First Impressions at Heidelberg
In January I applied for ISCB Student Council internship at Schneider Lab at EMBL (Eurpean Molecular Biology Laboratory) Heidelberg. Luckily I was selected and now I am spending the first days of the five months in Heidelberg, Germany. So what have I noticed so far?
Heidelberg
Heidelberg is a nice small town near Frankfurt. As somebody said, it’s just like Tartu but only in Germany. It has a university, very beautiful small houses and picturesque narrow streets in the old town.
EMBL campus and the guesthouse where I am staying are a few kilometers away from the city center. The distance itself is not very noteworthy and would actually be totally walkable in normal (Estonian) circumstances. The problem is, however, that this part of the town is on top of a hill (or a mountain, by Estonian standards) which is about 300 meters high. I walked up here on the first day, but from now on I will probably mostly be preferring buses 
.
Bank Account
Getting it was acutally pretty easy. Turns out that somebody from Sparkasse-Heidelberg comes to EMBL every Tuesday. I just had to meet him, fill in some forms and the bank card should be arriving by mail in a few days. They seem to be quite small bank mostly operating in Heidelberg and their online banking is only in German, but I think I’ll survive that.
Pre-paid SIM Card
This turned out to be more complicated than I expected. In Estonia, you would just buy a SIM card, insert it into your phone and start talking. In Germany, they first ask for your ZIP code when you are trying to buy the card. Then you have to activate it by either calling or filling in a web form in which they ask for your name, exact address, birth datw, e-mail and your passport or national identity card number. Finally, somebody has to manually verify that information. This means that when you fill in the form in the evening then your phone won’t start to work before the next day.
Some pictures can be seen here.
In the next episodes: Working Permit, The Double Helix and Food.
There seems to be lots of monitoring and tracking on the state side going on in many of the older European countries (of course, it is still far less than in North America). It really bothers me that there are only a few actions you can do privatly without the authorities knowing about it. For example, it is almost impossible to get anonymous access to the Internet (or telecom networks). It feels like there is always someone watching and you do not know that someones motives. The public and open communication infrastructure currently present in Estonia seems to be more fair and trustworthy. Unfortunately the anti-privacy movement is strong and keeping our freedoms is difficult. After all, the Internet 2 concept is all about being able to track everything anyone does online.
The amount of paperwork required abroad (outside Estonia) to get things done is amazing. There will be lots of forms to fill out and lots of snail-mail communications. And e-banking won’t be as easy as logging in (which is usually more complicated and error prone than using the chip card authentication in Estonia) and being able to perform any banking tasks there (you’ll be lucky to be able to see the terms of your current contracts with the bank, but you won’t be allowed to make any changes to them or initiate larger transactions online).