Colleague Distraction

Relaxing Sunday

The Sunday after our exhausting trip to La Gomera I stayed in bed quite long, had a short breakfast and went back to bed. I was still tired and didn't want to leave my bed - I just needed a relaxing Sunday. The weather wasn't quite good and despite from sitting at the pool the girls didn't want to do anything neither, so I could just enjoy doing nothing and transferring the pictures I had taken the day before from my mobile phone to the laptop. Because of some hardware problems that took me quite a long time. Afterwards, I watched some Arabic videos and tried to summarize what I had "learned" so far - it was quite difficult to learn such a language without a course at university and only with Youtube videos; I could write some things but speaking was simply impossible. I hoped that it would be possible to do a beginner course at university the following semester to learn it the right way, and with some pressure - due to my fatigue at work I had become a bit lazy and except some sports every day (I was already proud of me that I was really doing that) I didn't do anything. I had even problems to motivate myself to read a book because I wanted to finish my Spanish version of "Life of Pi", but from time to time it became incredibly boring as I already knew the story and didn't understand all the words written down in the book. And who is reading with a dictionnary next to his bed?

But that Sunday I even sat down at the sofa and read some pages of my book - the motivation was that I could buy some new, German or English books when I would have finished this one. Happy that I had done some things I had wanted to do for a long time already, I felt totally released and decided to spend the rest of the afternoon in my bed, watching TV and being lazy. I would have to cook later and prepare something for the lunch next day at work, and maybe I would do some exercises and do some sports, too. 

Endless Week of Work

Monday morning I didn't feel any motivation at all - there was just one more week full of wasting my time before me, and I couldn't wait until it would be Friday of the following week and my last day of that internship. But fortunately, I had some things to do: I wanted to finish my second Google AdWords Exam and receive the AdWords Certification, I had to meet my real estate woman and talk about what to do before leaving the appartment and I had to plan which things to take to Germany with me and which things to leave/throw away in Tenerife. I was happy that it wouldn't become a completely boring week, but at work it wouldn't be too interesting anyway - because I left the following week I wasn't involved in half of the tasks anymore, so I had even less to do! 

I focused on reading some Google support pages and watching Youtube videos from people taking the test in order to prepare for the second (more difficult) exam. It wasn't difficult to find time for doing that as I didn't have a lot of tasks to do. Obviously, they were all thinking that I wasn't there anymore. But as I wanted to do the certification test in order to have at least one important outcome of that internship I didn't really care. From time to time I was chatting with the Vietnamese girl and we were sending cute pictures and videos to each other via our Hangouts chat. Our project manager had become more and more annoying - we all knew that he wasn't happy about his situation but it was incredible how he was behaving because of that - it wasn't our fault. He did one weird thing after another and some things were just too incredible. I was really wondering how he had received his job there and how he had kept it for more than 2 years; any other boss would have fired him already because he was behaving like a small child. But in only two weeks it wouldn't be anything that should interest me because I wouldn't work there anymore. 

During one lunch break we were talking about my two last weeks and one colleague suggested that we had to meet one evening and have dinner and some drinks together before I left - it was a great idea and as we only had two weekends left, after some discussion and emails we agreed on the following Friday already. We weren't too unhappy that our annoying project manager couldn't come because he had already planned something else. He wanted to change everything to the week after that (without even asking ME) but fortunately nobody wanted to do that, so we kept that Friday and I told our project manager that we could maybe meet the other weekend without the others in order to celebrate my farewell (sounds mean but the Vietnamese girl and me were already thinking about an excuse for that). 

The rest of the week there wasn't anything important happening and it was as boring as always. The most exciting moment was when I did the second exam for the AdWords Certification and after 120 minutes I passed it! I hadn't studied that much for it and I would have never thought that I would really pass it as the questions from the second exam were quite difficult and I didn't have a lot of practical experience yet because we were only allowed to do easy and superficial tasks. I was proud of myself and together with the Vietnamese girl I was celebrating a little bit at our balcony with some cookies and a cup of tea. It was kind of a dilemma - I didn't like to scream around " heey, look at me, I have passed the AdWords exams!" in the whole office because it was just not my kind of thing. But at the other side I would have really liked that everyone in the office knows that I have passed the exam - I didn't know what to do, so I just decided to wait a bit. Maybe I would tell it in the weekly meeting on Monday. But it came differently - I forgot to close the PDF with the Certification on it, and when our project manager came to us in order to explain something to us he saw it and shouted through the whole office that I had passed my exam. Well, now everyone knew it without that I would have said anything - one time during my whole internship I was happy about his loud character. 

