Florida vs Germany: Air Conditioning

As someone who grew up in Florida, I've always known life with air conditioning. In Florida, it's a practical requirement, given how hot and humid it is for most of the year. When I moved to Europe a year ago, I expected to find less AC. What I didn't expect was to find a completely opposite attitude towards it.

Air Conditioning units - Source

Banking in Germany

Now that I've been living in Germany for almost 6 months, I've gotten a better feeling for the differences between life here and in the US. One thing that quickly became apparent was the different approaches to banking. In Germany (and really most of Europe), banking systems seem to be more secure, use the IBAN system throughout the SEPA, and Germans are somewhat distrusting of credit cards.

Image Credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dskley/8647962765/

Two weeks in, trip to Prague

Just over 2 weeks after starting work, I took a weekend trip to Prague. But I'll start with an update on those two weeks before getting into details about my Prague trip. My Prague Flickr album is here.

Brussels for the move to Berlin

In my last two posts, I talked about getting my apartment in Berlin and the trip back to Brussels. When I returned to Brussels, I spent my time there pretty much getting my stuff in order. I did some light grocery shopping for some Belgian food snacks to bring with me to Berlin. When I went out to the store, I saw an interesting truck parked along the street.

Diplomatic Cargo outside my grandmother's apartment building.

Being a tourist in Berlin for the last time

In my previous post, I talked about being in Berlin and flat-hunting. When I wasn't actively looking at flats or researching places online (which wasn't very much time), I wandered around a bit.

At Alexanderplatz, I noticed they were setting up for some gelato expo? More about this below.

Flat hunting in Berlin

After the weekend in Brussels, I returned to Berlin to embark on the tedious process of finding a flat. While in Brussels I had already started lining up places, mainly finding ones on wg-gesucht.de. Worried that I might not be able to get my own place at a decent price, I also included some flatshares in my search, but tried to keep it at most one or two other people. The trip back to Berlin was, again, uneventful. The only problem was there was about 30 minutes delay, and it meant I'd miss the first flat viewing (which wasn't high on my list, I mainly just liked the location and street name: Buttmannstr.)

A TGV on another platform in Brussels

Waiting for the train. Was actually going to Berlin Ostbahnhof since my hostel was near that station

Berlin (Part 2)

I'll start by re-posting the link to the Flickr album from Part 1.

To recap, had my interviews on Monday and Tuesday. Wednesday I switched hotels and did some visiting/shopping, but the weather wasn't great. Thursday was then a fully free day before traveling to Copenhagen on Friday. Since the weather promised to be nice on Thursday, I planned to go to Tempelhof Airport to see the abandoned airport that's now a park. Tempelhof is known for being the site of the Berlin Airlift. The airport closed in 2008. The city opened the airfield as a park in 2010. I took a panoramic picture from the runway, which you can see here.

Berlin (Part 1)

As in my previous post, here's the Flickr link for all the other pictures I took.

Berlin is a great city. I absolutely love how it has the mix of old and new, the history behind everything, and a very safe feel to it all. In my last post, I mentioned the interviews I had coming up. The first one was Monday with BlackBridge, second was Tuesday with Pixformance. I really liked what I saw at Blackbridge and was really happy when they offered me a job! So it looks like I'll be working there starting in September (so excited!).