Archive for July, 2010

…even, if people tell you better not to! And that happens an awful lot, when you are a Greencard owner with plans of moving abroad!

Being only a few months away from moving to another country, you naturally doubt your decision a lot! I honestly know that we need to do this. That we don’t risk losing much! We are young, our english is pretty good, we are experienced workers and work in jobs we can do in the US, too! And we don’t have kids that we need to bring abroad with us, yet. But even, if I know that I won’t lose much more than a dream when we might come back after a year, I sometimes am seriously scared!

In this situation you somehow hope that your family and loved ones will try to take that fears away from you. But they won’t! Because they are scared of you getting hurt! Their fears added to yours, sometimes is way too much to handle! After every serious talk we have with our parents, I need to calm myself down and tell myself that this is a chance I waited for a long long time and that Flo is with me and that everything will work out fine – no matter if we will make it in the US or not!

We always laugh about the people they show in these emigration documentaries on TV, because they don’t care about anything and don’t prepare theirselves enough. But sometimes I actually wish that I might have a bit of their naivity and careless nature. Because being as serious and realistic about the whole emigration thing (as we are) might be healthy, but is nowhere near easy!

The train I take to work every morning passes by Frankfurt airport, which is an international airport where many long distance flights depart. This morning I had a group of teenagers in the train with me. They were going on a four-week-long educational trip to California, were very excited about it and couldn’t stop talking. I normally can’t stand it when people entertain the whole train with their talk in the morning, but this one was to good to be overheard or to be annyoing.

Those kids were so damn cute with their big dreams and naive thoughts about the time ahead of them. The girl that stood next to me was going to stay at a family in Chino for the four weeks. I guess this girl knew Chino from the TV series The OC, where the main character Ryan is a Chino resident. So I guess she thought Chino has some kind of Hollywood glamour and is next to the coast! That girl actually thought that she would land in a TV series world, where girls wear bikinis to school and where it is always 38° Celcius, sunny and everyone is doing great!

The cutest statement I overheard from her, was: “It will be so hot in Los Angeles right now. About 38° Celcius I read on the internet. When we will do our trip to Las Vegas for the weekend we will be freezing!” Freezing in the desert would be knew to me! Freezing in Las Vegas also would! But it got even cuter!

The girl totally freaked out about the customs check at the airport. She told all the other girls that you MUST tell the customs that you brought food to the US with you, because otherwise they will open your suitcase. She than got totally freaked out, because she seemed to have a bag of gummibears in gift wrap and guess what another girl told her: “You can’t do that! You will be in big trouble, because the X-Rays at the airport can’t scan through gift wrap and they will think that you carry a bomb or something dangerous with you!”

Luckily our arrival to Frankfurt airport interrupted their talk! I still wonder, if the girl unpacked her suitcase before the flight to rip off the gift wrap and what customs told her when she announced that she brought food with her from Germany! But even if I have to laugh a lot about their naivity, a part of me wishes to be that age again, to go to the US without a care and only with great expectations and to know that no matter how the trip will turn out to be I will go back into mommy’s arms after four weeks anyways!

This summer I live a kind of american lifestyle! Till yesterday I didn’t really realize how hot it is in Germany right now. In my office and in the train I commute to work with, it is actually pretty cold, because these places are fully cooled down by air conditioning. But yesterday I joined a friend for her bachelorette party and nearly died of heat!

It is actually funny that everytime you tell people that you think that it is way to hot outside, the answer always is: You are complaning? You plan on living in a state where it is hot most of the time! It’s funny that people actually think that California is like a never turned off oven! Sure it is warm, but that warmth is so different to the one we have over here every third summer!

Actually I have never been much of a summer person. I love wearing thick clothes like hoodies and jeans and my Ugg boots. But much more than anything else I am looking forward to live in a sunshine state and nearby a beach. I look forward to having a summer I like. And not a one that has rain and thunder on one day and 38° Celsius on the next!

A guy from cologne that we know used to live in California and he told us that he had a pretty hard time living without the seasons there. He told us that he couldn’t sleep very good and that his body kind of went nuts, because of the never coming winter. I hope that we won’t have such a hard time, but even if I never thought I would ever say that: I want heat 24/7 NOW!