When I got the email my heart skipped a beat. I was on vacation, checking up on things from an airport in Tahiti. This brought a sense of gravity to our vacation that I wasn’t really expecting. I mean, I had applied to work with them, and I knew (or at least I thought) I wanted to go, but now that it was seriously on the table, I had to make a decision.

In the end of December I saw a tweet from Erik Spiekermann stating that they were looking for a new web design intern. About this time, I was passively looking for a new job, clicking on links like this, so I kept with the trend and clicked through to investigate more about the position.

I hadn’t really been considering any internships, and Germany decidedly wasn’t something on the radar, but I figured it was worth a shot. I went home and told my wife (who just so happened to be pregnant) about sending over my resume. We both laughed, knowing that I had also applied to be the brand presentation manager for Starbucks (something I am by no means qualified to do) and skeptical that anything would ever happen from this. But sometimes life surprises you.

In late January I heard back from EdenSpiekermann in Berlin requesting a skype interview with some members of their web team.

I  obliged.

I waited.

Another month later, they told me I was hired… as an intern.

So here I am in Berlin. Interning my little life away.

In case you’ve never heard of Erik Spiekermann, he is someone I had been following on twitter for a while simply because he is one of the world’s typographic and design leaders. From what I had learned about him previously, he knows more than most anybody in the industry about a lot of the things I am interested in doing.

There are certain times in life when you realize that what you are doing is not the most rational thing, but you just do it. Plus, a lot of the designers I respect seem to have done something like this at some point. They saw someone doing great work and they sought them out. I didn’t figure I would be spending too much time in direct communication with Erik (which turned out not to be so true), but I figured he must keep pretty good company (that part turns out to be pretty true).

I’m here for three months and my wife won’t be here with me for most of the time. That is to say, I spend most evenings in front of the computer reading, designing, and watching old episodes of Lost, trying to catch up. Life is crazy sometimes, but in my experience, every time that life has thrown curve balls, I look back on them as extremely positive experiences.

So here we go. Stay tuned.