No cheese, Gromit?

I just went into a German cheese shop. I was looking for English cheese. German supermarkets don't stock it. They seem to go in for processed cheese and brie. I asked the cheesemonger and he told me that they had 200 different sorts of cheese but no English cheese. His 200-strong assortment is mostly made up of French cheese. He told me that it is important to specialise. I was rather shocked. He offered an explanation: they used to sell cheddar but there wasn’t enough demand. I mentioned Wensleydale. All he had to offer was a blank face.

Work and Wine Festivals

40 minutes to go at work.
It is amazing how much time drags when you are not having fun.
No work to do and I am bored of surfing the internet (have spent the last 3 weeks filling in my time doing just that).
Looking for interesting websites of note.
Frank informed me of a cracker: the best 80’s video website. Dolly Parton and The Bangles deserve special note.
Any more ideas?
One good thing about this placement is that I am reading the Guardian Online from cover to cover (metaphorically speaking) every day so I am full of useful facts and pieces of information. A proof reading text today all about Christina Aguilera also proved educational. Did you know that she used to be on the Disney Channel, alongside Britney and Justin Timberlake? So that’s why they all love each other so much…
Looking forward to the clock hitting 5pm and getting out of here.
And tomorrow it is Friday :-)
And this Friday is the start of the Fulda Wine Festival. Looking forward to that. Never been to a wine festival before. Not sure whether to expect many inebriated people, as at a beer fest, or whether there will a more classy air, with lots of people sniffing their beverages and trying to distinguish hidden subtle flavours. Not sure which one I fit into best. Am determined to try my hand at the wine festival this weekend though. I'll let you know whether I manage to pull it off. Going for some practice tonight with a few girls from work. I'm taking it seriously you see...

Eye Eye

It’s time for the next update and just so you know, I am doing this one in ‘stealth mode’ – under the guise of a work email in Outlook. Yes, I am writing a blog at work. In my defence, I have been here since 8am and have had only one task to complete – a proof reading that took me a whopping 15 minutes. So I think it is justifiable. The way I see it, if I don’t do anything then I will fall asleep at my desk. If I am asleep I won’t notice when someone emails me with work so I will be slower to react. Therefore, it must be in the interest of everybody to keep myself occupied, and more importantly awake, by doing important tasks like writing blogs.

It has been an eventful and at times exhausting and excruciatingly painful week. So the fun started on Friday with Ragil’s birthday, complete with cake, candles and my own very unique version of Happy Birthday. I think he liked it, even if it was slightly out of tune… The pain started during the birthday meal and didn’t end until well, yesterday/today, still to be confirmed. My wonderful contact lenses apparently thought it would be a good idea to grow some bacteria and thus, on insertion into my eye, gave my eye a bit of an unwelcome shock and visitor. The bacteria soon took affect and caused an almighty pain in my eye. By Saturday lunchtime I was screaming in pain, my left eye too swollen and painful to open and my right eye similarly shut. An eye doctor was sought. Apparently German hospitals are weird, eerily quiet and empty places. We went to one in the morning, when my eye was just disconcertingly cloudy, and found no people and the casualty hidden away on the 2nd floor with only one doctor/nurse in attendance. She informed us that they don’t have an eye doctor at the hospital and that I would have to go into town and seek one. It being Saturday, they were all shut, so the emergency eye doctor, a Dr Maus, came to my rescue, gave me vision for 40 minutes, patched me up, prescribed eye creams and pain killers and sent us on our way. The next 36hrs were spent with me being effectively blind, limited to such exciting and varied activities as sleeping and, when awake, sitting or lying with both my eyes shut, listening to music. The patch came off on Monday and my vision was magically restored. My eye continued to look extremely unsavoury for a while but it is fully fit now, hence I am back at work, with nothing to do…

Onto rather happier pastures, the flat mentioned in previous blog entry is ours. We signed the lease, paid the deposit, got the keys, moved most our stuff and last night, most excitingly of all, started to paint. This is quite a big thing for me. I have never had a place to renovate and paint before. The excitement did temporarily wear off when we had to cycle ridiculously far and up a huge hill to get to the DIY store, but once back at the flat complete with paint, rollers and brush, I was beaming. Unfortunately you couldn’t see me beaming because we had no electricity. We managed to paint most of the living room in the light of dusk and just as we started packing up our stuff, the electricity was fixed. Hurrah. Can’t wait to see the place today. Ragil is going on ahead after work to apply some finishing touches. It is probably safer with me not there. I did a very good job last night of covering my skin, t-shirt, trousers and socks, as well as large amounts of newspaper, in paint. Luckily, in fact, miraculously, no paint on carpet or furniture. How good are we?! (I got quite a bit on the walls too!)

