7th of February, 2005 POST·MERIDIEM 01:30

Okay, so Berlin so far is unreservedly fantastic. I spent the first week or so looking for an apartment, reading Karl Popper in Zoo Station, drinking with expats, cashing in on all the positive marketing of Ireland from Heinrich Böll and Louis Walsh [Umm. Interpret that how you will], saying to myself that I would apply to more jobs, beyond the one that had offered me an interview Thursday, once I had a permanent place to stay with free internet.

So, I moved into a room in an apartment here on Tuesday evening. I got the LAN set up in the apartment Wednesday morning, after buying a switch and lots of ethernet cable, spent Wednesday afternoon getting my flatmate’s wireless LAN working, spent Thursday morning catching up on email, went to the interview on Thursday afternoon, did a great interview, asked for much more money that I was getting in Dublin, and was offered it without a murmur. From Monday I’ll be working in a huge hosting company, administering and automating the administration of, shared and dedicated servers running sundry Linuxes. Apparently agreeing salary and a starting day of Monday is a noncommittal way to end an interview in Germany. Lesson learned. (Okay, to be fair, they did say “we’ll call you within two weeks,” but they said it in German, they were aware that my German was ѕhіt, and the rest of the interview had been conducted in English.)

The company’s a twenty minute walk from where I’m living, and seems dead cool, from the two people I met—one a huge, unshaven, German, stereotypical nerd, the other a comfortably multilingual French mec , who was well enough informed on the tech stuff that it wasn’t obvious that the other guy was there for the tech stuff.

Aber ich muss mein Deutsch bessern—es ist möglich, ein bisschen Englisch bei dieser Arbeit benutzen, trotzdem ist Deutsch wichtiger, und ich mache noch viele Fehler dabei. (Zum Beispiel, vor dem Interview, habe ich bei der Rezeption “forname” geschreibt, als ich die Struktur meines Namens erklären wollte. Heh.)

So, yeah. I’m living in a bigger, more international city, getting paid more, having less to pay to survive every day, paying less for DSL, and, to be honest, I don’t anticipate having much trouble making friends—indeed, I haven’t had so far, even with catching up with people from the German conversation exchange in Dublin.