a supposed comedy :)
Monday...as usual, first day of the week, people who went back to Hungary arrive and are sleepy. The special event of the day was that one colleague finally received his laptop he ordered here in Germany. I also did some shopping online, smaller things though. We'll see how that goes, seemingly German post has less sticky fingers compared to the Hungarian. Of course I have to wait for all the items I ordered to be in stock at the same time, so it's gonna be maybe 2 weeks for my stuff to arrive. That's fine with me.
The only thing I miss is some good books...it's just series on my laptop all the time. Since I've finished the magnificient Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. I guess I should get some other book to read...I might dare to buy something in German :) We'll see...

(Some pictures might follow later)

And on a sidenote: my time here got extended until the end of January :D But of course I will spend end of December at home.
Exit, stage left.
M.

Leaving work ain't easy...

...at least it seems so since I spent here a lot more time this week than I usually do. I managed to correct the mistakes that this other guy made, and then some. All this code I'm looking at makes me want to scream, it's ugly and hides errors well. The least I can say that it's not the style I would work :) So I do my best to get the most out of it, without breaking anything or changing too much stuff I'm probably not supposed to touch. Next week, of course :)
Weekend will be fun. I hope. New colleagues are going to stay here, one of them is the silent guy from our office, the other is someone who looks more like friends material. This second guy is going to have his girl from Hungary over here for a month beginning this weekend, and I he asked me to show them around a bit. Hope it's going to be okay, or even better. Maybe the girl can make a better dinner than I usually do in exchange :) We'll see.
One other thing I've done this week was eating some exotic fruit :) Tuna, to be precise, which is the fruit of one kind of cactus. I carefully checked on the Internet in advance how one should eat it, but it's easy, you just have to be careful of the small hidden thorns. You have to cut it in half and then you can eat the flesh of it, including the small blackish seeds. It's not a bad taste, but nothing too good either. Maybe I will try something else next time. Maybe not. This stuff's not cheap here either.
Well, that about wraps up my adventures this week. Who knows what the future brings? :)

Bye
M.

Short update

I went to the local IMAX theater yesterday with Hungarian colleagues, it was great! 3D at it's best :) Everyone who has access to this and has not tried it, well, do it. Supposedly Budapest will have one IMAX theater sometimes next year.
I'm working late tonight due to someone else's mistake. Great. Tomorrow can only be better. Or worse. We'll see :)

That's all for now :)
M.

