Obviously neither Flo nor I just had our 2nd birthday. But even if he got a little older, Flo celebrated his 2nd birthday in the US yesterday. Last year we took a little romantic trip to San Luis Obispo for his birthday. This year we stayed a little closer to home, but went down to Huntington Beach. We met some of our friends, had a lovely brunch and afterwards went to Huntington Main Street to buy Flo a longboard.

For dinner I took Flo down to Santa Monica to the Boa Steakhouse. It is a upscale restaurant that is located directly by the beach and hosts celebrities all the time. Flo and I have meant to go there since we moved here, but always wanted to save it up for a special occassion. Flo’s birthday obviously was special enough and so I treated him to an amazing steak experience.

While we sat at dinner we started talking about the year that already had gone by since we moved to the US and that made me feel a little proud. I didn’t expect everything to go so good that we could afford a dinner like yesterday’s one without even worrying about it. We have only been here a year now, but we already saved up all the money we spent for moving here and even a little more. It feels good to be able to live a good lifestyle and not really have to worry about that much. Even if everyone loved to tell us how hard we will have it here and that we should get comfortable with the idea of being broke in LA.

Moving here has been a big but also an awesome step for us. And celebrating Flo’s birthday with friends, an amazing steak and the beach closeby all day proved that for us all over again. Life is good! And what better present can you get for your birthday than this?!

I have a german colleague at work, which happens to live in the same area we do. Sometimes we take advantage of that and carpool to work. This week – while driving all the way down to Downtown – we started talking about work. During that talk I told her that I am a kind of person that always thinks he can achieve more, do better or set himself higher goals. She told me that this in general is a good thing to do, but that I should give myself enough credit for what I have already achieved over here. That made me think!

If I make a list of the things that I have already achieved in my career, that list ends up being pretty long. I always followed my dreams and even if there were some bumpy roads along the way, I made nearly all of them come true. Even over here I alreay climbed the career ladder a little and actually made my job be the one I always wanted. Another notable thing she told me is that we sometimes tend to not give ourselves enough extra credit for not being natives. For sure everything gets easier by time, but still it is a pretty high achievement to perform better than some of your colleagues when you have to talk in a foreign language all day long.

There are still a ton of goals I want to reach in my career. And I am far away from giving up. But sometimes it is nice to take a little rest and feel proud of yourself. Even if you just do the normal things in life – you do them in another language. And no matter what, that is a big achievement on it’s own!

There are some weeks where I stare at my screen a little bit, before I decide what my next post is gonna be about. Today I did the same and said to myself: There didn’t really happen anything new this week. And after that I realized: That actually is a good thing! Because going a week without any exciting new news, kind of means that we must have really settled in into our new life!

Some days it feels crazily weird that we already have been here for a year! I feel like I stepped out of that plane yesterday. Still so much happened during the last year that I can’t even believe it has only been a year. During the past twelve months we not only moved to a whole new continent, we found new jobs, a new home, new friends and also established a new routine. A routine that makes us happy and makes us feel like home in this city we’ve only been in for short 13 1/2 months.

I’ve never been someone who had problems to adapt new living situations. But still I didn’t expect myself to adapt to this new life so fast. For sure there are still some problems every now and then to overcome. But isn’t that what life is all about? So this week I proudly announce that I have nothing out of the usual to talk about! Just life being how it is supposed to be!