Armed with a Cup of Coffee, Stapler, Staple-Remover, and Binder of Papers

With my best friend in town, work, and a bunch of other going-ons, I have fallen a little behind on the blog.

I hope you can all forgive me!

Not too many grand, new tasks in the office that I have been assigned (and the ones I WERE assigned, I will tell you about in this post!) - because of that, I choose to condense my last few weeks into one blog post. We can do it, I know we can.

If you missed it, I recently wrote a blog post about my wonderful road trip to Salzburg last weekend - check it out, pictures included.

This week has presented a few new hurdles in my professional journey here in Germany.

On Monday, I was to have an interview with a local hotel owner whose son needed an English tutor. I walked the 15 minute trek to Kantstrasse for my interview - much to my surprise, this interview was actually just a tutoring session! Unexpected, but alas, successful.

Stefan, the boys name, is 15 and is learning the English language. We spent an hour working on his pronunciation and reading through his text book so that we were sure he understood the material that was assigned to him.

During the middle of my session with Stefan, Herr H. came into the room and asked if I had time to meet with the next door neighbor's girl as well - she is in the same class as Stefan and also needed some help. After my hour was done with Stefan, I headed over. Mira had a few more questions about grammar than the readings - I promised her I would come back next time with a better understanding of my own language's grammar!

It is nice getting a little bit of tutoring experience on the side here. Both of the kids are very nice, and I think I am learning just as much German during our sessions as they are learning English!

Tuesday is when my next new task was given to me. Anne-Cathrin, who works with Erasmus scholarships for students studying in Europe, needed documents scanned into the computer and emailed to her.

This ended up being a lot more complicated than originally thought, and I ended up spending that entire day and Wednesday morning working on this project - never before this have I felt like my internship fit within the bounds of "typical internship." After spending hours in front of a copy machine armed with a cup of coffee, stapler, staple-remover, and binder of papers, I DEFINITELY felt that.

Due to a problem with the scanner function, I had to re-do about half of the papers the next morning. I bound all the PDFs that were related into one document and sent about 9 documents over to Anne-Cathrin on Wednesday morning.

After that task was complete, I had to head to German class, where I took my first test. I believe it went pretty well! I enjoyed today's class - we were speaking German with one another more than we were listening to a lecture, which was nice.


Dawn's birthday was on Wednesday, so Dawn, Ashley, Joe, and I grabbed some Swabian food downtown.

The next morning, Thursday, my focus was the Tandem program. I helped Karin to understand it more, and then we figured out how to put the Tandem Excel file onto a common network so that she could access it as well.

During the afternoon part of my shift, not too much work was done. Claudia had invited quite a few people from the department to celebrate her marriage. She made tons of delicious baked goods, bought some Sekt (sparkling wine) for everyone, and coffee was provided!

It was a great chance to see some of the beautiful pictures from Claudia's white dress wedding, as well as meet new members of the Reutlingen University staff. Tobi, Max, and I all got to catch up some, as well.

Today, Friday, the office was kind of slow. Gus came in to help me with more StudierenPlus stuff, but that was it! I worked a bit on updating my resume, as no one had anything for me to do.

There was a faculty get-together. We all met around 11 a.m. in the Aula and a lot of people made speeches (all in Deutsch, of course). Pretzels were promised, but after sitting through the presentation for over an hour (and almost thirty minutes into my lunch break), I ended up going home to make some food.

The afternoon was just as quiet in the office. After I got off of work, I headed over to Kantstrasse again to tutor Stefan - next week is fall break for the younger students and he will not be here next week for a session.