Recap on the weekend

This weekend was spent alone again. People left on Friday in the afternoon, and I was almost the last person to leave the offices, due to some problems others had with my work. Of course the culprit wasn't me, even though all the traces led to me. I'm not really fond of how the version and project control software works here :(
So after a long Friday I spent the evening at home (I think, I can't really recall :D but hey, it was 3 days ago! ) All I know is that I bought some tea, again, Ostfriesische Blattmischung (translates to East Frisian Leaves Mix) this time, which is very good, and I chose it myself this time. So I'm kinda proud of myself :)
Saturday in the morning I did my laundry (how exciting) and also bought food to cook dinner on the two days of the weekend. I did plan to do some clothes shopping and stuff during the day, so I went to check out the nearby Karstadt. This is basically a big store with a lot of different branches (clothing, electronics, books, etc.) I did find a pair of trousers that would be second best in any competition, but I think I'm gonna look for the winner in some other store too. I also found some scarfs which were made out of the right material, but I did not like the design. So basically I did not buy anything :) But there was also a hairdressers in the store, which I visited, and even though I lacked the words to explain properly what I wanted, the end result does not look that bad. All my ears are still in place and stuff. And with some promotional price the haircut only cost two times the Hungarian price I usually pay :)
In the end I also bough some South African wine in the store to complement, which was quite surprising - it delivered exactly the taste I was expecting. I don't usually get that from wine. It was only a Sauvignon Blanc/Chardonnay couvee, but still, it tasted like it should, and that pleased me.
In the evening I went to the movies to see the Borat movie, which was quite funny, even though it was very weird :) IMHO it was not Borat making an idiot of himself most of the time, but the people he fooled. Though I'm sure some of the were filled in, otherwise they would have killed the poor guy with bare hands :) One surprise in the movie theather (Cinestar in the Sony Center at Potsdamer Platz) was, that almost everyone around was a native English speaker. Though there were some Spanish and German too :) And my German while buying the tickets must have been horrible, the cashier girl immediately asked if I wanted to see the movie in English :P This may be the reason for not having any subtitles on the movie, which was just fine.
Dinner was nothing special, by the way, I just fried some chicken breasts and had some frech fries and barbecue sauce with it. And of course the wine I mentioned. After dinner and an episode of one of my series, I slept like 12 hours. Not that I had to hurry anywhere in the morning or to do anything at night. So anyhow, I woke up and got ready just in time to catch the historical U-Bahn train to take me to the U-Bahn museum and the Olympic Stadium. The train was nice, it had people opening the doors, and there was even a guide who told us the story of the Berlin underground railway system. I chose a non-smoking car in the train, but still, it smelled like an old bum. The ride was not that bad altogether, just the smell and the heat made it a bit uncomfortable :) The museum itself was quite nice, with free entry, as this weekend was dedicated to Alfred Grenander, the architect designing lot of the Berlin U-Bahn stations. In the museum there were the usual things, old U-Bahn-tickets, old uniforms, insides of old cars, and an old Siemens control system for the complex U-Bahn station of the Olympia Stadion. I also got to know that in the 80s and 90s Berlin had a maglev train, the M-Bahn, which was used for normal public transport for 2 years in the late 80s until the Berlin Wall was brought down. It was also interesting to see how the Wall tore the underground network in two, some line were just used on one half of their line, others simply skipped the stations on the Eastern Side. One exception was Bahnhof Friedrichstraße (German link), the so-called Palace of Tears, which was used as a border station and was the place for a lot of sad goodbyes while the city was split.
All in all, it was an interesting visit. After the museum I still had time before the next historical train went back in the city, so I decided to check out the Olympic Stadium. Well, it's big. And now I've seen it, even from the inside. Surely a lot of sport fans would kill me for being so cool about this :) But it's just a stadium ;) I had a lot of time to walk around, I've even seen a football match on one smaller sportsfield nearby, between two smaller teams. The road home was fine, I listened to the second part of the guide's story (the man must have repeated it like 6 times that day...), and headed home for an early dinner. I had the other half of the chicken breasts, but this time with sweet-sour sauce by Uncle Ben's and rice, and some leftover wine. The candle I lit complemented it just fine, and of course I had my private reasons to light it too. After dinner I watched the movie "Proof", which was quite good, only as crazy as it had to be. It totally deserves the 7 points IMDb lists it with. I think the synopsis is quite useless on the movie, though, but that's because the timeline is quite mixed up in the flick :)

Phew, long entry. I'd rather not say anything about today, it was long and boring anyhow :)

Oh, and next weekend I'm gonna have visitors again :D
Great success!
M.

Approaching well deserved rest

This week was just another one in the row :)
I finally finished my last work package, which included solving a lot of crazy problems, but I get more and more confident in my work. One reason for this is that by bumping into these problems I also have to check a lot of code to see how and why stuff does not work. But now most of the problems are gone, and I can start my next activity - we'll see how that goes.
Right now I seem to have another guy assigned to me, and he's a lot better than the one before. First of all, he can speak proper English. Second, he knows I speak German, so he tries to communicate in German with me. Those to combine in us switching between the two languages without hassle, which makes it very easy (for me) to practise my German and be productive at the same time. This is a very good change. This guy is also better professionally, so I can learn new small tricks while working with him.
Apart from work, I did not do much during the week. I've watched a few new episodes of the series "Heroes" and the 2nd season of "Prison Break", and spent basically all evenings with my colleagues. This of course led to me not getting enough sleep again :) So tese guys are a good gang, all in all, we usually have lunch together too. This week it was basically in a different restaurant each day, I've had chili one day, some German food the other day, I've even been to this good Thai restaurant. I will want to go to one of the Italian places too, but the others are hard to convince in this regard. We'll see. I will also have to figure out what to cook during the weekend...
The new guy in our office room (I mentioned him before) does not really fit in the group of colleagues, but well, his bad. He does not seem to be wanting to interact with us. We are not at all negative with him (even though he makes our office room crowded :) ), we do help and give hints on how life works here. But if he does not open up more, he will make his own time more bitter here... We'll see how that goes, probably I shouldn't be the person criticising someone else being closed like this :)
I don't have any plans for the weekend yet, but I might visit the "East Side Gallery", if it does not rain. That's the longest remaining portion of the Berlin Wall, and it's a graffiti art exhibition currently. The U-Bahn Museum is also open all weekend, that also sounds like something to do. I'll definitely report on all this :)

