Archive for November, 2010

I think I never told you this before, but the song California from Phantom Planet is one of “our songs”. When planning our wedding, we had to come up with a song that we wanted to be sang during the ceremony. We agreed on the California song and so I told my brother to get his band play it.

I didn’t really think that this would came as a surprise to Flo, but he was totally shocked during the ceremony, because he forgot about it. At the end of that song everyone cried! I couldn’t even look at the singer throughout the song, because that made me cry so hard! And people that attended the ceremony still keep on telling me that they couldn’t keep back their tears when they saw Flo cry.

This week I began watching the series The OC again. Everyone who knows this series, knows that the song California became popular because it is featured in the series Intro. Everytime I watch OC – which is mostly on the train when I commute to work – I nearly cry, because that song is connected with so many memories.

But that are not only memories that make me cry, but also some that make me laugh. When still planning the wedding we told my mom that we had chosen California as the song for the ceremony. She went: “Oh cool that funny song the girl sings, right, I know it from the radio.” I had to think about that for a minute to realize that she actually thought that we are going to play California Gurls by Katy Perry at our wedding ceremony. Me and Flo laughed really hard about it, but the lyrics of that song actually match our feelings for California:

I know a place
Where the grass is really greener
Warm, wet and wild
There must be something in the water
Sippin’ gin and juice
Laying underneath the palm trees
You could travel the world
But nothing comes close to the Golden Coast

We watched the show LA Ink today and they had a costumer who at that moment lived in his car just to be able to make his dream come true and live in LA. That at the same time made me feel bad for the guy and I admire him, because I would never do something like that just for the sake of living in a certain city. Especially in LA. I have never been a huge fan of LA, I never wanted to live there and we did not choose LA as our first immigration destination, because we love it. We just chose it, because we had to chose a city to move to.

Actually this wasn’t my first WOW moment about LA this week. In the last days I had several moments where it kind of hit me that we are actually going to live in one of the craziest cities on earth pretty soon. So many people dream about living in LA forever and we are just going to live there by accident.

Originally our plan was to move to LA to look for a job and than hopefully move to Orange County pretty soon. But yesterday Flo and I talked about staying in Los Angeles for maybe a year if we like it there. We both somehow feel that this might be the perfect moment and also the last chance to live in a huge and fast city like this, because we might not wanna do this when we are older and parents.

I don’t know where and when fate will take us away from Los Angeles – or if it even ever will. But right now I get very comfortable with the idea of us living in the city of Angels. But hopefully our guardian angel will keep us away from that car thing…

Flo and I kind of want to build the perfect circumstances for our emigration. This means that we want to get arranged as much as possible before our plane hits the LA ground in late January. But somehow this is not as easy as we thought it would be. Because being early – as we germans love to – is far too early for US circumstances.

First we tried to get a job. I have been applying for jobs in the US for the whole last year when I saw good ones. But in September and October I really applied to a lot jobs. One company actually got back to me and during the phone call it became obvious that they weren’t searching for a employee to come in 2011 (as I wanted to), but immediately.

As an emigrant you always have to learn. Learning that applying and getting a job in the US is a way shorter process than it is in Germany was surprising and changed our plans a lot. But it kind of feels good to cut one thing down from our long list of things to do now.

This week we began to search for a short term rental for our first three months in the US. We don’t exactly know where we want to live and even more important where we will get jobs, so we try to rent a furnished place first. But: Many of the landlords or owners that wrote back told us that we are too early. They asked us to get back to them by the end of december, because they might than know about free places for the end of January.

My parents and my environment always taught me that being the early bird is a good thing. Now it seems like that being the early german bird in the US means being way ahead of time.