Arrival!

Hi Everyone!
So I have officially arrived in Berlin around 12pm our time (that's 6pm EST).
Yesterday was a little crazy, considering I didn't sleep much on the plane and pretty much missed the "night" due to the time difference. Now its 3:30am my time, but I woke up and can't sleep so I figured I would write.

I think what most people want to hear is about Berlin, so I will try to write about that.
I think its ironic that the blog is called "96 days of summer" because well, when I left Toronto it was raining, and of course when I got here it was also...raining. Granted not as hard, but its never fun. Its a little bit warmer here which I guess is good. My PhD student picked me up from the airport with his 7-month old daughter (her name is spelled something like Ylna- its a Swedish name). He took me to the lab since my apartment wasn't going to be ready until 4pm. I guess descriptors are important, so if I was going to describe my first impression of the Germans would be "the cars are small but the men are very tall", both the PhD student and the professor I will be working with are very tall blonde me. Probably well above 6 feet- I felt like a midget. They were very nice people- I have my own "office" with my own computer, and there is even a label outside the office with my name. They bought me nice flowers that smell (important to me!) so the room looks great. After about a million introductions (which included another Canadian intern who was really nice but I think he might have given me the "You go to York??" look :))

Not sure if anyone is interested but the PhD system works a little differently in Germany. In Germany the PhD students are actually lecturers and they have their own Masters students which is interested. So pretty much he's responsible for like 5 people which is cool. Tomorrow, after I read a little bit of the literature I'll probably get a better idea of the theory of what I will be doing, but in terms of the actual techniques I will be testing participants in a driving simulator. Its funny that problems in labs all over the world seem to be the same- designing the actual stimuli is very error-prone, you code for something and it doesn't work (and of course no one knows why). Anyway it was all very familiar :)

The actual university I work in is called TU-Berlin, it roughly translates to "Technological University of Berlin". So I was really curious as to why there is a Psychology department at the university. They told that during World War II this university actually made lots of technology/weapons for Hitler and after WWII the Allies told the university that it can operate as long as it has a more "human" aspect to it, and so now it has some interesting human aspects to it. For example- they have a huge PhD program concerned with Human-Machine interface, so the interactions between machines and humans, as my PhD student put it "from cooking machine to cars and more". Sounds like an awesome department! In fact, one of his Master's students just made this giant "I-Pad". Its like a homemade screen which is multi-touch when connected to a computer. As Stefan (the PhD student) said, they have the technology, now they just have to come up with a use for the screen :D!

Okay so on to Berlin (this is a reward for those who got this far). I promise to post pictures once it stops raining and I have the motivation to get outside and stuff. The part where I live in is called "Charlottenburg" its just one of the neighborhoods of the city. Apparently Berlin is unique in that each neighbourhood sort of has something called a Kitte (I think that was the word) which just means "centre" so each neighborhood has its own downtown. The neighbourhood itself is nice, with the big streets having lots of shops on them. I live in a 5 or so story building on the 3rd floor above a grocery store. Yesterday I went on an hour long search of buying a surfstick so I could use the internet. After many unsuccessful shops, I finally bought one at Vodofone. Its pretty much my own portable wireless! So I think it was worth the money (by the way haven't looked up the Euro/CAD exchange rate yet which is sort of bad...) The people on the streets look like they do in Canada. I think its a relatively diverse city in terms of ethnicities (which is what Stefan was saying as well). The streets I walked on looked sort of like a mix between College and Spadina, Bloor and Spadina, and Queen West. Lots of stores selling different things. I hope that tomorrow it will rain less and I will get to walk around more so I have better than just "surfstick" stories. My neighbourhood is very green so its nice (yay jogging space!).


Okay I think this is the end for today, and I will be impressed if anyone got this far, but blogging is a lot of fun actually. I can definitely say that I am a little homesick, but hopefully this will go away when I meet more people in my program. I also hope to go on a weekend trip somewhere this weekend so maybe I'll see something nice! You can post comments and I will definitely respond or email me at alina.beliavsky@gmail.com.

 Miss you all!

Cheers,
Alina