The Chain of Events

In the hurry to move, this was saved as a draft and never posted…until now. Hold onto your hats for the excitement!

Today:
I got up; didn’t shower (yet); fed the cat; made an omelet with the last of the eggs and fresh vegetables in the fridge; made cappuccinos with the last of the milk; had breakfast; defrosted and cleaned out the fridge; washed and folded five loads of laundry (so far); packed away lingerie and the like into a moving box marked “private”; bagged all suits and dresses into garment bags and hung them back in the closets; moved all books into piles as they will be shelved in the new apartment; put all shoes together; set valuables, cash, jewelry and watches aside to put in the car later; collected and bagged all cat toys (ongoing project) and paraphernalia; packed the cat’s stuff; packed a suitcase for the week; put new bedding on the bed (will just stuff it all in a bag and drive it over); set aside the map of Nurnberg, made sure the new address was written in my iPhone; tidied everything up so that when it’s unpacked on Tuesday, there will be a high likelihood that it will be in the right room.

Tomorrow:
Movers come at 8am. Olli will stick around long enough to be sure he isn’t needed and will load our suitcases and Fergus in the car and head off. I stay till the movers leave and then hop a train to Nurnberg, hopefully not too late. If we’re really lucky, we’ll manage to reunite at his bachelor pad in time to head to Ikea and order the closets (we will have no storage room in the new place).

The Next Day:
Tuesday morning at 6am, the movers come to unload and the kitchen guys soon after. Hopefully I can keep them busy talking logistics until 7 am so the new neighbors don’t hate us forever for making tons of noise at the crack of dawn. Olli will go to work and I’ll supervise unloading, rebuilding and kitchen installation. Hopefully things will be civilized enough by evening to bring Fergus over and spend our first night in the apartment.

The Day After That:
No rest for the weary, we’ll be up and out by 7 the next day at the latest, on our way back to Munich. Oliver will head to a convention and drop me off at work. Wednesday night we do the final walk through in the old apartment with the new tenant (who has announced she is bringing back up in case someone tries to cheat her). After that we head back to Nberg.

And The Day After That (and that):
I come back in the morning to work the day in Munich and then… Friday is an off day for me and I start to unpack.

And In Two Weeks:
My parents have emailed that they grabbed some cheap tickets and are heading over the first week of June, so we have a deadline for getting moved in enough that they don’t have to sleep on the floor and eat out of cans.

Fast forward a few weeks and my parents are one week into their three week stay. With home office, family and on-going home-improvement, most updates will be Twittered until things calm down.

Moving Is Never, Ever, Easy.

Moving day in Monday, finally. It’s taken about three months to get to this point. Most of this time Olli’s been in Nurnberg and I’ve been here in Munich, with both of us trying to figure out how to get back together in the same place again. It’s definitely been interesting, if not total fun and games.

First, I’m probably more surprised than anyone – especially my husband – to find myself still employed. I worked myself up to getting a meeting with my boss and rehearsed what I was going to say. I went to work that day ready to quit and at the last minute thought, ‘Well, hell, I can him ask him about it first’.

So I just asked him if he had any ideas about what I should do before I made a decision either way. What he suggested didn’t sound half bad with me reducing to a four day work week, splitting the time between home and office down the middle. I walked out of that conversation feeling pretty good.

This was quickly damped a bit by the difficulty in finding an apartment. We’d just assumed that Nurnberg, being a smaller, less metropolitan area would have more vacancies, cheaper rents, and a better selection than Munich.

Hear that? That loud braying guffaw out there in the distance is Oliver reading that last sentence.

This assumption of ours turned out to be (excuse me) so fucking not true at all.

Germany may be a renting kind of place, but in Nurnberg, unless you’re looking for a little place to start out in after college, you mostly buy. This we hadn’t expected. After almost three months, we couldn’t find an apartment. We just couldn’t manage to find a decent place anywhere. There were a few good ones available at the beginning, before we were really looking, which may have lulled us in to a false sense of security. But then months went by with only two possible apartments coming into question, both of which we didn’t get.

