Is that a Mars Bar in your pocket or are you just happy to be an Expat? (Moving Abroad Pt 8)

(My) Expat Guide to walking the walk (beta v 1.2)

The eighth of 10 ( + 2) bits of advice on how to “Go West Young (Wo)Man” and keep going until you’re somewhere East-ish.

So you’re moving abroad, trying new things and getting to know a new culture? The proof is in the pudding and, if that’s Jello Brand I see in your cupboard, I think you might benefit from expanding your horizons a wee bit further.

8. Enjoy the adventure and embrace your surroundings. Try new stuff! Don’t try to completely recreate America-away-from-home.

There’s German stuff and American stuff and all the stuff in between. Everyone can argue whether one is better than the other, in the end I think preference is 98% convenience. You like the stuff you’re used to. Period.

Anyone who’s moved abroad can tell you their list of Stuff They Could Not Leave Without. The Stuff that – even if everything else goes wrong – as long as we have that it will all Be OK.

When a friend of mine was moving to South Korea to teach, I helped her pack her ginormous backpack. Several hours were invested in trying to get trim her gear to an allowable weight. The sticking points for her? Red Whips, TEA (what none in Korea? Really?), chunky peanut butter and a chipped coffee mug that weighed a ton. She had to sacrifice a LOT of underwear and socks to keep them, but when push came to shove she was NOT GOING TO FLY WITHOUT THE RED WHIPS.

As for me, I used to get a lot of questions from security about mysterious shadows in xrays that turned out to be bottles of rice vinegar, peanut butter, curly hair gel and deodorant (especially right after 9/11).

Everyone has their Must Have Stuff and this can be really good to have during the first few months. By all means, bring your security blankets, whatever they may be. This will help keep you sane when the other shit goes all pear-shaped. You’ll be able to draw comfort from the thought that you’re not breaking a sweat, the proper tea is in your favorite coffee mug and your hair looks fabulous.

The point of this is post about what happens when the deodorant runs out.

How Fergus Learned That Life Has Its Ups and Downs and I get to go to IKEA

Setting: It’s Friday. I’m in my cleaning clothes, not cleaning, but doing email and reading the Internet, because that’s more fun.

As I am innocently finishing an email, when – *bang* - I hear the crash of something small-ish in the living room. Wanting to finish my email I very effectively yell at my cat Fergus from the other side of the apartment to “cut that shit out, whatever it is he’s doing”.

Silence.

I continue to finish my email. Three minutes later – **!!KA-BLANG!!** – there is a HUGE crash from the living room and I jump out of my chair yelling jesusfuckingchristwhatthefuckisthatgoddamit as I run into the hallway just in time to see a bristle-brush orange tail exiting the living room at top speed and whipping through the doorway into our bedroom, claws scrabbling across the tiles in a hopeless attempt for more speed.

I walk into the living room and the first thing I see is this:

 

After taking that in for a second, I look up and see this:

 

 

Going on a search for the culprit I find he’s taken refuge in his ’safe space’ and other than being scared stiff as a board, and fine-where-he-is-with-no-intention-of-coming-out-any-time-soon-thank-you, apparently unharmed:

 

 

After making sure he wasn’t bleeding internally or broken but in shock, I sent Oliver this cryptic email and then meanly took forever to get around to posting the story online, but there you go. It’s Friday after all…and Friday the 13th at that.

Add home repair to our list of things to do this weekend, honey. And you know how you said that the shelf could take a lot of weight? Well apparently we’ve found the limit: One orange cat.

Now I need to go pick up a lot of crap off the floor.

There’s a story in that first sentence.

{my email to Oliver about five minutes ago}

Fergus is fine but we’re going to need to do some home repairs this weekend.

{his reply 13 minutes later}

???

{my reply}

I think I will write about it on my blog. This will make the whole thing more amusing. OH isn’t this FUN!

Now What?

After years of climbing small personal mountains by moving to Germany, learning the language and getting back into the workforce, I think I’ve reached a plateau of sorts where the hurdles become less extraordinary and life and its challenges have become relatively ‘normal’ again. For a long time my goals were a focused few: get there and stay there (ie visa, language, job, overall: survive).

These all seemed big enough at the time that I wasn’t sure that I’d ever achieve them, so I spent little time and energy looking beyond them to plan for the ‘now what?’ part that comes after. But here I am more or less (still here, still foreign), and now that I have built the foundations for a life over here, I’m realizing that I now have to move forward and actually live it.

Some relocations, one that happened and one that didn’t, also had gotten in the way of me getting serious about long term plans for anything other than being ready to pick up stakes and move. Now we’ve gone and done that move, landed in Nberg, and here I am with no more excuses to not start thinking about the next moves for me.

*crickets*

{thinking…}

Hey, that’s me there.

I just happened to be browsing* the blog at  ThisNext, the social shopping site where I started putting up lists about two years ago and was (at first totally and then pleasantly) surprised to see my Oktoberfest picks staring back at me. Hey now, if I’d known I’d be a contender for recognition, I would have put a leettle more thought into my punctuation.

Meh. Ah well. Still, it’s nice to be recognized, no?

To see the post in its full glory so you can be astounded all over again, click on the pic above. I suggest quickly moving on since O’Fest is over and have a browse through my list on pasties. Christmas is coming faster than you think and there’s a Santa’s Helper pair in there! Jingle Bells for everyone!

*full disclosure: this is not true. I was snooping. Their intern wrote me just before my vacation last month asking me if I’d submit an interview for their blog. The questions I got included a haiku request. This is not the normal thing I would jump at doing, but I feel challenged to swallow my skepitcal pride and give it a whirl.  I needed to see what the others have done first, of course.

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!