Getting up with the Sun

These days I get up together with the sun. I climb out of bed into what seems to be deep night, but when I leave the shower, there are already some strays of light. By leaving the house, the world wakes up, the sun still hides behind the trees. On the train I see the fields, covered with fog and pink light waking up the birds and cows standing on dewy meadows. It’s this time of the year where you start freezing, take a hat and some gloves with you, when you leave the house. The higher it rises, the sun will warm up my homeland and the past two days, we had a clear blue sky during the day. It’s so nice to be home.

Where do you hide your dirt?

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On our last train ride in India, Lexi and I jumped screaming on the seats, because we saw mice runnung around the compartment. We were so nervous that everytime something moved on the floor, we shrieked. So this morning I was standing in Berlin, waiting for the underground to arrive when suddenly I saw a mouse on the tracks. I didn’t scream, it was far away.

Everytime you get too confortable in this clean and nicely organized world, something will show you that there are some dirty corners somewhere. To me, the Indians where more sincere with their dirt, they laughed at us, when we were jumping all hysterically. Had I asked the guy standing next to me this morning if he could also see the mouse, he would have said „Uhm, no.“ and turn his head away, cause no one wants to speak with the crazy lady.

Bad Luck

There is a band called Bad Luck. I will try and listen today.

Yesterday I lived my new addiction on the train: Soduko. It catches me so much, that I forget time and space and just concentrate on the numbers. The result being, that I missed my stop, had to return to the orginal station and try and reach the next train. I failed. This resulted in me missing my hometrain by two minutes. The home train is a regional shuttle which only leaves every hour. I was freaking tired and angry, every minute is holy to me after work and spending it at a train station is really not what I had planned. So I did some slow motion food shopping, got a Döner Kebab for dinner and passed the rest of the time with Soduko. And thus I reached my village, got off the train only to notice that someone had stolen my bycicle. I go nuts! What have I done to be punished like this? It’s totally not fair. I walked home, called my mom and complained, she just said „It’s all gonna be alright“ – yea right. The walk home did me good, I liked the evening air and had the chance to reflect a bit. I hadn’t reflected for a while and it really made me see some things, I did not notice so far. So with all the bad luck and all the misery, I somehow managed to get something good out of it. I really wanted to be pissed off, now I am just tired, which is OK.

My safety moment

source: getty images

This morning I left the house at 7:15 in order to catch the city train at 7:30. I am a trainee in Berlin now. My mom popped her head out of the small window above her bed in order to wave me goodbye and wish me a good day. I rang the bell on my bike and waved back at her.
In my family we like this ritual. It makes our world and life seem easy and good. A month ago it was me looking out of the window, hiding under my blanket again after my mom had disappeared behind the turn. I would catch another hour of sleep and then get to my calm and easy daily activities.
I can’t decide which part I like better.

And it goes up again!

So there are days where I get all dramatic and cry out: “Oh evil world, I despise you and your trials!“ (see below) and then there are the other days, where I am working hard to get settled and make a good living, where I get excited about mails from friends, the beautiful agenda I made myself, or the trips to Berlin.

So yesterday I had such a trip. I was all excited, as I had my first job interview with a real company. It was really interesting to see how my preparations the day before helped and how I somehow did not need it at all. So even though I was quite nervous and didn’t do the awesomest job at selling myself, the boss liked me and offered me a 6 month traineeship at his company. The thing with me is that I have studied languages, but that I have developed a passion for branding and PR through the activities next to my studies. So now I want to work with that and not too much with my education background. I like that I dare to go that way and not the safe path and I like the whole development and self discovery part of it. And the company offers me a really interesting project to try out and expand my knowledge.

So of course, there is a dark side: these 6 months will be poorly paid and below what I need to survive in Berlin. It’s like that in Germany. Interns should be happy if they get paid at all. So the problem is: Should I continue to live with my mum and then do a job I would really like to try out, or should I find something else, maybe less attractive and earn more money?

What is great about these problems is that they trigger decisions and they are also a sign that things are moving. I am out of the blind way, I think I have never been stuck in it, but I was too impatient to arrive. It’s like traveling with an Indian train – eventually you will arrive - that is guaranteed, the rest is up to the gods.

The Hole

It’s half past three in the afternoon, I just made myself a cup of tea and a plate with fruit and cookies. Sounds nice? It’s not! I am caught in this loneliness, producing self made agendas, spending my weekends with my mother and most of all feeling sorry for myself.

It’s now been 23 days back home and I am turning desperate. I feel like stuck in a time hole, while everybody, really EVERYBODY, seems to move on. There are days, where I cannot start hyper motivated at 9:00 am to apply for jobs, taking care of all the small things of my small life and then doing something pretty at 14:00 – waiting for my mom to come home, so I have someone to talk to.  I’ve watched all my movies, sometimes twice, sometime trice.

So my day today started with checking my mail – no news. I checked FB, ok I got news, but they fed me for half an hour. I still got stuck for too long, looking at wedding pictures of people I barely know. And I found out that even the evil ex boyfriend has moved on. He, really an evil super baddy, has a girlfriend. What!?

This is the hole. The hole has greasy hair and no shampoo. The hole starts to smell under its armpits. The hole has food from yesterday for lunch. The hole does not have a nail file. The hole has slow internet, no TV, and only a limited amount of radio stations.

So I went to take a shower, made some tea and served myself some fruit and cookies. Breathe in, breathe out. 

Picture: Solid-Caine-Stock "Hole" nohaycomolodeuno.blogspot.com/2009/02/hole.html

Don't look back in anger

I am currently spending most of my time in my mum’s little house on the country side outside of Berlin. Sometimes I take the bike out to buy some butter, or go and scan something in the village copy shop. The highlights of my daily life are the trips to Berlin, where I mostly go to look at apartments.

What I spend my time on is the great activity of applying for jobs. I feared just to get started not knowing what even to put on my CV, or what to look for. I had to do it anyway, there was no way to procrastinate, as the internet is so slow that youtube is no fun, and yea, besides going to the bakery there is not much more to do here.

I made a CV that I liked and started looking for jobs. I started to stumble upon jobs and internships I really would like to do, so I started applying with passion. I just got started, so frustration is not too big, yet (not too many rejections).

I realized something today: What would I have done one year ago? Would I have had the same confidence to go job hunting? Would I have been able to capture my experience and put them on paper? I started to see how much I have developed the last year, how each success and each failure made me stronger and more capable for the situation I am in now.

So, as a side effect I miss my team. You can’t imagine how much we had to work and how much sweat and tears we invested into our projects – but you can also not imagine how much fun we had together and how close we knew each other by the end of the year. I watched the good bye video this morning, and I smiled. It’ll all go the way it’s supposed to go. Man! I have just returned from India where I visited some of my dearest friends. Nothing can go wrong.