First days

For all the people that don’t understand German I will write some of the posts in English, so here is the first one. As described in the first post I had a easy flight and arrived without bigger problems in Irvine. There was a complication with the keys of my door, but by now it is fixed and after a long day I finally could go to bed.

The following day I thought to go to the university and will try to find my assistant. To get a first impression of the campus I decided to walk to the campus instead of taking the bus. And so my first impression was: everything is huge! Even I had an idea of the Campus map first I had some problems finding the part of the campus where the offices and the Labs are. After a certain time I finally got to the center of the university called Aldrich Park. From there it was easy to find the engineering complex and I tried to call my assistant. Later I learned that he was the whole morning in the cleanroom and the afternoon he went to L.A. Therefore I didn’t reach him and I decided to explore the university and try to organize some stuff. I had in mind to organize a cell phone so that it would be easier to communicate with the other people, I needed a blanket and a cushion and besides some other articles I also needed an internet cable! After a long time I finally found the University center which looked like having a lot of different shops. But besides a lot of coffees, fast food restaurants, hairdressers and cinemas I didn’t find a lot of shops and I finally left without checking something of my list. After some more time I then found an Albertson store and after I saw the big shape of the store I was nearly certain to find most of the stuff inside, but in the end I only bought something to eat (believe me or not one of the first thing I bought in California were some apples!) and left without one of the things mentioned about.

This evening I finally reached my assistant and we arranged a meeting the following morning. I was glad to finally have somebody who knows a bit the town and I hoped that now we could take his car for further distances (my feet were hurting from the whole walking during the day!)

The next morning I met Rodrigo in front of the International Center and after that we went to make some copies of my documents and then we went to the Mechanical and Aerospace engineering department, where I will work the following 6 months. I learned to know a lot of new people and we did a lot of administration stuff. The first document we organized was an official invitation letter (I have to be invited to come to an university and it is not possible that you can come here only by exchanging a couple of mails ;-)). Afterwards we had all the papers I needed to get a social security number and therefore we took the car of my assistant to drive to the office. Once arrived there we picked a number and filled out a form to apply for the social security number. After filling out of the form we took a seat and had to wait, we had #57 and #50 was served, therefore we thought it couldn’t take this long…

One hour later I finally got served! It was already lunch time and on the way home we went to an Indian buffet. Afterwards we did some shopping (I finally got a blanket, a cushion and an internet cable and off course a cell phone!) Finally Rodrigo let me out at my place and I had some time to check my mails etc. Later in the evening we did some more shopping, this time we went for food, we were in a shop similar to our Prodega and this means everything is very huge! When we then got home it was about 9 pm and since I’m still a bit jetlagged I was very tired, so I baked a pizza and afterwards got to bed.