Don't count your chickens...

Without wanting to jinx the whole situation, I wish to report some good news. It must have been all the fingers being crossed from everyone (thanks) but today Lady Luck shined down on us and we not only found a flat, but found a landlady who liked us and a reasonably priced, centrally located abode complete with furniture. Hurray! All this only happened a few hours ago so I really hope I'm not counting my chickens here, but YEAHHHHH!!! We're meeting on Saturday to sign the lease and then moving in the weekend after next. It's going to be ace.

On to the other thing. Getting up at 6am everyday sucks beyond belief. Going to bed at 10pm doesn't make it any easier. Getting the train with all the business people is quite fun and means I'm getting a fair bit of reading done and the work itself is fine - just translating and proof-reading - although a bit anti-social and a lot like exploitation. Was expecting more from the company, which has thus far proven itself to be very profit-orientated with staff-satisfaction appearing to be bottom of their list. On my first day I was briefly introduced to all the employees (about 20 sat upstairs) and then taken downstairs where the other interns sit behind their computers, churning out proof-readings and translations if they're English native speakers (that's three of us) or twiddling their thumbs if they're Germans (four of them) as they have no work to do because everyone who works for the company is German so they can do their own proof-reading. Yeah, it's very much a case of hamsters in the wheel, oil in the machine. This naturally gives us interns a great sense of motivation and pride. If they paid us anything close to the minimum wage I think we'd maybe find a little more motivation, as it is, we just feel like their means to a greater profit margin. Still, when there's no work for me to do I get to do my translations for the uni, which is paid work, so in a funny way I feel quite smug. Plus, as we're in our own room, away from all the 'action' (read action as employees, phones that ring more than once a day and coffee machine) it means when the work dries up we can pretty much entertain ourselves on the computers. Still waiting for the guilt feeling to go away when I check and write emails though... Although am pretty confident it won't stick around for long.

Into the unknown...

So the 'Lucy being a business woman' outfit has been chosen. The smart bag has been dusted off and packed with important, business-like items - posh pen, file complete with important forms, umbrella, you know the sort of things. And I am preparing to go to bed at an outrageous time of 10pm.
Got to be up early tomorrow, 6am to be precise.
KERN AG, 'global communications company', Frankfurt, awaits.

Some Rather Upsetting News

Hmm. So I'm back in Fulda (after a fab time at home) and I have a problem... I AM OFFICIALLY HOMELESS :-(
It is indeed a sad sad situation and, after our experiences today, it is in fact getting more and more absurd. (Song ref, 10 points for 1st correct answer!) Our hunt for somewhere to live has been rather rollercoaster-esque. We have found several suitable flats but all have come with problems ranging from current tenants wanting over 700€ for their furniture, to today's extremely unfortunate incident which can be roughly summarised as follows: we find a great, reasonably cheap flat in the centre of town with balcony, we sign the lease and are just about to 'close the deal' when Mr Letting Agent gives us his bill for 500€. This fee covers the cost of him walking 200m from his office to the flat, spending 30mins of his day showing us the flat and talking about it and then printing out the lease and going through it with us. A bit steep ain't it? Well we thought so, so had to do a rather embarrassing RETREAT manoeuvre that now means we are back to square one. The only consolation is that we have now been here many times before, so at least we have some experience. There is lots of bad news that probably outweighs this consolation - namely that as we now know that letting agents seem to find it justifiable to charge a ridiculously inflated figure for their services, they can no longer be relied upon to help us in our quest to find a flat (2ZKB if anyone has any ideas or handy hints). And so, we must continue alone, using the internet and hoping that we stumble upon somewhere that (a) is free, (b) we can afford, (c) is in Fulda, (d) doesn't throw another spanner in the works.
In the meantime, I am crashing at Ragil's appartement, my worldly belongings are crashing in a friendly German's basement and the situation remains somewhat suboptimal. Welcome back to life in Fulda.