Ah, the German beer scene...

Not actually that great. Before arriving, I never would have expected that I would actually be counting down the days until I got back into the US to drink American beer, but that seems to be the case. While the price and convenience here can't be beat, I'm already getting bored of the few available styles ("Would you like a pilsner, a hefeweisen, or a dunkel?"). To be fair, my experience has mostly been limited to shops and bars, with only a few brewpubs and beer halls with a longer beer list, but damn Germany, I'm disappointed. I haven't yet had the "wow, that's damn good" experience in my time here. (I'm sure I will find some excellent beers with a little more effort, but I expected it to be much easier.) This article sums up my feelings pretty exactly.

Nine days until Chicago! I will drink ale, so much ale!

Culture Shock

Oh Germany. So quirky. Here's a few:

•  Exact change please - cashiers will ask if I have 15 cents on top of whatever round euro amount I gave them for my 4.15 euro purchase so they can make even change. I've gotten very used to this, it's nice to clean out the change purse regularly.
• All cash, all the time. Using my card is pretty rare. Tax is included in all listed prices though, which makes paying with cash much, much easier - no random few cent amounts in my final purchase.
• Spray deodorant. Only spray deodorant. The only roll-on stuff is tiny and expensive. I'm a total convert, though. Application is a little weird, but it works so well!
• Dryers are non-existent. I can't do too much laundry at a time, or I'll run out of space to hang it all up around my room.
• No jaywalking. None. Empty street, safe to walk? You better wait for the little green man anyway, or expect disapproving looks from everyone around you.
• Alcohol is everywhere. In convenience stores, shops in the subway, as little impulse buys by the register in the supermarket. Beer, wine, hard alcohol, you name it. But...
• Not exactly the best beer variety in terms of style. The offerings I've found stick pretty strictly to this list, with mostly pilsners, wheat beers, and variations thereof. I miss ale.
• Mullets are far more common than they should be.

On an unrelated note, I suck at blogging. But I'm not going to suck anymore! Early new year's resolution.

On a doubly unrelated note, shit guys it's almost 2012.

Hello from Berlin!

It's AWESOME here. I'm having such a good time so far. The city is huge and exciting and I'm going to need many more weekends to sufficiently explore it. However, I'm going to skip over all of my first week and the explorations therein and save that for a later date. I just started work today, so I'm going to just write about that because it's fresh and I'm too lazy to write about everything right now.

Today I started my six(!) month internship at SAP, in their new and tiny Innovations Center. You probably know SAP from their business software, payroll and all that, but they have some pretty cool stuff going on here. My department is located in Potsdam, a short train ride outside of Berlin, at the Hasso Plattner Institute, started and headed by one of SAP's co-founders, Hasso Plattner (surprise!). The college itself focuses on IT, and we have a few students working for and with our department.

My group/department is very small: only around ten people at the moment, including myself and the new hires. I'm really enjoying the size, though, as it makes the atmosphere less rigid and more start-up-like. I came to the group with one manager, but it's so flexible that I've been talking to everyone about their projects and I have a lot of decision making power about what I want to work on. I spent a good part of today meeting people and learning all about the different projects going on in the group.

I have three-ish projects that it looks like I'll be working on to begin with. The first concerns an extraordinarily huge amount of data about patient blood samples, and how we can efficiently manage and analyze all that. The second is actually an MIT-affiliated project and my favorite so far, trying to forecast demand for a product at a some specific store so the supplier can more efficiently ship the product to the distributer. The last, which I think I'll only be marginally involved with, is the development of an efficient data structure for their custom database system. This one sounds awesome and hard and straight out of 6.046; I was wishing for my copy of CLRS and maybe access to some office hours as the guy was explaining it to me.

All that plus free coffee, free lunch (every day!), and a beautiful campus made for a pretty excellent first day :) And I'm doing it all again tomorrow!

Hello lover

Best waiting-for-flight time ever.

All packed!

See you guys in six months!

I'm going to miss him

Hello world

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