Friday Evening - Farewell Time

Finally it was Friday - not only because it was the end of the week, but also because it would be our (or rather my) farewell trip to La Laguna this evening. The Vietnamese girl and I were both excited and looking forward to spending the evening with two of our favorite colleagues. The others didn't have time, so it was just the four of us who wanted to go to La Laguna, receive some insider information about that historical place that was even UNESCO world heritage site, and then have a delicious dinner somewhere and finish the evening with some drinks. As always the day didn't pass by and it was incredible boring at work. After having finished the AdWords Certification I didn't have anything interesting to do and I was just waiting for the next week to end in order to finish my internship and have 10 days of holidays to enjoy the island a bit before returning to Germany. The Vietnamese girl was bored, too, even if she was having some more tasks - the ones that they didn't want to explain to me anymore because I was only there one more week. I felt a bit at the wrong place but I had stopped caring about things like that and started to watch some interesting TEDtalks, waiting for that day to end. 

After endless hours it was finally 5 pm and we were ready to start to La Laguna. Our colleague who was living in Santa Cruz, the city right next to La Laguna, would take us with him in his car and we would return to Puerto de la Cruz by bus later. The other girl and me were already waiting for our two colleagues to finish work, too, but they were incredibly stressed and we had to wait 20 more minutes before the one with the car had shut down his computer and was talking to the other one. After a short conversation he came down to our tables and told us that the other one wouldn't come with us as he still had to finish an important task and didn't know how long it would take. If it wasn't too long he would come with his car after he had finished. We were a bit disappointed because he was quite a funny person and we both liked him a lot, but we couldn't change anything so we went down to the garage and started our trip to La Laguna. We had a lot of fun in the car and I already knew that it would become a nice evening. Our colleague had decided to show us a bit around the city as our experiences over there had never been quite good, and he wanted to convince us of the beauty and the charm of that particular place. Afterwards, he wanted to show us his favorite restaurant and have some more drinks with us in a bar. As La Laguna was the city where the university is situated, there was a lot less tourism and more nightlife - something that was quite good as distraction.

We arrived and had some problems to find a parking - friday evening was one of the most frequented days, even if it was not even 6 pm. But we were lucky and could find one after only 10 minutes. We left the car and started our tour through the city centre immediately. He showed us some important places, told us the history of them and asked us what we wanted to see afterwards. As we didn't really know he suggested to go to the "Guanches Museum" - the museum of the aboriginies at Tenerife. It was a small traditional building with two floors and a lot of historical things in there. He had an explanation for almost everything we could find in there and we had some fun because of weird objects that were presented in there. After we had seen everything (we had to hurry up a bit because the museum would close 30 minutes after we had entered it) we went to the amateur artist exhibition in the ground floor where art students (our colleague was one, too) could exhibit their projects and objects and one could buy them and vote for the favorite artist - the most voted could win another exhibition just for himself afterwards. It was interesting to see how the three of us had another view at the abstract paintings and sculptures (actually, I didn't understand anything about art, but I really tried to be interested) - he had an incredible interest for all these things. 

We left the museum and decided to have dinner first and some drinks afterwards, even if it was still a bit too early for dinner in Spain - but we were all hungry as the last time we had eaten something had been 1 pm, and only a small lunch. So we followed our colleague to his favorite restaurant. It wasn't far away from the city centre, but when we arrived there we saw that it would open in 45 minutes - so we changed our plans and returned to the centre in order to have a drink first. We went to a bar and had some wine. We talked about the city, work, colleagues - everything we had a bit in common. Then, the Vietnamese girl wanted to take some polaroid photos with her cool camera, so we spent some time with that. It's quite complicating to achieve a perfect picture, as light circumstances and everything has to be perfect in one single moment. You cannot simply delete it and try again, it's always about 50 cents per picture and when it's bad you can't change it anymore. But the small pictures are quite cute and I really like them as memories. After a while we saw that the restaurant had to be opened now, so we paid and left the bar in order to return to the other place. It didn't take us long to arrive there and fortunately it was opened now, so we entered and asked for a table for three. We were lucky because even if it was only opened for 30 minutes it was quite crowded already.

We received the menu and asked our colleague to suggest the best dishes. As we were eating "tapas" we would order about 6 of the dishes that would be served in small bowls, and share the food with everyone. I really liked that way of eating, as you could taste 6 different things and didn't have to chose only one dish. He suggested some things and we ordered what he had told us. While we were waiting for our food we still talked about work and the problems we had, what we were thinking about some colleagues and things like that. We didn't have a lot in common despite of the work, so it was almost the only subject we could talk about. The food arrived and it was delicious! We had a lot of different things and we could already see that it was too much for only three people. But as it was really, really good, we finished everything and could hardly move afterwards. Anyway, we decided to order a dessert that was one of the best desserts I had ever eaten in my life. It was merengue, yoghurt, smashed cookies and red fruits. It was a dream! But after that second dish we were all unable to move, so we stayed in the restaurant some more time and took some polaroid pictures before we finally paid and left the place. It wasn't that late already, so we walked a bit around the city centre, watched the people there and enjoyed our time. We entered into one more bar and had another wine before we decided to get back to the car. Our colleague wanted to bring us to the bus station and say goodbye there. That's what we did and soon we sat in the bus and returned to Puerto de la Cruz. It had been an incredible evening and I was happy that I had had the possibility to explore that city in another way and fom another perspective. 

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