Working for TCH Europe

Sorry everyone for not posting in so long, the last three weeks have been really busy for me. To say the least, I really love my new job here in Berlin, and that is the subject of this post. I work for a company called TCH Europe, which stands for Transport Clearing House. We work with several business partners, but most notably Air Berlin, Domodedovo Airport Moscow, Berlin Brandenburg Airports, and several smaller Russian airlines. TCH Europe is a startup, and so there is always a lot of work to do, and we have so many ambitions, that it's difficult to decide which ones to pursue. I have three main colleagues, Eileen, Igor and Guenther. We 4 make up the marketing and management team of the office. We also have Jens in finance; Kristina, Helena, Anna and Svitlana in sales, working the call center; Bernd, Martin, Andreas, and Evgeny in IT support and programming, and finally Guenther, who I already mentioned as CEO.

The office is located in the Steglitz part of Berlin, which is in West Berlin. We have a great office, and it's nice that nobody has a cubicle to work in, it's verboten under German working law. Everyone is entitled to at least 9 sq. meters of personal work space.

So, for the past three weeks, I have been working on several projects. My first big project was collaborating in writing a business plan for our investors, and of course it was in English. But my job was not to translate or correct the texts, but it was to give my opinion as an outsider about the content and my understanding. Now that I'm a part of the company, they really like to hear my point of view and opinions about the project, and they take some of my suggestions and implement them. It's a great team of people I get to work with, and I couldn't be happier. Yes, there have been late nights in the office (once until 3am) but it's laid back and people are very understanding.

We have a website for our company, which is currently being upgraded and relaunched. Of course you can all visit www.geruxx.de/en but I assure you that by September it will be much more aesthetically pleasing.

Here is the secretary/call center office. This is the center of the office, and here we look up flights and reservations and answer calls. Some of my other projects that I am working on include correcting the English on the new soon to be launched website, managing our google ad words campaign, marketing our product to tourism websites in and around Russia and the CIS, and also leaning about the Sabre distribution data system which is what all US airlines and many international airlines use to host their tariffs and fare information. We will be connected to Sabre by December.

Other than that, there's not much else that I get to do at work. We all go and eat mittagsessen at around 2pm. We have our friend Vasco at Bar 55 across the street. We usually go there a couple times a week to have lunch.

(above) This is my own office. As you can see, I look at the window all day and have a large open workspace.
These are all our marketing materials, and there are a lot of them. We usually needs these pamphlets, fliers, calendars and what not to give to our clients or end customers during trade fairs.
Here I am standing with two of my colleagues from work, Kristina (Left) and Angelina (Right). They are sisters, and we were working all weekend at the Deutsche Russiche Fest (or German Russian Festival), but in reality it was a 99% Russian Festival and 1% East German Festival. It was located in Karlshorst, which is where many Russians live, but also in the East. Here the conditions are much different than in West Germany, and you can see the difference in living standards as well as ideology of the people. At the DRF, there were famous GDR bands as well as Ivanuski International, (a Russian Pop group that I listen to when I was very young) Lots of Russian food too, like Shaschlik, Blini, Cherbureki, Caviar, and then Bratwurst, Schnitzel, Potato Salad. Supposedly over 100,000 people attended this three day fair. All weekend we spent passing out fliers to visitors. The fair was a lot of fun, and we got to meet some new friends (below). We are wearing our specialized Geruxx t-shirts, and we passed out fliers and totes with our brand on them.
Here, Andrei and Kolya are wearing Russian tradition shirts. They had the same job as us, giving out fliers, but they had a much cooler event to advertise (but we had our banner and URL on their flier, so we got VIP access to the club). They worked for a Russian disco club in Berlin, and there were having a club night right on the fair grounds. We of course went to this disco, and listened and danced to 'poppy' Russian music, but only Russian youth can really like it. It's hard to explain why Russian music is so culture specific. It was a lot of fun, and great to make new friends in a foreign city.

Coming next: My WG (shared apartment) in Berlin and my roommates.