the job.

i'm getting more settled into the internship.  it is pretty relaxed.  most days, i show up around 9ish, and then go when i feel tired of being there.  on monday, i got a key to the building!  woo, i'm official.  i also got an official work space in christoph's office.  he is the guy that picked me up at the train station the first day.  carine, one of the girls i work with, was really sweet and decorated my workspace and got office supplies all lined up and what not.  

i'm also working on her project now.  it is called project ACCESS, which is about finding ways to provide better accessibility to services like groceries and doctors in rural areas.  several countries in the EU are participating; therefore, much of the work is done in english.  a few days this week, i was reading things in german and then filling out questionnaires in english.  pretty good system - my english grammar is better than my german.  later in the summer, i may also get to help with an ongoing project concerning some american army bases.  

starting next week, i'm going to attend a few classes.  one is about the sociological side of planning and the other is about transportation planning.  we will see how much i understand.  the planning school here is much bigger than vcu, and they have planning broken down into city planning and then regional development and spatial planning.  i'm interning with regional development and spatial planning but am quickly learning that a lot of the things i'm interested in - such as public spaces, housing, and slums -seem to fall in city planning.  

hiwis are student workers that also help with some of the same sort of stuff that i'm doing.  one of them tried to help me fix my wireless the other day.  he started talking to me in german.  after three or four sentences, he kind of paused and smiled, and asked in german if i spoke german.  haha.  i think he is now the 4th person or so to ask.   i also attended the studio about rural planning in idaho again this week.  those students are the least friendly people i've met at this university.  but who knows, maybe they think the same thing about me.  the have pulled a bunch of information from the census, so my job was explaining the educational system of the US, and what all the different possible degrees were.  eek.

i went running one afternoon and found an awesome playground in the forest.  it had two little forts built of stones, a really tall (but not very fast) slide, some stuff to climb on, and some that was kind of like a merry-go-round, but it was elevated (and fabulous).  i may have played a little bit.  

yesterday, i went with christoph for some meetings concerning his doctorate work.  i won't even try to tell you about it  because any of you who are still reading will stop.  point of the story, we went to a town called cochem that was really great and typical german.  of course, i didn't have my camera because i thought we were going to be in meetings.  http://cochem.de/tourismus/starten.htm (third link from the photo says 'bilder', that means photos.)

i'm going to heidelberg for the weekend to play with max and tom!