Week 2: March 26 – April 2, 2016
This week was my first week at Correctiv! We had Monday and Friday off for Easter, so I began on Tuesday. My first day was nice. I got to experience my first editorial meeting at Correctiv. I also got the chance to start to learn about the German FOI laws and the beginning of a few investigations that I will be working on during my time here. Since my week was short I didn’t really work on too much, but rather spent time reading up on our current investigations and things that I should know about the German datasets I will be working with.
It was a bit weird for me at first because my newsroom is super small (15 people) and if since the office is small, you can literally hear yourself talking. I also noticed that people don’t really small chat here, which is really weird for me since I feel like Americans small talk a lot, even if they really don’t care to know “how someone is.” But if there is small talk, it’s usually in German, so it’s really pushing me to try harder to learn the language. On a separate note, I feel that I’m learning something new daily (ex: a word, code, phrase, or some random thing about German living) – which is fantastic!
This week was short for me & I really wasn’t in the office as much as I would have liked as I was dealing with life things that come with moving to a new place, like opening up a bank account and getting my address registered. The address registration is similar to getting yourself registered with the U.S. Post Office, except you have to go in person to an appointment, show your ID and fill out a form explaining exactly where you live. I learned during this meeting that while I live on what I’d call the second floor in the U.S., it’s actually the first floor here.
Fun fact: in Germany, you also have to get your pets registered. And guess what? You also come here to get that done!
Here’s the sign outside the place where I got my address registration. You’ll probably see more of these long word sign pictures as I love that German words can literally be 3 or 4 words just strung together. They look intimidating, but they actually aren’t that hard to say.
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