Bye Bye Internship

Relaxing last week

After that weekend full of events and new impressions, for the first time I was happy that I would be bored at work and could relax there. There wasn't anything to do for me as I had been kind of excluded from all the new projects, so I focused on finishing my internship reports that I had to write for university. The bureaucracy was annoying - there were about five different persons that wanted to have papers and reports and documents from me and it was hard to keep everything organised. So I started to write lists in order to get an overview over all the deadlines and documents I would need by the end of the week. The most important things were my internship certification and the signatures for the internship report and the Erasmus Plus learning agreement. But my internship supervisor had told me that we would fix all that at my last day. Fortunately, on Friday I would only have to be there in the morning because I had told my supervisor that I had an important appointment with my real estate agent who had to look at my appartment and give me back the 450 euros security fee. So there were just 4,5 days to pass by until I could start my holidays. I was excited about that weekend because I would move to the hotel on Sunday and my Mum and her boyfriend would arrive Sunday evening in order to pass five days together with me in the hotel. 

The last day

Finally it was my last day! The whole week I had tried to make time pass faster with reading books, cleaning up the appartment one last time, doing sports and washing all my clothes (I wouldn't be able to do that in the hotel and I was a bit afraid that I might run out of clothes) and cooking. On two evenings I went with the Vietnamese girl to the restaurants from our list, so at least these nights passed by more or less quickly. I was happy that the last day was finally there, but I was also a bit excited about it - I didn't like goodbyes and I had to say goodbye to the whole office that day. Furthermore, I wasn't sure how to behave in regard to my boss - he was quite a special person and I didn't know how to say goodbye to him. But I believed that everything would work out and the day would pass quickly. 

I arrived at work full of motivation and excitment - we had changed the places in the office the day before and I loved the new order of the tables. The only problem was that I wasn't sitting next to the other girl anymore - our annoying project manager was now sitting between us and it had become even more difficult to chat or have fun. That meant that it would become a boring day and that made me even more happier to be able to leave at 12. It had also allowed me not to cook for lunch the evening before - a releasing feeling! So the beginning of the day I did what I always did - pretending to work, clicking around randomly and reading newspaper articles or scrolling through online shops. I didn't like my new place so much as now everybody who went to the kitchen or the skype conference room could see what I was doing. But as it was my last day I didn't care that much and focused on making sure that I had printed all documents and thought of all signatures that I would need later from my supervisor. When he arrived I gave him all the documents and told him what to sign and what to do - he said that he would do that together with the boss and went to their bureau. 

The funny thing about the boss' bureau in that office was that the walls were totally made out of glass - so it was only the sound that was separated, but one could see everything they were doing in there. It was great for the design and I really liked the office, but it didn't make a lot of sense for me. I saw that they were talking and I heard that he was printing something but I decided to focus on "preventing to work" again - he would come to me when he would have finished. In the meanwhile he asked me to write a testimonial about my internship (I had to lie a little little bit) what gave me about 15 minutes of work. The chat with the Vietnamese girl was funny as always and we were writing a lot as we didn't have the possibility to talk to each other anymore. Our project manager was annoying as always and wanted to talk about our farewell dinner - he just decided and didn't even ask ME - the person who was leaving, about everything. Fortunately, all the others already had plans for the weekend and his plan started to fail a bit. I didn't say anything and just let him decide and talk about it, because I had already talked to the Vietnamese girl and we had agreed that we didn't want to go anywhere with only him. It sounds mean but we had passed 6 (5) months with him as responsible project manager in one office and he had become more annoying every single day. So we didn't want to pass one evening with him totally alone in a restaurant. 

My Vietnamese friend was very sad that I would leave the office that day because she had to stay there for three more weeks and wasn't happy about the fact that there would be two new interns from other countries on Monday. But I always tried to convince her that she would have new projects to do and that three weeks werent' that much. Furthermore, I had downloaded Hangouts to my mobile so we could chat while she was working. I couldn't imagine what I would do the whole day when I wasn't at work chatting and laughing with her, but I was sure that the hotel pool would offer me some other, more relaxing possibilities. When lunchtime came closer my supervisor came back with all the documents and signatures and my internship certificate.

That was the moment when the other girl asked everybody in the office to take some "Goodbye Polaroid Pictures" - she wanted to give me one as a present. Everyone was excited about that idea because they had never used a camera like that before (except the one colleague and the two of us) and were curious about that. It took a while until we had found a good position and we took several pictures - some of them were too dark, some were too far away, but after some minutes we had taken the perfect picture. Everyone went back to work and I started to pack my things. I didn't have many objects at my desk, so I had finished soon and it was time to go to everybody and say goodbye. Maybe I would miss them one day, but at the moment I was just happy to leave. When I had hugged everybody (also my boss which had been very strange) the Vietnamese girl accompanied me to the office exit and we agreed on meeting this day in the evening to have pizza together. It was incredible how much time we were finally spending together! I had one last look into the office and left the Commercial Centre. I couldn't realize yet that I had really just finished my internship and would never have to come back to that place and be bored anymore. It was an amazing feeling, but I had to hurry up in order to be at home in time when the real estate woman wanted to come. 

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