This was a shock in itself. In Munich – a tough market – we’d never lost one to someone else. One apartment went to someone who was willing to buy more furniture off the departing renter who was buddies with the landlord. It was some pretty awful Italian stuff and a short man’s Ikea kitchen, which he wanted to let go to the tune of 40K+. The other one, well the the other couple got it because the woman was pregnant. In Germany they have a Joseph and Mary complex, show a rounded belly and everyone offers you their manger. Seriously, they consider it part of their civic duty to support those who reproduce, which is all well and good, but come on. We actually had realtors tells us that we didn’t need – read: deserve – that much space. I actually considered some deception to even the odds.

Four weeks ago we were starting to talk contingency plan and I was trying to figure out how long we could co-habitate in Oliver’s little bachelor pad above the butcher shop, surrounded by the smell of meat, before killing each other.

Every free moment was spent looking online, going through the new listings on the phone, me ready to jump the train at a moment’s notice to come look at places, Oliver often ducking out for a quick Go See during business hours. When 9 out of 10 times the apartment you go to this kind of effort to see is a shit hole, this can get old really fast. Olli kindly and practically sifted through most of the crap and then set up appointments for me to see the rest.

Most of those still had a major “But…” included. Beautiful altbau (historic) place with crazy stucco details on all the ceilings with castle-view, but… located on the loudest, busiest street with no parking for blocks; huge altbau apartment with painted stucco ceilings in a gorgeous jungendstil neighborhood, but… no hallway so all the rooms connect through one another (with the bathroom at the very end, giving the added bonus that if you left all the doors open you could see your partner seated on the throne from the front door about a football field’s distance away); beautiful altbau apartment with a working fireplace in a charming building with a little Italian bistro in the ground floor, but… fourth floor, no elevator, no parking nearby, no balcony and the current tenant wants you to buy all his crappy stuff for a small fortune.

I’m cutting a segue of my rant and making it into a bitch post for those who love to read how miserable and expensive renting and moving can be, find it here. For the rest, I’ll cut to the chase. We finally found something just in the nick of time. It’s modern, quite similar to what we have now. It is in a nice old neighborhood near the park. In four minutes I can be at the train station to go to Munich for the two days a week I have to be in the office. We have a parking garage and an elevator. All is well.

Best yet, we’ve more than tripled our balcony space. One off the bedroom, about twice the size of what we have now and one off the living room, which is the same size (or larger) than the bedroom itself. Booyah! Oliver is gleefully looking at patio furniture across the table from me right now.

But… we have to build a kitchen, which meant we had to first buy one. This is a post on its own. For now, two words: not cheap.

About 36 hours to go…

Am I Making Too Big Of A Deal Out Of This? (or is moving really so much harder over there?)

For the Americans, this may all sound like I’m making way too much of a deal out of this. Why not just rent something, see if we can make it work and then if it doesn’t, move on? When I was in San Francisco, it was that easy. I feel like I was moving every 6 – 8 months when I was a student at Berkeley and then young working professional in the City. When I first moved over, I approached the whole moving thing with the same casual Northern California attitude. Silly American, I found out soon how wrong I was to assume that moving in the Western world was the same everywhere.

In SF you accepted and expected to pay a week or two double rent, but tried as hard as you could to reduce that down to a few days. That plus a moving van, or company if you swung for it, was your major moving expense. Here you have the long notice period (3 mos) for moving out coupled with the relatively short notice period ( ave. 1-3 weeks) for apartments coming available which pretty much guarantees that you’ll not be able to avoid paying at least one or two months’ double rent. Add to that the renovations that you have to arrange and pay for in the apartment you’re leaving, including removing any additions that you cannot sell to the next tenant which can range from lighting and curtains (no biggie) to shower cabins, flooring and kitchens (biggie). Don’t forget renovations and additions to the new place which may include any and all of what you just sold or ripped out of the last one. Toss in the normal moving costs for your method of choice (boxes, paid help, beer for unpaid help, truck or moving company). And don’t forget that you will need to put down a security deposit on the new one before you get the old one back, so you need to be liquid enough to cover both.

