According to wikipedia, people from Hamburg are called a Hamburgers, and for this post, I’ve decided to agree with wikipedia. So, I can say that I am slowly becoming a Hamburger. (Bad dad joke, I know, but bear with me)…
In the last few weeks, Hamburg has started to feel like home! I finally know my way around the city (although, I have to admit that sometimes I still get confused with how to properly navigate public transportation, but that tends to happen to me everywhere I go…) I have found my favorite bakeries, coffee shops, bars and restaurants, so I guess I have reached the point to where I can say that it feels really good to be here 🙂 This doesn’t mea that I haven’t been homesick a few times, because I definitely have been. There were days where I just wanted to be in Philly or Asunción for a little bit, but at the end of the day, I was also grateful for the opportunity that I had to be interning in Hamburg for the summer.
I also think that a big part of me enjoying more of this moment is due to the people that I have met. I am not the only intern at my workplace. At the moment there are 6 of us working at the same office, but under different teams and projects. The interns are amazing individuals with whom I have shared a lot of laughs, interesting conversations and adventures around the city… they have become my summer gang!
The World Cup! Yes, the World Cup gets its own paragraph. There is something about the collective euphoria that the World Cup games brings to places and people that really makes me look forward to every four years when the games are played. So one of the things that I have enjoyed the most in these last few weeks, has been watching the World Cup in Germany. Europeans like South Americans, shared a passion for this exciting sport, so every time that a match is on there are tons of bars and restaurants streaming the games and there is always a crowd cheering for the teams that are playing. Even at my office, the conference room is transformed into the World Cup room when there is soccer a match going on. This Sunday is the last game of the World Cup, and I seriously ask myself what am I going to do with my life once this is over…
Now is time to get serious! For the last few weeks, I have been working on the development of handbook that gives practical examples on how to promote, create, and develop lifelong learning practices among member states. Although, the institute where I am working has published a myriad of papers and journals regarding lifelong learning, this is the first time they are developing a handbook for it. I have to say that participating on the development of this material, has been quite an interesting experience. I have been doing literature reviews as well as looking for different case studies that will be added to the handbook. In a couple of weeks the handbook working team (which I am part of ) will meet with the authors of the handbook and will be revising the content of it all together. But these are just the very first steps of the process of creating the handbook. Later this year, experts will meet again to revise it and then the handbook will be pilot it at a different meeting with representatives of selected member states, and after that it will be revise a few more times by the authors and editors before it finally gets published. It has been fascinating to see the process through which a document such as this has to go through before it makes it to the outside world. Besides this, I have been supporting the Lifelong Learning Policy team with various tasks they needed to do throughout on a daily basis. At many times my Spanish came handy, because I was either asked to check to the translations of documents, or to revise and comment on drafts of entire reports that were in Spanish.
This is all for now! On my next blog, I’ll share a little bit more of my adventures in Germany/Europe and some of the other tasks that I have been assigned at work.
The International Educational Development Program 