I have now been in Germany for about three months, and I quickly learned that settling in, and figuring how to make a life for myself here is harder than I ever imagined. I suppose part of the reason I assumed, unjustly that this move wouldn’t be so hard is that I have done this all before. Meaning right after I graduated university I packed up my life into two big suitcases and moved to China, where I was able to make a life for myself. Complete with a small apartment, paying job, great friends, and amazing vacation time.

Before I go into all the gory details as to why I don’t have my own apartment or a paying job I’d like to start out by sharing how I ended up in Germany. First, my contract teaching English in China was only a year, and in all honesty being an English teacher is not really what I wanted to do in life. I don’t have a teaching degree and while I don’t want to be an astrophysicist or brain surgeon I would like a job with a bit more prestige, doing something that actually has do with that university degree I earned a couple years back. Anyway, the plan was to travel around Asia a bit, move back home for a couple months to visit family and friends, and then pick a new country to live in. Where I would be going was yet to be determined, the important thing was that I knew I wanted to continue to work abroad, preparing myself for graduate school on route to that more ‘prestigious job’.

Arriving in Germany via Indonesia

So the contract in China ended and I found myself traveling alone in Asia – Indonesia to be precise – where I met a nice young German man. Now I am going to speed things up. The German man and I traveled around Indonesia, fell in love, kept in contact, he visited me in America, met my parents, my friends, passed the boyfriend test, and I decided that if we wanted to make this relationship work one of us would have to make the move. I already wanted to move back abroad and now I had an exact place in mind. So again, I packed up my life into two big suitcases and arrived in Germany at the end of December.

So here I am, still in Deutschland, still wanting to make a life for myself, but still quite confused on how it is going to work. Needless to say I don’t have a job with more prestige, and freelance English tutoring is starting to sound really good to me. In my next post I’ll update you on just what I have been doing since December.