This is quite a bit more than what you would expect to have to cover for a move in San Francisco, and that is an expensive town.

Last but not least, there’s my favorite expense: the Realtor. Try as you might your chances of getting around this one are low. And this is probably what bites the most, because I am convinced that these people are not worth the money they demand, mostly because they never understand who their customer really is.

This is not the Lyon’s representative you’d expect back in CA, who may or may not be wearing the uniform blazer when they drive you from viewing to viewing of “objects that match your requirements” and walk you through pointing out all the advantages of the place in question. This is what you’d expect from someone you were paying, right? Well in Germany it’s assbackwards.

Instead, the Makler (realtor) kisses the landlord’s ass and treat you like shit, even though you’re the idiot who’s paying them. Yes, the landlord pays them nothing. You fork over 2-3 month’s rent for the privilege of them begrudgingly showing up (astonishingly often unbathed) to unlock an apartment for you to see, judge you, maybe make a few snide comments about the fact that you selfishly want so much space without having kids, poke through your personal and financial history and then pocket your cash and walk away. Pity the fool who thinks they can call said realtor, once the money has changed hands, and get say… measurements of the living room or negotiate a move in a few days earlier. No way.

Ok they’re not all like this, true. Some of then are very nice and efficient in taking your money without really servicing you in any way. But at least half do the same thing rudely, while smelling a bit like old socks with crusty stuff in their beards you don’t want to look at too closely. I’m not exaggerating.

I’ve told the story of the last move and the realtor who, in my opinion, bent us over the table and gave the The Treatment. This same guy stepped up again to collect from the next tenant who, because of a friend in the building, had the same right to pay less and I am sure did not.

Since then who has been the one dealing with her questions about measurements, her need to see it again in “natural light”, to know whether there was an electric outlet on the balcony (”it is so important for me!”) and then see it again with her new subtenant. Right: us. I’m sure the realtor didn’t return her calls.

Not that I can even completely blame him in this case. He’s smart to avoid contact, with this one it’s almost a full time job.

Annoying next tenant aside, moving here feels more complicated and expensive. It probably is because people who live here rent their whole lives and have therefore higher expectations from apartments they really look at as their home and not as that place they lived in in their twenties before they bought their first of many houses. Do this once or twice here and you will want to get your move right the first time and ‘we can always move’ is not something you want to hear your partner say as an alternative or an argument for taking an apartment.

People always ask for amounts, which are hard to share because it can be so subjective. If you keep things as cheap as possible you will still easily find yourself looking at costs climbing towards the 10k mark. Less of course if you’re living in a shared apartment, which can make it much easier to avoid double rents and sell your share of the kitchen to the next guy. But if you an apartment and a few pieces of furniture, you’re quickly in this weight class. And that makes you think twice if not three times about the place you choose to live.

Change is in the air

Seasons in Germany turn on a dime and some of them can pass before you even had a chance to stop and admire it. Others, like that unwanted party guest who just doesn’t want to take the hint and go the fuck home, stick around way longer than wanted, outstaying their welcome. When they’re finally gone, it’s like the whole region shares a big sigh of relief and gleefully slams the door on that chapter, trying as quickly as possible to forget that it ever even was.

Fall / Winter hang around for what feels like forever, co-mingling so tightly that’s hard to even tell when one stops and the other starts. Spring on the other hand is the uncomfortable one who hates to enter the room alone and instead drags Summer along right behind her and bugs out as soon as she’s had a cocktail and it’s clear that all the guys think Summer’s hotter anyway.

Spring was here briefly (and she may still be hiding in the bathroom) but all signs point to Summer climbing on a table and lifting her skirt to steal the show anytime now.

This post is being brought to you by the gimlet in my left hand causing me to hunt and peck with my right. This is probably the reason for the plunge into party metaphors. It is time for celebration.

