How to train a graduate in Germany 101

Unlike what one might be thinking, this is not a foundation course, and I am not your professor (though I am already disappointed with your performance). It is just a binary equivalent of five (spoiler alert : next could be a hex, not a spell but hexadecimal credits to a friend who used to live in one of aachen’s darkest regions). Many of us live our lives in the world of binaries, good or bad, love or hate, real taco or taco bell taco. But as humans, we are hardly a binary, we are like quarks, a superimposition of the two extreme states. That is probably the reason why I always dislike labelling anyone as good or bad, since it entirely depends on one’s perspective and outlook which could be heavily biased (although the grandpa from “Courage the cowardly dog” was borderline evil). One good example would be Severus snape from the Harry potter universe who is perceived as a grey character by many. But as the book depicts, none of the characters except Hagrid was an angel nor none other than Aragog a devil (seriously, how can this be perceived as a children’s book).

Pathway leading to the sports centre close to my previous residence.

I completely forgot where I had stopped previously, so I had to revisit my blog to refresh my memory. After looking at the photos I had taken during this timeline, I honestly thought whether there was nothing worthwhile to write. But looking at many well established novels with several plot holes and timeline inconsistencies, I would not want to be that person (Eragon series, I am looking at you). Our memories are so delicate and tangible, it needs utmost care when one handles with them. If not for some of these photos, I would not remember what had happened back then. The Indian association in Aachen had organized an event to celebrate an Indian festival about a month after it is usually celebrated. I decided to attend this one before not partaking in any of their previous events and expected them to welcome me with open arms. As a first year student, I had such wild imagination and now the audacity to write about it. The event was pretty entertaining, but I left the way I had entered, making no friends there. I choose not to share the photos I had taken during these events to protect the identity of the persons involved and protect my ineptness in taking a proper photograph (probably this is why they did not want the photos I had taken of this particular event). And to add to this I did not expect such a huge turnout despite the fact that there were only seven Indians in my batch (if my memory serves me right, none of them turned up for this event, or they secretly did).

Just like the simulations. Run them again to be sure.

Our cosy study room.

Let us fast forward to December, since as the photo above, most of the time went into coding and debugging. As a friend who did not want to pay for a stupid wall rightfully mentioned in his thesis acknowledgement, we bonded much over debugging and making our codes work. Most of the time, the communication was one way, I will let the readers guess the direction. But this Julia loving friend along with Asian/European and guy from the country with the second most population of Japanese origin, helped me immensely to get rid of most of my bugs. Ironically, apart from the Asian/European friend, we went together to the Japan Tag, but this story will be told in the next blog (excitement intensifies). Apart from the library, most of my outside time was spend in this very room throughout my time in Germany. If I list the places I spent my time away from my room in descending order :

• Study room in German Research School (GRS, I have practically slept there thrice which adds more hours here yay!).
• Library (there are two spacious ones, whenever I wanted a change of place from one, I chose the other).
• Treks and travel to trek locations (nothing to add here, just being consistent).
• Travelling to an unknown city or town without a plan within North Rhine-Westphalia. (some called me a madman).
• Concert practice rooms (will come up in the future blog) and HiWi room (room designated for student assistants).
• Guinness pub and White house (what an alcoholic you might think, this will be discussed in the next blog).
• Katschhof (Aachen city centre) and public parks.
• Bus stands and train stations waiting for the “punctual” train (it is a devastating story 😦 ).

Why stop at 8? I cannot recollect any other, and this is the eighth blog that I am writing (I love correlations, they are one of the most chaotic beasts).

Pre-baked.

Post-baked.

You can very well ask me what are these two delicious looking foods doing in my blog. And I am going to tell you just that, even if it wasn’t the question in your mind. Around mid December, not-anymore-European batchmate invited me and other batchmates to his house for a pre-Christmas party. He actually took extra effort to cook vegetarian dishes since I was visiting him. I have never cooked meat based dishes when any of my friends visited me, so I give a medal of appreciation to him. I have never attended a Christmas party before per se, so I wasn’t quite sure what I should take with me. And to the rescue came Lindt chocolate factory outlet, which is situated painfully close to my house. I am still not sure what to get as a Christmas gift, any suggestions can be sent anonymously in the comments so I can be invited to one in the future (preferable anonymous names being : IamSanta, IhaveaStupidFriend or DontInviteMeForAnything ). It felt great to have such a good bonding moment, seeing a friend struggle cutting Brussels sprouts and another friend chomping over food while we were cutting the vegetables required for the night. I feel really bad about not saving the picture of a giant packet of cheese balls almost as tall as me. This tea loving batchmate who had invited us for the get together also baked a giant turkey to celebrate Christmas. It was definitely the first time that I have seen a dead turkey, and I was astonished by its magnanimity, while my carnivorous friends had a bite of it. To beat them in the protein game, I was served food made almost entirely of soya. Did I win the game? And the answer is no, but well I tried. It was a memorable evening, which I can almost accurately recall even after about three years. And in life, we don’t recall too much about our work or our code, but we definitely could partly recall our experiences. Or maybe we snap photos of only these, and not our beautiful looking code (nano : 1 vim :0 , they both are text editors). I visited the Christmas market in Aachen with some of my batch mates and their friends where we chugged gluehwein/kinderpunsch. Katschhof was particularly pretty with Christmas lights and shopping outlets selling various goodies. As one can guess, outlets selling food/drinks were overwhelmed with customers while other commodities were sparsely crowded. We had about three weeks of vacation after this get-together which most of us burned through, studying for our exams in February. Next blog will reveal some gruesome moments and life changing experiences. Stay tuned.

Sneak-peek for Dusseldorf and Japan tag.

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