Good bye,
M.

I think I wanted to post this....

This is the huuuuge sushi plate plate we had at the project dinner. I was not quick enough, so some pieces have already gone missing, but still, look at the shear size of it! :) It was for 4, though, but we were 7 and had 2. We did not manage to get rid of it all :)

One way ticket to Budapest and back

My trip back home and the return to Berlin went smoothly, I think there are less passengers in these months as before, so it's less likely that the standby ticket will make me miss a flight. Time at home was fine, had a nice evening out with a friend, having a tea and watching a movie, and the team building excursion on Sunday was fine too. Though I would have enjoyed the included wine tasting better with some better quality wine.
All these things I've been doing in the weekend led to me sleeping less than I usually do, so I had to take a nap before the gig I went visiting on Monday. It was a show by Mike Patton's new band, Peeping Tom, which plays a quite unusual style of music. Unusual for me, that is. You can check out their whole first album at the link. The gig was fine, Mr. Patton is truly an extraordinary frontman, and both the female vocalist (Imani Coppola) and the "Human Beatbox" guy (Rahzel) were great for what they had to do. The actual musicians were Dub Trio, the band who played before the main act, and they were quite good too. One thing that was strange about the venue was that they had plastic cups which had to be returned at the end, and you even got 1€ back if you returned the cup. In Hungary you would get disposable cups, that's for sure. After the show I got back home at around 1am, so I'm still a bit tired right now :) I will have some catching up to do this evening :)
Work is as usual, today is just wasted because I have to wait for one operation which started 6 hours ago to finish. Oh Joy. We have one change here though, a new guy in our room, so now we are 3 here. This new guy is a bit strange, but we will get on well with him - even though the room is now very crowded, it was more comfortable before.

Hmmm. I know this is not my most interesting entry. I better finish it :)
M.

Another weekend at home

I did not really have the time yet to write about the project dinner we had this Tuesday, but to put it short: it was good :) We had sushi again, I will have a picture of the plate for 4 persons :) There was not much else I can recall, I'm almost finished with another work package so I'll have my well deserved rest this weekend. Which, for one part, will consist of a team building with my colleagues.

Maybe I'll write more when I get back :)
M.

Visiting the countryside

One of the lucky aspects of having had my guests here was that we were able to visit places outside Berlin easily using their car. So we used the opportunity on Saturday, and took a ride to Potsdam, to check out the Schloss Sanssouci, or, translated from German and French, the Castle of No Worries :) This was the summer residence of Frederick the Great, and it is an amazing place. The castle itself is only one of many in a huge garden, though most probably this is the most decorated one on the inside. At least this was the only one that was open to visitors, as the main season is over now. So we took the guided tour inside this one castle, which usually happens in German, but in our group basically no-one spoke that, so our guide kindly switched to English. It was a bit embarrassing though that since she believed I spoke both languages, at some points when she did not find the proper English word, she was more or less expecting me to translate it from German... Of course I explained that my skills are not quite on that level yet, but still, it was strange :) The guide was good, nevertheless, and she gave a good insight on how the rooms and the castle was used back in the time. The rooms were decorated in rococo style, and despite this some of them did not lack good taste completely :) Of course every possible surface was gold-plated or painted with very bright colours or decorated by animal figures, but it looked nice anyhow :) Strangely enough there was no mention of Frederick wanting to spend more time in the Rheinberg Castle instead of Sanssouci, as the Rheinberg guide had told us :)