For one it’s gorgeous outside. Nothing but blue skies, green trees filled with tweeting birds, warm-but-not-yet-sticky-hot (which means the nastier little bugs haven’t hatched yet to fly in through the open windows and die, their corpses adhering to all the light bulbs and overlooked cobwebs) and a soft breeze keeping everything feeling fresh.

Tomorrow is yet another holiday in Bavaria, which means that everyone has taken Friday off as well and the whole region is settling into holiday mode to enjoy an extended weekend. Everyone is smiling at each other and wishing his/her fellow man/woman a ‘nice weekend’ (a level of friendliness which almost never happens in here). Even the cashier at the grocery store and the lady I’ve never seen before in my building’s elevator wished me a Schoenes Wochenende.

The whole city feels the advent of Spring and in the Ubahn today you could witness this shared feeling manifested in the acres of milky white flesh that was daringly laid bare with tank tops, shorts (sometimes too short), skirts and sandals. Thinking that if all of Munich could be shameless enough to bare the pale jiggliness of it all in public I could too, I came home, changed into the sundress freshly bought from H&M, pulled on my new cowboy boots, threw the doors and windows open wide and set up camp on the balcony with my laptop to have a cocktail and stare at my neighbors.

It’s 15 minutes to eight and the sun is still up in the sky and I’m sitting on my balcony, aforementioned drink in hand, waiting for Oliver to get in and join me. The air smells like bbq.

It’s farewell tour time.

On Monday morning the movers come to pack our stuff and us off to Nuernberg.

Work Widowed (Take 2)

Gerlinde’s Visit May 2008 – 28, originally uploaded by meganinmunich.

Last week we drove to Nurnberg and checked out the little apartment Oliver found for the interim period. A little one-bedroom apartment in a building behind a butcher shop (not the one pictured), fully furnished from IKEA.

He really lucked out.

Most of the places we’d seen online had obviously been furnished with cast-offs from the landlord and all of them had extremely questionable-looking couches. The kind I hadn’t sat on since college days. You know, the one at the frat house or the co-op in the common room that had assumed a brown-ish patina from years of beer-bonging, or just plain old bong water? You just knew these things had histories that rivaled red-light districts.

So I was very happy for him when we walked into this cute little newly renovated place, with brand new furniture. He’s the first tenant. Even better, his landlord is the butcher and the whole building smells slightly like fresh raw meat. It’s like he’s living in the meat section of the grocery store. This is heaven for a carnivore that has spent the last ten years in semi-vegetarian purgatory, eating Asian-inspired healthy crap.

Every morning he can stop in the butcher shop on the way to work and buy something meat related. I just hope I can convince him to move in with me when I’m finally ready to move over.

The landlord won him even more (if that’s possible) when he stopped by on the second day to deliver the one thing he’d forgotten – a small flatscreen TV. So I’m not worried about him, everything is fine. He’ll be coming home for the weekends for the next two months while I close up shop over here and we search for an apartment over there.

As for what I am actually going to do…well I’m still figuring it out. After a lot of consideration, Monday afternoon I went up to our CEO’s office – who I have always had a special relationship with – and asked him flat out, if there was some way we could still work together, given the fact that I am moving in two months. I figured this was a long shot (I work in marketing and there’s no way I would do sales, where home office a legit option). Surprisingly, he’s actually got some interesting ideas (that I’m trying not to get prematurely excited about).

It could still all turn out to be nothing, but I felt lighter than I have in ages and a little happy. I haven’t been thrilled at my new position, which I have had for just over one year. I’ve had some really tough times, where I’ve beat myself up quite a bit. But as bad as it’s been, quitting was somehow something I couldn’t bring myself to do. Even when the move gave me an excuse, it was still hard to just walk away. I just have this feeling that I still have something left that I want to accomplish here before I can move on. It may be that I’ll actually get the chance. We’ll see. Either way, my conscience is clear. I’ve given them a two-month warning and if this idea doesn’t turn into a home office job with a few days a month in Munich, then I’ll turn in official notice at the end of the month. Then at least I know I’ve tried and been very fair to my employer.

