When I accepted the position here, my first task was to sign the contract, before the 1st of November. So, as I didn´t want to spend too much time ´wasted´ on this, I asked my father for yet another adventure :) we went to Kiel and back again on the same day, 11 hours of driving, and I signed the contract at the University (on the way there, I found this ring, while in Kiel we beat the dragon, found lots of gold, oh no that´s a different story altogether..).
What I noticed immeadiately was:
° German motorways are dangerous as people drive incredibly faster than you can possibly get (even when you think your driving fast yourself)
° The Graduate School building, however light, nice and new, was also very empty on that particular day (and that was no incident, as I found out later)
° Kiel is actually not that bad as a city. Nice green areas, tall old buildings.. And the occasional concrete abomination, but well, hey, we are in Germany, what do you expect!?
° Bureaucracy is a German word. When signing the contract I received 9 pages of forms to fill in. And not just that, but also the need to gather more forms first, fill those in, get numbers back, and fill those numbers on the contractual forms.. All while not even yet having found a place to live!
As my father was not only brought along for half of the driving, but he was also curious about where I was going to end up for the coming three years, we visited both the Graduate School building and the Institute of Pre- and Protohistory (Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte).
Back home in Amersfoort, I started searching on the internet for houses; Two or three rooms? Close to uni? How are the different areas of Kiel actually? Is Kiel a city for bikes, just walking, or will I be using my car a lot? In the end I contacted a lot of potential houses in a week, but heard near to nothing from those e-mails.. I did find out that I had to go there for some time and ask locally about housing. But it was already near November, and the starting date was solidly marked, so I decided to book an AirBnB place for the first week in November.
Photo of AirBnB:
From there I attended the first meetings with my fellow PhD students, welcomes from new colleagues and (importantly!) social events, such as meeting up with fellow Dutchie and Leiden alumna Welmoed. Welmoed is doing a Post-Doc here on the analysis and characterisation of phytholiths (which are silicate based plant remains).
Oh, and I have a shared office with a nice German guy who´s working on Tripolye megasites (http://tripolye-megasites.blogspot.de/) and a nice Spanish/Catalan girl who studies coprolites (search that up if you really want to know what they are..) from Neanderthal caves.
During that week I also searched houses, talked to a lot of housing agents, visited more than 10 houses in 5 days. On the final day of my stay in the AirBnB, I finally found a nice place! As I could only enter the house a week later, I stayed at a colleague´s place (thanks Gustav!) for my second week.
But well, I needed the address to write on all those forms I told you about! So now I can get health insurance, enroll myself as a student (eeh.., I don´t really see myself as a student anymore, but well, free bus tickets and cheaper meals are fine! And I need a Student ID to get a Library card), get first emigration and then immigration done (after waiting for an hour or making an appointment), get a German bank account (mainly so I can actually get my income and pay my insurance) and fill in the final papers for my contract. The contract holds some nice questions like ´have you ever been in contact with justice?
What the GS building and my office look like:
I only just received a letter of the Student Enrollment, which I thought I already enrolled for. But no, they need lots of copies, original diplomas, signatures and numbers (among which my health insurance number, which I still do not have), so that's up next!
Oh and I own a private company, MAK Onderzoek & Advies, which also needs to be relocated after I left the Netherlands. More forms, signatures and paperwork...
Having filled in all the above forms, I can now start with my actual work: the PhD research on Bell Beakers. You´ll hear more about that next time!
