Sean in Bozen
23 June 2006

Work is underway now, but here's not a whole lot to say about it, actually. The folks I work with are nice. It's mostly pretty young people, generally in their mid to late 20's. I started at the same time as my co-worker, Stefanie, who is from Stuttgart and who is working on the same project I am. Once we got past orientation and all, I've mostly been writing programs to convert news text from the idiosyncratic markup it is in to something more modern and standardized.

When people are talking at full speed in German, I sometimes have a hard time keeping up. I miss words here and there. It was an awful lot of information in the first couple days. I still don't know the names of all my co-workers, so I made a study sheet with photos from their web pages.

I started reading Harry Potter in German. It's a nice easy read, unlike the dense legal or academic stuff at work with so many new words.

The World Cup has been a big deal ever since I got here. Early evening yesterday, as I was walking home from work, people were honking their horns and waving the Italian flag from their car windows; I knew that Italy must have won some match (2-0 against the Czech republic, I later learned). As I was walking around in the old city doing some grocery shopping at the vegetable stands and all, there were groups of rowdy young men marching in groups up and down the streets, waving big Italian flags and yelling I-TA-LIA! I-TA-LIA! in unison.