First Days at the Office

12.10.2016

So, I had my appointment for the foreigner’s identification number. It was awful. I’m telling you, the way they treat people there is really inappropriate. But well, long story short, I finally got the identification number and that’s the most important thing.

And now I’ve also had two days at the office! The office building is really nice and newish although the air conditioning there is heavy duty, so I’ll take a scarf tomorrow to finally try and get rid of this sore throat. By now, it’s been all kinds of preparations, among other things we had a tour in the building, they showed us where we are going to be sitting and introduced us to the people at the office, we had this ceremony for the last day at work for the now leaving trainees of last year and all these kinds of things. Tomorrow is my first day of actual work and my supervisor already promised me some tasks, so I’m looking forward to getting started.

All trainees are assigned a supervisor, with whom they act in close cooperation. I was lucky to get a great supervisor and besides, he’s German, so I’m hoping to get to use some German at the office. As a whole, the office experience by now has been quite a melange of languages - I love it! Only yesterday, I spoke French with one of the trainee supervisors (she gave us a tour in our department in French because it seems, almost everyone around speaks it), English with the other trainees, Spanish with the IT-guys installing my computer and a little bit of German with my own supervisor.

About Spanish: We get to attend language courses organised by the office, so naturally, I signed up for a beginners’ Spanish course, vamos! I really want to learn the language now that I have this great opportunity to learn on the spot. Although, it’s not like I wouldn’t have been doing just fine even without it. It’s true that the locals don’t speak much English but if you have some imagination, you’ll cope. I admit that at the foreigners’ office, some knowledge of Spanish would have been helpful but anywhere else, using French words, hand gestures and sometimes drawings has been good enough. Besides Google translate is there for anything more complicated. Among other things, I chatted with an internet service provider’s tech expert about my internet connection in Spanish just using Google translate and got what I wanted. I still don’t have any flatmates, so I’m secretly hoping to have a Spanish one to have someone to practice my Spanish with.

So the past days have mostly been meeting new people. The other trainees are among other countries from France, Italy, Spain, Czech Republic, Poland, Macedonia, Finland, UK, Serbia, Lithuania and so on.. It’s a unique opportunity to get to meet people from different countries and everyone seems really nice, so I’m expecting a great year!

With love,

Noora