The number of COVID-19 (more commonly known as coronavirus) cases in Germany is growing. The curve is on the upswing, and it’s getting steeper. The situation is changing quickly, and in just a few days, coronavirus has gone from a bit of a running joke (at least in my office) to a serious fear. Continue reading “The Quarantine Diaries: Day 1”
Category: work
Gotta eat to live, gotta work to eat. Student jobs, part-time jobs, internships, and even grown-up jobs I’ve held abroad.
The ship visit that changed my mind about cruising
Despite the fact that I’ve been writing marketing texts on cruise ships for the past eight months, I’d never actually been on a cruise ship. So when the opportunity arose to tour the MSC Magnifica while she was anchored in Hamburg, I took it.
Continue reading “The ship visit that changed my mind about cruising”
The view from the ivory tower
Towering above the city at 52 meters (170 ft), the Philosophy Tower is the tallest building on the University of Hamburg campus.
Officially called the Philosophenturm, it is colloquially known as the Phil-Turm. The building houses a cafeteria, no fewer than three libraries, a handful of auditoriums, and dozens of classrooms and offices.
And it’s my new place of work. Continue reading “The view from the ivory tower”
At a Wendepunkt … turning point
As the weather in Hamburg slowly shifts and is now firmly entrenched in fall, so, too, is my life changing, and instead of a supermarket warehouse worker, I’m starting to feel like a student again.
I quit my job at the supermarket, which had been bringing me down and taking up a lot of time for a while now, and now have three new jobs – the most exciting of which is definitely teaching German to refugee children.
What I am learning about German culture from working in a supermarket
After a month and a half of tangling with bureaucracy, bellyaching over budgets and nearly driving myself crazy with the amount of free time I had on my hands, I finally got a job.
I work at a supermarket chain collecting items for customers’ online orders and packing them neatly into boxes. I get to carry around a neat little scanner and push around a large shopping cart and learn the location of even the most obscure supermarket products, from Studentenfütter (which literally translates to student food and turns out to be a type of trail mix) to mango-flavored buttermilk (yes, Germans drink plain buttermilk, how gross) to Hüttenkäse (which literally translates to “little hut cheese,” which, as you may have guessed, is cottage cheese in English). Continue reading “What I am learning about German culture from working in a supermarket”
Following the Wanderlust 