Archive for January, 2010

It is still a whole year till we will finally move to the US and I am already counting every minute of it. I feel so ready to move right now that I feel like a teenage girl in her last highschool year, who knows that she only has a few days left to go and a few assignments left to write before her new life begins.

I remember my last year in school to be one of the most exciting of all of my school years. I finally grew confident enough to be just me, had wonderful friends and at the end of the year succeeded by getting my A-level. As far as I can predict right now this last year in Germany will at least be as exciting as this last school year. We have a big wedding coming up, I am starting a new job tomorrow, my brother will welcome his second baby, friends of us are getting married, we will travel to our new home twice and their is going to be the big Goodbye at the end of the year. Right now the number one topic in our lifes is the Greencard. We work to save money for the Greencard. We try to plan our holidays to not miss any expirations dates and try to plan our future with our emigration.

Even if I know that I am not quite ready to leave my family right now and that we don’t have enough money to move yet, the one wish I would ask a good fairy for is that I could just pack up my stuff and move. I miss America so much right now and even make it worse by searching for appartements, furniture and jobs on the internet the whole time. It is kind of the same with our wedding: I am so looking forward to this day that it hurts me when I realize how many days it is away. But aren’t our whole lifes full of waiting for something? And don’t we all love a little thrill…?!

Me and my husband love to watch TV coverages about people who move into a foreign country. We have a weekly show here in Germany which accomponies german families, couples and singles who emigrate everywhere all around the world. Needless to say that we always hold out for people moving to the U.S., but what we enjoy most are stories about naive emigrants.

I really don’t want to offend anybody, but I can’t understand how some people can be that blue-eyed! How can someone want to move for example to Spain without seeing the need to learn spanish? How can someone move without even knowing a thing about the job or the realty situation of his new home? Sometimes we even feel like we are so damn overprotective, because we try to learn everything about our new home and won’t move til even one of us has a job.

For me this whole emigration thing is not like a game that I try to play and just move on to the next, if I’ll fail. Our plans to move to the U.S. are more serious than the most things I have ever planned in my life. This is my dream and I don’t want to ruin it with ignorance or greenness. Sometimes it even hurts me to see how easy some people throw the chances given to them, by for example a Greencard win, away without even giving 100 percent to make their new life work.

I know that it must be hard for the TV stations to find people with serious emigration plans and that those guys are not as good for the viewer ratings as the blue-eyed emigrants are, but it is sad that they nearly never show people who take emigration serious. Especially when you are that serious about it yourself!

Everyone knows that talking in a foreign language isn’t easy. Living in a foreign country isn’t either. Therefor it is no surprise that you often get engaged in awkward situations. Today I will share two of those nasty moments with you.

Even before we won this Greencard, I had to talk english on a regular basis. Last year I worked for a german girls magazine. My first interview for the mag was a phoner with Benji Madden from the band Good Charlotte. I hate talking english on the phone so the interview was kind of cursed before I even picked up the receiver. The other bad thing was that Mr. Madden didn’t seem to be in the mood to give an interview at all. In his defence I have to add that this interview was at about 9 am L.A. time and he was probably still lying in bed while talking to me. His answers were mostly yes and no and he didn’t seem to understand me very good. While researching for the interview I read that Benji was a car collector and so I asked him about his cars. He seemed to be kind of pissed and answered: “What? I don’t collect cats!” That distracted me so much that I kept on giggling like a lunatic for the rest of the interview and I actually hope that I will never have to talk to him again in my life!

Another embarrassing thing happened to me while our stay in Florida last year. My husband and me went to the cinema one evening and decided to buy some popcorn. I have to explain that in Germany the “normal” version of popcorn is sweet and that only a few people order salted popcorn. I assumed that this was the standard in the US, too, and ordered popcorn with adding the idiotic question: “Do you have salted popcorn, too?” The girl at the counter said nothing, gave me a pitiful look and went to get my order. Only than I realized that there was nothing to order besides salted popcorn!

My english is not anywhere near perfect and I assume this will be a matter of fact at least for about another five years, so stay tuned for whole seasons of my personal Out-takes!