Saturday, June 20, 2015

Other expats come and go but I'm still here


One of the problems with making friends with other expats is that a lot of them are only living in Germany temporarily and eventually move back to their home countries (or some place else). In the almost five years I've lived here I've had to say goodbye countless times and it doesn't get any easier.

Finding people you really click with and building up the friendship takes time and when they leave, you naturally lament their absence. It's great that I now have lots of connections around the world, and these days with skype you can still keep in touch pretty well, but day to day I miss hanging out with the person.

Of course you're probably thinking I could make more of an effort to make German friends. And I do and I have some great ones now but in general I still find I have more in common with other expats and tend to connect with them faster.

I guess it's just a downside to living abroad, that you get to meet some great people and have them your life for awhile but then they move away. In another year or two everyone from my initial friend group here will most likely not live here anymore. Sometimes I feel like the last guest left at a party! At least I still have the GerMann to hang out with. And I can plan some more trips back to Dublin when I start feeling homesick.

Expat Life with a Double Buggy

Monday, June 8, 2015

House hunting in Germany #microblogMonday


Last week we almost bought our dream house. We've been looking on and off for over two years at this stage and rarely has something come up that's right for us as normally anything we like is either well outside our price range or in a location we're not so mad about. However this time we saw a great house for sale in an area we love and we both knew we had to go view it. Unfortunately loads of other people also saw the ad and the realtor was inundated with calls and visits.

The viewing went great so we arranged a meeting with the bank to get mortgage pre-approval (the low interest rates at the moment means the timing is really good) and then we made an offer! After that all we could do was to wait and cross our fingers (or press our thumbs as the Germans would say- Daumen Drücken!). Sadly we heard back a few days later that we didn't get it.

It was so disappointing. We had both gotten really excited about the house and I had decorated all of the rooms in my head already! So that's where we're at now, back to square one with the house hunting again.