My relocation journal

I intend this to be a continuously updated journal of my journey/struggles with relocation to a completely different country with an alien language. There is no need to keep the country secret, it’s Germany. Berlin, to be precise.

I am writing this 8 months after I first landed here, and it’s been a roller-coaster ride so far.

To begin with, Why?

As always, there are a lot of reasons. Here are the main ones:

Better living environment, better work-life balance.
(Possibly) better growing environment for my child. I believe the education system is more about individual development as opposed to the hyper competitive, exhausting experience I was exposed to.
(Possibly) make better money than I did back in India.

These why’s are all very high level, and there are of course cracks in each of them as we move into the finer details. I hope to find as I move along if these cracks are just small enough to be just accounted for, or if these are systemic issues which would make my life here harder than my home country. It may indeed be the case that I may settle back in India at one point of time. I intend to journal every aspect of that journey as much as I can.

Three possible outcomes

There are three possible outcomes that I foresee about this experience. They are pretty simple actually.

Outcome 1: I continue in Germany, and everything works out. I learn to converse in German at least in the most basic sense, and I can integrate with these humans better.
Outcome 2: I move back to India, and settle there permanently. Not exactly a bad thing. I am totally up for it if needed.
Outcome 3: I move to a different country, where English is spoken by a significant amount of people willingly. I say willingly because here in Germany, I’ve noticed the average German speak English grudgingly, and sometimes out of frustration (especially in government offices). More on this later.

It’s all about language, isn’t it? I’ve come to understand the value of language (and more importantly, community) after I moved here. Language makes all the difference. It’s perhaps fitting that I work in a language tech company.

Community

I’ve heard of the saying, “No man is an island”, but that I really understood it after I relocated to this new place. Community is something I now understand that I’ve always took for granted, something which was always there wherever I went. It’s only now that I fully understand the need to have people to connect with, to talk to, to call your own. That doesn’t mean that I am totally alone here. I am lucky enough to have a lot of friends around, people I can call family.

After my relocation, I find myself faced with the new experience of having to make contact with people on my own. That sentence itself sounds very weird, and is indicative of the shell I have been living in for quite some time. For almost all of my life, I was lucky enough to have good people around me, with zero effort from my side. At some point in those thirty something years, I took that fact for granted, maybe even thought of living my life away from people and the noise.

I’m not saying that I have jumped to the other extreme and become a complete extrovert. In fact, nothing really has changed in how I make contact with new people. I still feel the reluctance to make the effort, the awkward and shy first efforts at small talk, and so on until if I continue long enough, the complete destruction of all barriers once I find out that the other person is another person like me. Nothing has changed, yet something has changed in how I value these interactions, even if they are short lived.

In short, having good friends is important wherever you are. It’s not everything, but it is something, and it’s something we can’t really live without.

Kindness is a virtue

This is one of those cliche quotes I have heard since I was a child, but now I know it’s importance. After having to find my way in a completely different land, I have come to appreciate even the smallest gesture of kindness I get from people. Kindness is NOT the default mode of interaction for most of the people I have seen, including me. Kindness takes work. It is the higher ground. Hostility on the other hand, is easy. It is easy to feel hostile about a stranger, and we may even have survived as a species because of this default hostility. Maybe the best way to learn this is to try to integrate yourself in a society without any of the privileges you have enjoyed till now in life. It’s another popping of your bubble, and it’s not easy. I’m not even sure if I would recommend it.

Here’s the bottom-line. It’s better to be a nice person as opposed to a not-so-nice person. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen quite a lot of nice people who made my life so much better.

The Sun is a luxury!

I never believed I would say this after years of not stepping out of the house because the Sun was waiting outside. I’ve always thought about what was wrong with these foreigners who were sun-bathing. Yuck. What kind of bathing is that!

Now I get it! I’m sorry! Now I actively seek out the sun, like all those people I made fun of back in the day. My idea of vacation is to get as much sun as possible. A good day is a day with lots of sun. The sun is a luxury, and I had to relocate much above the equator to figure that out!

Next Up: Language experience, Learnings so far