Yeray Annel Solís Dueñas · 2025-2026
Emden
It all started on May 1st. A whole day of traveling: Barcelona → Hamburg → Bremen → Emden. Everything was going smoothly until the train stopped in the middle of nowhere at midnight, just 40 minutes away from our destination. We almost ended up waiting until 5 AM for the next one because the bus that was supposedly coming to pick us up never showed up. Luckily Menno, our boss, came to rescue us himself. Honestly, he was super nice right from the start. When we arrived, we saw the apartment and, well, it wasn't exactly what we expected, but for what we were going to use it for, we didn't need much else. It was basically just a place to sleep and not much more.
Culture Shock in Germany
The first week was all about adapting. On day one, they introduced us to our colleagues and explained what we’d be doing. Everyone was incredibly friendly from the get-go. What we absolutely did not expect was how early everything closes in Germany. If you left work thinking about buying something for later, you couldn't because everything closed before 7 PM. We had to reorganize our schedules quite a bit, though luckily we found an Aldi that stayed open a bit later and saved us more than once. Another thing that really caught our attention was the number of people riding bikes. Emden is a flat city with bike lanes everywhere, and you can tell that cycling is the main mode of transport for people, not just something used once in a while. It’s also very green: parks, natural areas right inside the city, animals… it’s a very quiet and beautiful town, and it was really nice to just walk and stroll around.
The Internship
We worked at HTH Sinus Electronic, a small company that manufactures chips for electronic devices. Our main project was learning how to use their ERP and handling small tasks. The hardest part was at the beginning when we had to research the framework, which was FRAPPE. We set up a local environment and started tweaking things to learn how it all worked. Our schedule was from 9 AM to 4 PM.
Berlin and Amsterdam
Whenever we had days off, we made the most of them. We went to Berlin for four days and visited the main sights, ate well, tried typical things like pretzels, and went to watch the Valorant VCT live, which was awesome. After that, we went to Amsterdam—my second time there. We really enjoyed the neighborhoods, the food, and the coffee shops which, as the name suggests, sell "coffee." Two trips that turned out great and that we managed to fund quite well with the grant.
In Conclusion
An experience that is completely worth it. You learn to work in a real-world environment, in another country, with a different culture and a different way of doing things. Not everything is perfect, but that’s also part of the journey. We’re taking a lot away from this chapter and are really looking forward to doing something like this again. Thanks to Biel and David, because it wouldn't have been the same without them, and to the whole HTH Sinus team for making us feel so welcome.