Germany has European charm by the bucketful, does train travel as well as anywhere else, and offers 100 different ways to cook a potato, what’s not to love? (Answer: absolutely nothing.) But making Germany home as a non-fluent, non-EU foreigner was harder than I expected.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my year of living abroad it’s that plans are made to be changed. You’ll come up with a dozen backup plans and each one of them will fall through. Something goes wrong, someone tells you no, or you change your mind completely and start from square one. As someone that works best with goals and plans, that’s been a huge adjustment for me. Over the past year, I can’t tell you how many rejection emails I’ve read or the hours I’ve wasted scrolling through my Facebook feed and wondering what I’d be doing if I were in the States. Honestly, it’s been the feeling so directionless -not the thousands of miles between me and my family and friends, the seemingly (but not really) insurmountable language barrier, or the lack of quality peanut butter in the entire country- that’s been the hardest part of my first year as an expat.
I started 2015 determined to give myself a future in Germany and over the last five months, I’ve worked really hard to make it happen. And finally I have good news to share with y’all: I’m moving to Berlin to be a grad student!
Freie University’s JFK Institute, home for the next two years.
I was never one to want to go back to grad school right out of undergrad, but this was even truer during my senior year when I started to become more and more unsure of what I really wanted to do after graduation. But here in Germany -and I think Europe, more broadly- it’s super common to get all of your schooling out of the way at once. (I copy-edited a letter of motivation for a Belgian applying for his FOURTH degree program!)
I’d flirted with the idea of grad school when I first arrived, knowing that F’s plan has always been to get his master’s degree, but it wasn’t until F and I were trying to come up with our “longer”-term plans at the beginning of this year that I started to look at it as a viable option. Knowing that we’d probably have the most luck in a bigger city -Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden- we tried to cast a wide net in looking for a city that offered something that appealed to us both plus something in English for me. I was pretty sure, and happily so, that it would come down to Berlin.
I spent all of March working on my applications, and by the end of April, all that was left was to wait. Waiting for uni-assist to receive them, review them, email my confirmation, forward them to the universities, the evaluations, the interview, the arrival of the letters. It’s been a stressful couple of months, to say the least, but finally, there’s a definite plan. I can’t believe it. I’m a master’s student at Freie Universität -one of Berlin’s great public universities- and I’ll be working towards a career in journalism.
Now to breathe a sigh of relief that my visa won’t run out on the 10th!
In preparation for the upcoming move to Berlin, we’ve temporarily moved back to Burbecke. Leaving Marburg, my first apartment in Germany, and the friends I have there is definitely bitter-sweet. As ready as I feel to move on, doing the final walk-through and saying a last goodbye was sadder than I expected. But on the bright side, with F in charge and armed with tie-down straps and four suitcases to stuff things in, this was by far the breeziest move I’ve ever made and we were on to the celebratory Kaffee-Kuchen in just three hours. And now I get to enjoy the rest of my summer: time with friends, a summer vacation, cycling along the Rhine.
The coffeeshop-culture so common in the US has been slow to take root in Marburg. C&T is one of the exceptions. This American-style cafe, with its chai lattes, donuts and selection of bagels, has become wildly popular with Marburg’s younger, “hipper” crowd. Located on a Südviertel sidestreet surrounded by student apartments, the store’s inside feels minimal, not the coziest coffeeshop, with just a handful of high-top tables and stools, shelves full of coffee mugs for sale, and a back wall covered in tins of its coffee and tea varieties from around the world. But what C&T lacks in ambiance, it more than makes up for with its good, roasted-fresh-daily coffee, priced below 2€ for a cup, which is also available to-go.
Caitlin Travis 