After the castle tour we went walking in the gardens, and checked out a few more buildings from the outside, including the pretty disgusting Chinese Teahouse. We were told before that in that age rich Europeans loved to copy Chinese style or use Chinese elements in their art, well, this house the worst example of this habit :) Though I guess under certain circumstances, like during a carnival or something, this still could look a bit less strange.

It was not that easy to find our way back to the car, but when we did, we headed back to the town of Potsdam, and had a delicious döner for dinner. And, more importantly, we spent an hour at the Cafe Laila, having a delightful cappuccino and some tasty dessert. I was quite satisfied with all this :)

We left Potsdam, and headed for the town of Brandenburg, though our book on Germany did not mention anything special about it. It was a very good idea to visit it nevertheless, since it has a very nice and big old part, with lovely little streets, nice buildings and old churches. It was a nice walk in the town, even though it was quite cold. After our walk we just did some shopping, and headed home to have a nice dinner and a few beers :)

Sadly, my guests had to leave this morning, and what's even worse, they had to leave at 7... So we were up quite early, they were packing and I was paying attention so they don't take any of my precious crystal vases by mistake :) It was fun not be alone for a while, and it was a bit strange that they are leaving and I am staying here...even though I feel quite like home in my small apartment by now :) But, all in all, it was a good experience, and I'm really looking forward to the next time someone decides to take the trip and visit me :)

Sunday was very dull, it rained all day so I did not take a walk outside, just took a rest and spent the day at home. I was actually planning to go to the movies, but my monthly ticket for the public transportation expired, and I was not able to buy a new one :( All the vending machines refused to accept my Visa card, a 100 Euro bill was too big for them and on Sunday I did not find any shops which looked like they could give me some change for my bill. Of course I could have bought a single ticket or something like that, but that would really have been a useless expense, especially with the movie ticket being quite expensive itself. So I just came back home to watch TV, I watched a show on farm vets and one on why chili is so strong... An afternoon well spent, eh? :) I also figured out how I'm going to get my monthly ticket tomorrow in the morning. Actually I'm not in a too good mood because of this, since my company basically left me out of this month's “extra cash because you are working in Germany”-payroll. It's just an administrative hell, and probably I did not shake the hands of one of the devils in this hell firmly enough. So I will have to get some Euros from my Hungarian bank account, which of course will cost me some extra money and extra hassle. And of course nobody told me I'm left out of this, I just know because I asked someone to get my Euros for me (it's handed out in Budapest), and he was told there's nothing there for me. Well, I know I will get it next month, but it's a bit unnerving :) (BTW I know this story is almost incomprehensible, but that’s just life transcribed :) )

And now, being quite sleepy, I'll probably check if there something on TV about the exciting secret society of postal workers or something...Not that I'd need help falling asleep :)

See you!

M.

Short report

I'm having my first visitors here! They arrived on Wednesday at 3am, after a long and tiring drive, and will stay here until Sunday. I took Wednesday off (it's a national holiday in Hungary, so it would have been free anyhow), and we visited the Schloß Rheinberg, castle of Prince Heinrich in the late 18th century, where we had a guided tour just for the 3 of us, with a guide speaking a quite strange German. But it was fun, after the repairs going on in the castle insides are finished, it will be a very beautiful building - now it was "only" very nice :) It's strange somehow that this was my first trip outside the city limits in the past 6 weeks, but it was definitely worth it. My friends did some sightseeing yesterday and today, and we're going to check out Postdam and the Sanssouci Castle together tomorrow. So it's going to be an interesting weekend again.
Oh yeah, and it turned very cold this week. I will have to buy a scarf. Which will probably happen next week, since nothing is open on Sunday, the only day I'll spend in Berlin this weekend.

That's all for now :)
M.