First Day at Work

Today I had my first day at work and I was really nervous. I woke up at 7:30 in the morning and also my host father checked whether I was awake. I guess he was just wondering why I wasn’t awake yet, because I had told him the night before that I will get up at 7. But I just love sleeping too much.
At 8 o’clock I took the old trolley to the station. The streets were already full of cars, so it took me a little bit longer to arrive at the Metro station. Also the Metro was crowded, which meant that I had to stand for the next 25 of minutes. Apparently this wasn’t the Rush Hour yet, because Russians tend to go to work later (10 o’clock) and finish work late (7 o’clock). I only got to know the real Moscovian Rush Hour on my way back. I arrived at the Holocaust Centre 10 minutes early and thus walked along the River Moskva for 15 minutes.
The Center is located within a building in which also the Conservatorium of Moscow rents its rooms. Therefore, there are always young people around and it’s always noisy. Only the Austrian volunteer Cornelius was already in the Center when I arrived. We talked for a while and he showed me around. At 10 o’clock my boss also arrived and said hello. I was still nervous, because I heard so many bad stories about him. But actually he didn’t seem to be that bad. Then, Cornelius and I discussed what we wanted to do in the coming year. We planned on improving the website of the Center and also write wikipedia articles about it. My chocolate present sadly didn’t really get attention at first.
Our boss gave us the task to write a letter to a fund which usually gives the Center financial aid. But in the last years the Center has always used the same text in their application for the funds. One should usually tell the fund what was achieved in the last year and what the plans are for the upcoming year. The lady which sent the mail to the Center seemed to be quite angry that the Center had always used the same sentences and therefore asked several questions. It was our job to find the answers. This wasn’t as easy as it sounds, because even our boss didn’t state exactly in the reports what they did in 2010 and were planning to do in 2011. I wrote down some sentences and my boss added new ones. But his English was so bad that it took me ages to rewrite what he had written. Until the letter was finished I already worked two hours more than I should have. But after work the whole Holocaust Center team drank wine and ate my beloved chocolate and other sweets and talked about this and that. Cornelius and I had dinner after work and then I went home again. However, I stood in a traffic jam with my trolley bus for more than 30 minutes. But overall it had been a nice day.

The picture shows the Lomonossov University in the evening.