There went twelve weeks.

I'm sitting in the very comfortable armchair in my room at my host family's house, the house I'll only be staying in for two more nights. Yesterday I said all my goodbyes to friends, coworkers, and bosses at ViaSat. I had high hopes for that internship - that it would be fun, that I might learn a thing or two. It exceeded all of my expectations. I learned "material" things if you will (new programming languages -- though I'm not great at them, I had to write at least a little bit of code in 4 different languages by the end of my project, also new software in general) but also intangible things lil learning to interact in a more corporate environment, finding out what work I like and what work I don't, etc.

Even when I worked at Primarq last summer, it wasn't this kind of work experience - though I remember thinking then what I thought this week. Namely, that work is apparently 8 hours a day, but it's really more than that. You don't actually have 8 hours for you, 8 hours for sleep, 8 hours for you each day. No, because you take lunch at work and that isn't really your time, plus the time it takes you to get to and from work - just like even if you lie down at 10 to sleep and technically have until 6, it doesn't mean you are immediately asleep at 10. These things are tricky.

And now, again, it's time to pack up and leave. I mean, I don't leave for a few days, but coming and going seems to be one of my main activities these last few years. When I say this, I don't mean to sound ungrateful for the opportunities I've had to live in all of these amazing places -- San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Budapest, Santa Cruz, Carlsbad -- but all of those have been in the last year. I'm very familiar with my big red suitcase. And in a few weeks, that suitcase will be pushed into the belly of a plane and come with me to Frankfurt, where it will get dragged onto a train in the airport, then down an escalator a few stops later and pulled down the street in Mainz, and finally hauled up six flights (12 half-flights) of stairs on Pankratiusstr. And when it gets there, I really hope it stays there, unused and empty, for a long time. Say, longer than six months. At least.