Week 6: April 24 – April 30,2016
This week marks the one month that I’ve officially been living in Berlin. I realize that at this point, I’m about a 1/10th of my way through my fellowship; which is pretty crazy to think about. I’ve been working on an investigation on nursing homes throughout Germany (which will be publishing early June.)
This past weekend, I went to the Indian store. It’s weird how entering a store can bring you back to something familiar, like the Indian stores back home in NJ. I bought some rice, frozen samosas and naan. Something I definitely miss is the good Indian Food, although I’ve gotten some good food here, it’s just not the same as my mom’s cooking.
This week I mostly spent focusing on the pflege data (nursing homes). I learned a lot from looking at Stefan’s code and working through the data to combine it into one file. Towards the end of the week, I learned more about the FOIA process and sent out some initial press requests for some data for two possible stories that I am hoping to work on. It was a bit chaotic in the office because we had a Teckraking event this weekend with the folks from Google News Lab and CIR.
On Friday, we cleaned the office and prepared it for the event on Saturday. Friday evening, we had a dinner at Cafe Nest near Gorlitzer Park. From what I heard about on Gorlitzer Park, I heard that it was not a nice place to go and that it might be a bit dangerous to go to. But once I got there, I didn’t feel that way at all. The park was sunny and there was lots of people sitting and enjoying the nice weather and the summer.
Then, Saturday early morning, I was in the office to help out with the event. I was a judge and coach for the event. During the event, the winner of the Teckraking event from last year showed off their VR experience. It was really interesting to hear about the different projects and how people came about their final projects at the end of the hackathon. Also, Erika was there! At the end of the event, everyone actually won the hackathon because there was a lot of great ideas that were all interesting ways to think about how we get news. One of the projects I liked was a project looking at diversity in sources and in newsrooms in Europe.
After the hackathon, we headed to Holzmarkt (means: wooden market) and had some ice cream and drinks.
Some German things that I learned this week: My colleague Simon taught me about two German desserts this week: pfannkuchen (berliner) and Spritzkuchen.
This week also had some strange weather (as I learned from my colleagues April weather does whatever it wants… not so different from the “April Showers May Flowers” phrase that I know.) It hailed a lot this week, which was surprising for me to see, especially in April.
Here are some pictures from this week’s events!
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