Stresstest

Jan
2010
11

posted by on English, India Project, Journal 360°, Livin' my Life, Model G8

StressDear all,

I’m real sorry for this redundant excuses of mine for not being able to keep up blogging, but I just and plain simply wasn’t able to or had other things to do… As you know, I came back to Germany on the 16th of December and since then I think I have had only one day, where I did not see anybody in terms of meeting friends or family (though I enjoyed that very much) or worked like nothing good…

New Year…

While I had planned to celebrate New Year’s Eve in Berlin, my plans changed while being in a little village close to Hamburg at Natasha’s place. As I did not had any real plans on what to do in Berlin, her idea to celebrate the new year together with her and a friend of ours, Fride, was gladly take up. Thus instead of hanging around at some anonymus party in Berlin, I spent some great days with the girls. We prepared a fantastic menu for the last dinner in 2009 and got very relaxed into 2010 – perfect 🙂

Getting back into my life…

Since I arrived in Berlin the „real life“ hit me quite hard. While my internship at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research started off very well (in terms of everybody being nice and pretty laid back), my other activities kept me quite busy… While I’m not going to outline all the stuff going on, I think this weekend is explanatory:

Friday I started the day trying to solve a hell lot of problems connected to the session of the jury, which is going to take place next Friday here in Berlin. As many of you know I’m working for Model G8 Germany being the Head of the Summit Organization. Our deadline for the applications to be part of the delegation2010 was the 31st of December 2009. Until today all the received applications got peer-reviewed and rated by our team, because the independent jury will only get three candidates for each of the nine positions. Thus we had to figure out, which three. Meanwhile on Friday, we neither had a proper jury nor a room to accommodate them. Friday afternoon I attended a workshop organized by 360° – the journal I’m working for – on PR, which was extremely useful. To make it short, after dinner I worked until half past two to transcribe interviews I did in India for my university project.

Saturday me and Marius – the guest I accommodated during the meeting of the members of 360° – got up at seven to be at the venue in time. The first part of the day was dedicated to review what had happened over the last year with 360° and the question, who would candidate for the two open positions in the steering committee besides Marius. I had been asked beforehand to do it but denied due to time-constrains. Still, at the session my name was raised by a lot of people who said a lot of nice stuff about me 🙂 To make it short, I resisted the temptation and finally, with Tine and Inga, we found two very capable nice girls who are now heading 360° together with Marius 🙂 After a quite short dinner I got back home in order to work on the interviews again, while my guest went out partying with the other folks…

Sunday morning I finished the last interview before moving over to the breakfast with the crew of 360°, which was followed by an intense but productive round of discussions. I left early in order to power nap for 2 hours and then started again to work on getting all the data of the peer-review process in order. Unfortunately, only half of my team got the deadline right and some didn’t pay attention to my orders on how to do it – resulting in more work. Thus I worked until half past two this morning until I had all things done. A big thank you goes to the ones who helped me during that process and took over the work others should have done!!! 🙂

This morning we now finalized the list of candidates for the jury session and already send it off. The jury has now 6 quite qualified members and we’ve a room 🙂 Moreover I finally got in touch with the office of the chancellor so that I can coordinate my planning with them for the workshop that is supposed to happen in March to prepare the delegates for the real summit in May 🙂 Afterwards I met with my project group in order to coordinate our presentation which is going to be due in 11 days…

So that’s it. Unfortunately I have not been able to meet a lot friends here in Berlin since I returned and I’m sorry for that, but I hope that if you read this post, you’ll understand why. I hope that I’ll have more time after the jury session on Friday…

I hope you’re doing fine and will get in touch once I find a free minute to do so.

Take care, Strothi

Merry Christmas

Dez
2009
24

posted by on English, Family-Life

Christmas09

I’m enjoying my time with my family and friends and look forward to some relaxing days at home in Osnabrück 🙂 Wherever you are, I wish you all a wonderful christmas time! By the way, the pic above was taken here at my mom’s place along with a few other pics which you can find on SmugMug 🙂

Enjoy your time with family and friends 🙂

posted by on Livin' my Life

Hey folks,

it’s been quite a while since I wrote something but the last couple of weeks have been really stressful and I had no time to blog about the stuff going on. I’ll report about the last two weeks into more detail in another post later this weekend, but I just wanted to tell you that I’m now back in Germany.

I came back on Wednesday evening and as predicted I have been busy since I hit German ground… Now I’m in Oldenburg at Matze’s place and look forward to some relaxing days 🙂 I haven’t had a chance to take sometime for me and think about the sudden change, thus answering the question „How does it feel to be back?“ is kinda tricky… I guess I’m still somehow in Delhi and will be until I settle back into my life here in Germany and have time to think about it.

Actually though there’s one thing that always reminds me where I am: The weather! In Berlin we had MINUS 12° today and while it’s here in Oldenburg a little warmer (-7°), here’s way more snow than in Berlin. In Delhi we had (in case we had sun) about 20-25° so this 30° difference is quite a thing… Moreover, I totally forgot about „winter-weather“ in Germany before I flew to India so I had no „winter-stuff“ in Berlin. However, my mum send me a „care-packet“ with gloves and a nice cap so that I wouldn’t freeze to death 🙂 I guess that’s exactly what mums are for, right? 😉

Alright, I’ll be in Osnabrück on Monday and my German mobile is working again, so give me a call if you happen to be in town as well. As stated above, I gonna blog about the last 2 weeks in more detail over the coming days 🙂

Enjoy your winter-time,

Best, Strothi