Archive for March, 2010

As I told you before, i am really scared of losing my friends when I live thousands miles away at the other end of the world! This fear vanished a bit after I talked to my best friend the other day. Petra moved to London three years ago. Before she moved we were unbelievably close, talked to each other on the phone for hours daily, saw each other nearly every day and had one of the best summers ever together. I still cry with laughter when I think about some situations we got ourselves in.

Nowadays Petra and I don’t see each other very often, nor do we talk to each other every day anymore. Actually we don’t even talk every months. But still Petra is one of the closest friends I have in my life! Everytime I talk to her on the phone, I don’t feel like I missed out on anything or have to tell her a lot, because it feels like we just talked the day before. My hubby and I visited Petra in February and the minute we both hugged each other all the long months we haven’t seen each other for just vanished.

Petra not only encourages me in our emigration plans with her experience and with standing by my side, but also with showing me how real friendships work. My english teacher once told me, that she hadn’t seen her best friend in ages after moving away from her home country Ireland. But she said it doesn’t matter how far or how long you are away from each other, because that would never break the band of a real friendship.

I don’t know how many of my friendships will reveal themselves to be real and unbreakable, but I know a hundred percent that the people I care most about will be in my life for a long long time. And that’s what will keep me alive – even at the other end of the world!

I am so looking forward to our next visit to the US in May. Not only because I definitely need a vacation or because I will be visiting our new home. But because I am in desperate need of some foreign people that just treat me nice for the sake of it! I may be some kind of alien, because I am one of the few not-american persons who likes the american niceness. But I actually miss it from the bottom of my heart.

We paid our tattoo artist a short visit yesterday. He is american and had a canadian guy over for a couple of days. When the canadian guy first saw us he came over, introduced himself to both of us and told us that it was nice to meet us. Yes, I know he perhaps didn’t mean that. But it was nice and it kind of made me smile. And this is what matters! When I came home from our Florida trip last year, I felt kind of depressed! I hate it how people here in Germany, especial in grocery stores, treat you like you are the most annoying thing ever! I know that this may be exactly what american shop clerks think about their costumers, too, but those guys would never treat you that way! For me germans are one of the most cold and uncommunicative people ever! No one over here would ask, if he could help when seeing you on the street holding a map and looking quizzed. No one would over here help, if you can’t carry your heavy bags or if you are having trouble dealing with your little niece’s buggy.

I know that it can also be annoying when foreign people always see the need to help you or communicate with you. But the american shallowness actually is the last thing that would ever drive me away from the US. It really gives me a good feeling and sometimes even gets me out of my bad moods. For me living in California will not only be living in the golden state, but also living together with sunshine people! And this is something I am looking forward to the most!

As you all may know, right now President Obama is fighting for a better healthcare system in the US. Even if this will not be the answer to any problems of the United States health system, it is something that gives us future emigrants a better feeling.

We Germans live in a country were health insurance kind of comes natural. Even if you lose your job in Germany the government will pay for your health insurance. You can also join a private health insurance to get better treatments, but in general you are covered by a compulsory health insurance. I only know about a handful of people who have been without health insurance ever. And that only, because they were in between university and their first job and didn’t have the nerves or the will to change their health insurance status and pay higher contributions. Health care is something I never had to think about a lot. In Germany you can go to whatever doctor you want to go without worrying much about it. Yes, you have to pay extra for certain treatments, but in general no doctor would send you home, if you are in misery.

One of the first things, that everyone asks a future US emigrant here in Germany is: “Wow, you are willing to move to a country with no existing health care?” It is hard to make people understand that there is not no health insurance at all in the US, but that it is tricky and that you can get in debt when being really sick, because your insurance can kick you out. The goal of Obama’s reform is to decrease the number of Americans without health insurance from 17 percent to five percent. And to ban the insurance companies to decline ill people or even kick people out, who become ill.

We talked about the health system a lot in the last months. I am not ill very often, but I do want to get pregnant and have kids in the near future and this is a really scary thing when you think about doing this without health insurance. But the fact that you now can be covered by an insurance even if you do not work, takes a big load off my mind.