Travel stories

Trip to Emden and First Week of Stay

March 11, 2023. We finally start our journey to Emden. We spent the whole day traveling. From Spain to Hamburg, from Hamburg to Emden. We even got on the wrong train. Once we arrived in Emden, we met our company tutor, Menno. He seems like a good person. Menno took us to the apartment we’ll be sharing for the entire stay. It seems like a nice place, although we already saw we’ll have to clean it soon :)

During the first week of the internship, we did various tasks. Initially, we met our work colleagues and they introduced us to the tasks we would be doing during our time at the company. On the afternoon of the first day, they took us around the city and showed us the shops and a bit of the town. Due to German schedules, we really have to organize ourselves well to shop early, because stores close very early, and if we wait until after work, we always arrive too late. Luckily, we found other places to shop, like Aldi and similar ones, which thankfully close a bit later.

By the way, one of us has a fear of spiders, and we discovered that our house has quite a few that want to accompany us during our stay. Unfortunately for them, we had to make it clear that it wouldn’t be possible.

Impressions of the Country

Germany is nothing like Spain. Throughout our trip, we’ve had to change many of our habits. The first and most noticeable difference is the schedules. Shops, supermarkets, and even entertainment venues close much earlier than in Spain, which means we had to shop right after getting home from work. Also, nights start earlier, so we can't make much noise from the early evening hours.

We also noticed that a large part of the population uses bicycles, and thanks to that, many roads have bike lanes that are regularly used by cyclists. Finally, we found that the city has a lot of green areas, which means there are many parks where animals can be found, giving the city a more natural feel.

Travels

After a few weeks in Emden, we wanted to visit a nearby city, but we couldn't do it. What we did do was explore Emden (even though it didn’t have much). There was a cinema in the city, and the only movies we could watch were new releases on weekends because they were shown in the original language (in English without subtitles). The city center was usually empty; the only time it was full was around mid-May when there was some sort of fair. Unfortunately, we couldn't stay long since we found out about it the day before leaving.

Internship

During our internship, the main focus was to try to develop a way to transfer data from one ERP system to a completely new one. For this process, we developed a program using Python, which would copy data from the original ERP to the new one. We had to do a lot of research because we needed to figure out what section each data field belonged to, since most of it was in German and abbreviated, so neither we nor our boss could help much. In the end, thanks to our persistence, we managed to get the program to transfer the important data through trial and error.

The Company

The company we worked at was HTH Sinus Electronic, led by Menno Ternieden. It was a great workplace. Although we had some issues with a flatmate who also worked at the company, most of the employees were very kind to us and helped us with many of the problems we encountered during our stay.

Our work hours were from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and Menno would pick us up around 7 a.m. Something that surprised us was that the house we lived in was full of employees from the same company. Menno usually came with a van to take all of us to the office and drove us back once the workday ended.