Home office with a bit of travel, the chance to see friends in Munich and even keep my hair salon would be pretty great actually. It’s a bit early to be banking on this turning into anything. In the meantime, time to find an apartment!

Then again, let’s see…

Woke up this morning to a fuzzy nose in my ear, purring and sniffing loudly. Every morning this week has been the same, nose in ear, milk dance on the pillow making a nest of my hair, bedroom eyes and wrapping himself around my legs wherever I am in the apartment. Although he’s usually too cool for cuddling more than a second, when one of us goes on a business trip, Fergus always gets really appreciative of the one who is left behind. It does make waking up with a slight hangover much better.

The other benefit of work-widowhood while Oliver is away is being able to meet up with friends for drinks more often, which I took advantage of last night. I can always depend on Nina to turn one drink into two bottles. The headache was worth the girl time.

Just after Fergus woke me up the phone rang. Oliver’s Friday night in San Francisco was still going strong at a dinner party with some of our friends. His mobile had fallen into chatty hands and made the rounds among the guests. It was great fun getting drunk dialed by a group of people who I love, even though the party was going on without me. I’m totally jealous that his farewell business trip for this job has taken him back to my homebase, right among all the people who were there when we began as a couple, but at least one of us gets to be there. I’m sure the headache he’ll have in the morning will be well worth it. The phone bill too. (Oops.)

It’s a very short and sweet farewell tour. Tomorrow Olli meets up with my parents for lunch, finishes his last errands and flies home. Then we figure out how to get him to Nurnberg so he can start working. Then I get going with preparing to move, quit the job, and so on.

That’s what’ll happen, as long as that mobile phone bill doesn’t get him into too much hot water.

Exit stage right

So we left off with a countdown about to begin. Now it’s started. Looks like some things really are going to change around here. Before he flew to the US this afternoon, Olli drove a few hours out of the way to meet a new boss and pick up contracts. He’s on a plane now to go hand over some projects to his successor (and briefly enjoy my old city, see friends and meet up with my parents; I’m completely jealous again). When he returns on Sunday, the following week will be about tying up lose ends, canceling the apartment and finding temporary housing near his new job about a two hour drive away. Work starts March 1.

Just like with China, it’s all been very vague until the last few weeks, and now it’s all moving quite fast. I’m still figuring out my own exit strategy and what I’m going to do. As much as I hate it right now, I’m having a difficult time wrapping my head around the idea of quitting my job. Part of me stubbornly wants to finish a few open projects and leave everything neat and clean when I walk out the door. With things are they are right now it also feels a bit risky to walk away from a sure thing into the unknown.

I have to double check my contract but I probably have to quit next week and be done April 1 or wait and give notice for the first of May.

Lots to consider.

About counting chickens and being one

And just where have I been all this time? Cat got my tongue…er typing fingers?

Pretty much.

You know those situations where you’re not sure who’s reading your blog and you’re dying to write about what’s on your mind but you just don’t want those thoughts and feelings falling under the wrong pair of eyes? That’s been partly to blame. I’m also the kind of person who’ll whine, rant and make fun of things when it’s insignificant, but if things get heavy, I clam up and clamp down until I figure my way through it. That about sums up about half of my year last year. What a waste.

Not wanting or feeling I could say much about what’s been going on, I’ve been completely seduced by my iPhone and its Facebook and Twitter apps. I didn’t get social networking until I got this gadget and now I’m checking in several times a day. Rather than write paragraphs on here, I’ve been summing my days up in one-liner updates and loving that freedom to the brief. But I’m ready for a bit more again.

