So what have I been doing for the past two months?
Pretty much everything that they said I would be doing. I have written a speech, done research on several topics and wrote a summary of said research (the topics themselves are subject to a non-disclosure agreement). I have been going to the plenary sessions of parliament; into the Comittee for Environment, Nature Conservation, Construction and Reactor Safety; and in to other various events and meetings where my Member of Parliament (MP) is present. One week, I was "running the office" and had to get the mail and answers the phones and everything. Luckily, it wasn't a busy week.
I have gotten to visit the American Embassy twice, the Dutch Embassy for their King's Day celebration, as well as the Polish Constitution Day celebration. There have been many other events along the way as well which have been less memorable but there is often good food.
As it turns out, the internship is just work. Some people had good luck and gotten good offices and MPs, others were not so fortunate. As for me, I landed in a great office of an MP with the political party "the Left", which is the successor to the "Party of Democratic Socialism", which was the successor to the "Socialist Unity Party of Germany", which was the THE political party of East Germany. As such, the large basis of support for the Left comes from the states which constituted former East Germany. If you look at an electoral map of the Left, you can clearly see where the former borders lay, even within the city of Berlin.
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| Electoral map of "the Left" |
My MP is called Ralph Lenkert. He hails from the state of Thuringia, and more specifically the city of Jena, a historically significant city which is world-renowned for its lens manufacturing, due to a man named Carl Zeiss. Carl Zeiss and his colleagues took the trial-and-error guess work out of lens manufacturing and figured out the exact physics and science behind lenses, in order to make more consistently perfect lenses. Sony, among other photographic equipment manufacturers, use Zeiss lenses on their cameras.
All the MPs with the left are extremely friendly and personable, and they are not overly formal like some of those from the other parties, where my poor friends have to go to work in a suit and tie in the 80 degree weather with 80% humidity. With the Left, you can dress as formally or (almost) as casually as you would like.
What they lack in formal attire, they make up for in parliamentary procedure. All of them are very engaged and constantly working towards making changes in the laws or policies of the federal government, although they have practically no power to effect any real change, due to the small number of them in parliament (64 of 631 seats). They currently find themselves in the opposition with the Greens. The government coalition consists of two of the more conservative parties the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union, often simply called the Union), two sister parties which are the most strongly represented fraction in parliament, and the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany).
What have I been doing for the past two months outside of work?
A little bit of this, a little bit of that.
After my last blog post in April and in the week before we started our internships, I was on a trip with 20-something other interns in Franconia, a region in Bavaria, in order to learn a bit more about the Hanns Seidel Foundation, a political foundation that works together with the CSU in Bavaria. We stayed for a week in a former abbey turned hunting castle for the local duke. It was nice to get out of the city for a while and we got to visit the quaint cities of Coburg and Bamberg.
I was able to take a lot of nice photos, but it is difficult to upload them with the poor internet connection I have at home, which means I have to go to the university to do it, which I will do in the very near future.
After spending one night at home, I was off to Warsaw for the weekend to visit a friend there. Although it was cold and rainy, Warsaw has many beautiful sights to offer. After the war, the historic city center was rebuilt in a traditional style, and as such, Warsaw still has the feel of being an old city, whereas in Berlin, that is not the case at all. In addition to the old town, there is also a tower known as the Palace of Culture and Science, a Soviet-era building in the heart of Warsaw, which serves as a point of reference for the entire city.
The rest of April was rather quiet as we were all getting used to our new jobs. We only traveled within the city of Berlin, which in itself has a lot to offer, if not always something good (looking at you, Spandau Citadel). In addition to the start of the internship, the semester at school started up, where I am enrolled in a entry-level Russian course (здравствуйте, товарищи!).
In May, I ended up traveling firstly to Padua and Venice, in order to take in the sights of northern Italy. Padua is an incredibly beautiful city and is exactly what you would imagine a "typical" Italian city to be: old buildings, big squares, many churches, nuns walking down the street, and the bicycles. The largest square of Italy is found there, "Prato della Valle" (field of the valley). There is a large elliptical-shaped island surrounded by a fountain and statues of many famous personalities of Italian history, such as Galileo Galilei.
Venice, of course, is a beautiful city. There is a lot to see and a lot of walking to do, but there are also a lot tourists. My friend and I decided to just get lost in the side streets instead of walking down the main passageway with the enormous crowd of tourists. In this way, we came across the first ghetto (and I learned that ghetto is originally a Venetian word, "foundry"). We also saw a lot of laundry hanging out to dry. After seven hours of walking in the blazing Venetian sun, I was done for the day.
Later, I also took a trip to Jena to see my MP's electoral district first hand. I was there for a week and had many interesting events and meetings, in the Ministries of Thuringia and within the city of Jena itself. There is a planetarium there, that always has the most up-to-date technology, because the technology is produced by Zeiss.
Yeah.
I think those are the major events. I'll write a couple more updates with some of the finer details of the other things I've done as well as photographic evidence that I've done them.
Until then.
