No speak German – kind of a problem

Ok, this is where I was not too happy… I accepted my offer with New Firm in June and started November 1. One would think that since they knew I spoke only a little German, that they would have had been more organized for my first day. When I showed up at my new office, they were about to put me in a large room for orientation. The problem – the orientation was all in German. So they sent me upstairs to my department to start. Well, my department wasn’t ready for me because they thought I would be sitting through the orientation. Not too much of a welcome feeling. So, I got a much abbreviated version of everything (sort of) and was sent to 2 weeks of German classes. The classes were good, but it was about a week of review and then a week of learning new things. It only advanced me to more conversation and food/survival things (which are important) however, not really that helpful in doing a job in German. I am learning and so far it hasn’t been a major issue with my job, it’s just more annoying than anything.

The other times I run into trouble is on the trains I take to and from work. Sometimes they have announcements of delays or mechanical trouble and I don’t know what they are saying. One night I was going home (of course when Alex was out of town) when an announcement came on (in German) stating there had been an electrical outage in a large part of the city. I was fortunately sitting next to a nice girl who told me what they had said. The plan was that the train was going to stop at a station and then bus us back to my home town of Lüneburg. If you can imagine how many people there are in a rush hour train all trying to get out and on a bus, it was really manic. However, the nice girl sitting with me had called her mother to arrange for her to pick her up at the station, rather than taking the bus. She offered me a ride. I was very thankful for that because the mayhem caused by the buses was a bit crazy. They also had used all the buses in Lüneburg to go to the train station, so even if I had taken the bus back to the station, I would not have had a bus to take me on to my house. So this was a time that I was thankful that I did not know German!