I'm the 'M' in TLK

OK... so my name might not have made it into the company name yet, but at least my picture made it to their website! www.tlk-thermo.de (click on the TLK-Thermo link and scroll all the way to the bottom (of course)).

Last time I wrote on my blog I was dodging pine trees and waiting for my work visa... and health insurance... :S . On December 1st I received my work visa and became an official employee of TLK-Thermo Gmbh. My job is pretty cool, I play with fire, and ice, and gases at high pressures... and then after lunch ;p I'm a cross between a code monkey and an Excel junkie. Another advantage of this job has been going to programming/modelling courses in a very luxurious hotel in downtown Braunschweig... three times already!

I haven't written in a while, mainly because I was working two jobs, finishing up a prior programming contract, but also because nothing really funny happened. In fact the funny highlight of December was pretty much when I told the Foreigners Office that I was born in 1958. (In German numbers are backwards. For example, I would say I am 3 and 20 years old... which makes it really easy to mix up.) They took it pretty well, considering, and complimented me on my youthful looks.

Most of my miscommunications unfortunately happen with Veronika's parents. In fact most of them would probably be hilarious to you, but are just too embarrassing for me to actually write. Let's just say that at different times they've thought that I wanted to steal their farm and had sexual tendencies towards men.

Over the Christmas holidays I was in Germany with Veronika's family. Veronika and I also travelled for a bit, to Berlin and Dresden. Dresden is a totally underrated German city. You never hear of it, but I think it has been my favourite city so far in Germany.

There's not too much else going on at the moment, other than I think that I will start training for running again on Monday. I haven't trained in four months now... which has been awesome. I definitely needed a break and am just starting to feel some motivation to run again... and no Fehr, that motivation does not have to do with my waistline.

The last two days I was at another sweet programming course at the luxurious hotel. For a nice change, this course was in English with people from Denmark, USA, the Czech Republic, and of course Germany. Surprisingly, I was actually looking forward to the Americans coming to hear correct (well, close enough ;p ) English again and make fun of some Germans. Unfortunately, even the Americans had English as their second language, and it turned out that I was the only native speaker there. The result: every time the presenter wasn't sure of a word, he asked me in German how to say it in English, and half the time I didn't know, because frankly, I don't know a ton of advanced thermodynamic vocabulary in German yet. One time I got busted for not paying attention when I said that the opposite of capitalized letters was undercase... until a German corrected me with lowercase. oops. The cool thing was that there was also a Mexican there. We had a blast speaking Spanish amidst the other conversations, but by the end of the first day I couldn't speak any language at all, except Spanglan.

If you're interested in seeing some videos of Braunschweig, I put up a Christmas video on YouTube. A warning though, it's 15 minutes long and I made it for my family, so you might find it boring.
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zScsDgvdloU
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BClX_D9ztIo

Christmas was good. Most depressing moment: when a 15 year-old said to me "yeah, but you're an adult already".
Damn, when did that happen?

Alex