Hallo from Frankfurt, Germany

I wish I will be the first posting the story here, but man goes first (if you meet Al you will now what I mean hehe). Let me introduce my self, my name is Irma Kasri and I just started my internship 3 weeks a go at PricewaterhouseCoopers Frankfurt, Germany. In next one year; I will be working in Global Mobility Department as coordinator of PwC and AIESEC Germany cooperation as well as project assistant for internship and recruitment program.

Frankfurt is a financial city of Germany where you can find a lot of financial institution here include the EU Central Bank. It has around 650.000 inhabitants and quarter of it is foreigner. They are mostly come from Central Europe, Turkey, Spain, Africa, and many more. It is the second international city in Germany after Berlin but the most expensive one. The things that I was impressed during my first month here are the on time and fully organized transportation system, also the honesty of German people. The driver never asked you for the ticket, so you can easily cheat by not buying the ticket but no one do that. It just reminds me to Jakarta’s train user but anyway we can’t compare it. As four season country, we are now in winter where the temperature is around 0 – 10 degrees. It’s hard to adapt especially when there is snow with hard wind, I can feel my body shaking and it’s really hard to make any moves.

Talking about my company and the job that I have now, it’s out of my expectation. I have background in accounting and finance but now I am working in HR although it is also a financial services company. I should thank AIESEC because the experiences in organizing project and HR stuffs mostly I got when I was active in this organization. My manager was also the AIESEC member 12 years a go, so we have so much fun when we share what we do during our AIESEC life. I am lucky to work in this department because every one could speak good English, because some German people although they can speak English they prefer to speak German when you have conversation. As the way to adapt, I just sign in to German class to be able to recognize some words and to make conversation in next few months. The alphabet is similar with Bahasa but they use ‘sch, st’ so much that really hard to pronounce. The funny things are when you meet someone, you should say Guten Morgen (in the morning) or Hallo and when you leave the office or elevator you should say Tschüs or Cao (bye), no matter you know them already or you just meet them for the first time or they are your boss.

Well, I still have a lot of story to share but I will do next time. I hope the other exchanger can share their story here too, so we will have more exchanger in the future.