Before anyone leaps to drastic conclusions, the world hasn’t come crashing to a halt. Personally, everything is great. Professionally, there is a lot left to be desired. Being an expat who immigrated for love and not career, I’ve worked my way to a pretty decent situation. But the fact that I am an expat who isn’t fluent in written German, (and still falls back on English in meetings when push comes to shove) but specialized in an area requiring good communication skills, means that my choices of employment are limited. I’ve had a good run where I am but this last year hasn’t been inspiring. There’s been a lot of stress and differing expectations, some butting heads and some hands thrown up in the air in exasperation. I like having a job and have strong pride issues about pulling my own weight and being independent, but at some point the question has to be asked, “what am I doing all this for?” Would I be happier somewhere else? And now the doubt creeps in. Can I find another job?

If this was the ‘homeland’, I’d feel a lot better about floating my resume around and seeing what happened. Thanks to the finance crisis – a term I am already sick of – I’m a bit concerned. ‘First hired, first fired’ is a term that readily comes to mind. Where I am, if push came to shove, there’s at least one person ahead of me in the line to walk the plank.

Looks like I may be jumping anyway though. We’ve been apartment hunting. Olli’s all but signed a contract and it looks like we’re moving. I say “looks like” because experience has shown me not to count any chickens until contracts are signed and sealed. This time it won’t be China, but it will be a change of accent and local dialect. It’s far enough away that a commute is really out of the question, but close enough where we’ve still looked for ways that we could swing staying (really impossible though). I think I know what I’m going to do, and I’m almost sure I’m ok with it. The hard part will be going through with it and finding out. I’m not loving my job much, but I really don’t love my chances for something new right now. This will be a smaller town, not as multicultural or international. A break for a month or two would be great actually, but only as long as I really felt it wasn’t forever, and a little part of me is worried.

It’s finally time to rip off the bandaid and start finding out. We’re a few weeks away from a countdown, but it’s pretty clear that our remaining time in Munich is limited.

When in Rome…or at least when in Lucca

Racism, snobbery or preserving authenticity?

Splashed all over the evening news in Germany for the last few days is this story about Lucca, a town in Italy, that has outlawed the opening of new kebab and other ‘ethnic’ eateries within the old city walls. The official reasons were to protect local cuisine against foreign food that is apparently encroaching upon the local palette. These ethnic places, often of the cheap, fast food variety, are also suspected of importing substandard ingredients of questionable origin that may be unhealthy, and definitely don’t contribute to local agriculture. They are also blamed for the growing trash problem that is defacing the old portion of town, presumably harming the tourist trade. Most affected appears to be the Turkish kebab places (I haven’t heard of any Pizza Huts or KFCs getting run out on a rail).

Many are calling this very thinly veiled racism. Anyone who would flat out deny that this had something to do with the decision would earn a raised eyebrow from me. I would consider it an eyesore to walk into an ancient portion of town and see a chain store has been chiseled into a building several hundred years old. It would seem out of place and inappropriate if in such an area the only kind of food I couldn’t find was Italian. To walk a street that has existed for many centuries and be kicking aside paper cups and wrappers is distasteful. But I’m not sure you can pin all that that on small ethnic restaurants (and frankly this problem is everywhere in every old European town).

I haven’t spent much time in Italy yet and know nothing about Lucca, but I’m not convinced that these kebab places are so much the problem for the town leaders as the people who are running them. The reasons for outlawing more kebab houses could all be applied to chains like KFC, Subway and above all to McDonald’s, but there hasn’t been any mention of the damage, trash and disruption caused by fast food chains to local cuisine, culture and ancient architecture. (Walking through the heart of old Bratislava ten years ago and stumbling upon a brand-spanking-new-soon-to-open TGI Friday’s wasn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination.) I think part of the reason chains haven’t been targeted by this law is that when you walk into these, they’re more likely to be Italian-owned with Italians behind the counter. Walk into the kebab house and you’ll find an immigrant with a thick accent, broken vocabulary and very little that’s Italian. The pollution that the town leaders are indirectly trying to solve, but not talking about, are the non-Italian immigrants, specifically, the Turks.

