Hey, I’m Alberto! I’ve been here in Cologne for more than two months and there are only about two weeks left to leave the country. Time flies!

After living in Cologne with my girlfriend for a while, I can say that, except for the bad cloudy cold weather (I love sunny days, and here they don’t have a lot of it), I love the country, or at least the places I visited (Berlin, Amsterdam [ok, not Germany, but still nice],Eltz castle, Essen, Bonn and Frankfurt).

People here are supportive if you ask for help and most of them speak English very well, which is good if you know just a couple words of German. They are nice and more patient that people in Spain. For example, when you are walking and want to cross a road, they often stop and let you pass even if you are not in a zebra crossing!

Food and rents are about the same price as they are in our country.

Bars are not as expensive as I heard and is nice to eat out. I’m vegan and there lots of options to eat there, is a paradise compared to Spain.

The city seems to be very secure, there are no fences in houses’ windows and I really like the feeling of being safe when walking in a crowded market, knowing you can be relaxed because surely no one is going to try to steal something from your backpack.

Regarding the internship itself, I was in REWE, a huge company with thousands of supermarkets, DIY home stores (something like Leroy Merlin in Spain), tourism offices, etc. I think they even have a small airline. The work was interesting. I used php, JavaScript/jQuery most of the time, and a bit of SQL, CSS and HTML too. I made a web application to it easier for the ITs to open connections between the different parts of their network.

My boss, Michael, speaks Spanish quite well. I also worked often with Vanessa, she was in charge of the project I was in and was the one who sent me new tasks. I think both, Vanessa and Michael, are nice people and always help if you ask. The rest of the colleagues were nice too, but I didn't have as much contact with them as with Michael and Vanessa. 

There was a kitchen in the office where you can make tea or coffee and the company offered a free meal every day in the canteen too. The only thing I could complain much about the company was its place in the city, it took about 50 min to commute to work, but I guess most of the big companies haven’t offices in the city center.