Scapegoating foreigners for bringing in filth and dilluting local culture and overall causing a nuisance? Sounds so darn familiar… Way to go Berlusconi.

Watching history unfold from afar

(I started writing this the day after the election and then one thing led to another … it finally feels right to finish now.)

The day after the election. Walking out the door of our apartment, I hear the downstairs neighbor talking with his daughter. She is maybe three.

(in German)

(child’s voice): “…und, Obama??”

(dad’s voice): “Ja, he won. Obama won.”

(child): “Yah, yah, Obama!! Obama won!”

(door closes, sounds of childish celebration continue to come muted into the hall)

To overhear my German downstairs neighbors have that conversation with their toddler gave me pause. A child that age is of course only echoing the interests and sentiments of her parents. But still. Her parents obviously cared about it so much and spoke about it so often that she picked up on it.

That morning after, I had at least seven German colleagues come to congratulate me on the outcome of the election. Most of them had stayed up late and gotten up early to follow the results. One got up three times during the night to check.

I spent election night at Amerika Haus, a house meant to serve as a cultural ambassador for my country in this one. It’s been owned and funded paid by the Canadians for about 20 years, ever since the US decided such things were not important. Canada, our super polite neighbor, then stepped in and graciously took over promoting us.

The election party was by invitation only. When we got there the line snaked around the block.  Entering the building we cast mock ballots and were offered campaign buttons. Looking into the basket, the guy at reception grinned, shrugged and admitted that only McCain ones were left. Several people around us improvised and pinned them on. Upside down.

Inside was rock concert packed. To move about the room meant weaving and shouldering your way past people sardined up against one another. Oliver, being taller, located the bar and navigated us into the slow moving stream of people headed in that direction. Other than a handful of faces, and a few words caught here and there, it was clear that the overwhelming majority was German.

We listened with half an ear to the speeches from the US consul and other local diplomats – all of whom had likely been placed there by Bush and were doubtlessly aware of the fact that the election would influence their job security. Most of the audience put on polite bi-partisan faces, but when they read the mock election results it was clear which way the crowd leaned:

785 Obama
53 McCain

Sponsors for the evening were Maker’s Mark and KFC. In addition to whiskey and fried chicken, hotdogs, chili and beer rounded out the refreshments. Was this what they considered to be typical American food? It was surely naively unintentional, but I couldn’t help drawing a mental connection to a few choice stereotypes that one could claim this to be a nod towards, and I was reminded of the fact that this election wasn’t just about a change in political parties. For it to go to Obama it would require a demonstrated change in mindset. A historically significant culture change.

I under-estimated you America. I honestly did not think you had it in you yet.

When Hilary Clinton started making noises about running I was quick to say that I was doubtful America was ready for a woman as president. I said the same when a black man joined the race. Regardless of what I may have wanted personally, I did not think that we were far enough along for that.

I left the country after a privileged white man had arguably stolen the election. The old boys’ club seemed firmly in place.

Waking up early the next morning and seeing the election numbers was an amazing feeling. People’s reactions around me here were really remarkable. If the majority of America was euphoric and even tearfully joyful that day, the Europeans around me were even more so. A lot of people abroad wrote in the following days that they were feeling proud to be Americans. For many, it was the first time in a long time. I felt some of that too. It’s a major step, but I feel cautious about feeling too proud. It’s one thing to vote a person into office, it’s another to stick behind him and knuckle down to change what needs changing and get through what can’t be helped. I’m hopeful that this is all a sign that America is growing up and getting past its narrow mindsets and selfcentered arrogance that’s gotten it nowhere in the last few decades. It’s a wonderful feeling to not have to defend my country for once, but instead accept congratulations and watch people get visibly excited about the next fours years.

*******

A few months later, I’m sitting in my apartment watching the events unfold on CNN. It keeps hitting me anew what this means, what it meant to get here, what it could mean in the coming years, that this man is president. Voted in, fair and square, the country solidly behind him. I’m humbled and deeply impressed.

And (cautiously) hopeful.