Chapter 1: The Deutschest of Lands

A bit of background- I am the token girl-engineer at the German office of an American company. I have a thing for languages and fixing shit, so this seemed like a good fit. I just moved to Berlin from my longtime-home of Pittsburgh, where I grew up, went to school, and joined the roller derby team.

So, you might say, Germany eh? I kind of fell into German, honestly. I started collecting western-european languages in high school, and happened to find a cheap ticket to Frankfurt for spring break during college, so after bumming around the country for a week, learning German seemed like a fun way to spend my copious amounts of free time in engineering school.

That just-for-funsies German class turned into a year in Munich studying abroad, which turned into a German minor (on top of French and Italian), which turned into packing up all of my worldly belongings and moving to Berlin as of last week.

So how does one just up and move to Europe?

In my case, basically by the seat of my pants. I got the notice from work that I was all clear to go less than a month before they wanted me at the new office. This meant I had less than a month not only to pack up all of my shit (well, by the time work had hashed out that they were, in fact, going to pay for me to go at all, I had about 2 weeks over Christmas…) but also say goodbye to my entire Irish/Italian family (“go see your grandmother before she dies!”) and all of my friends. Stressful to say the least, and that isn’t even counting the heaping dose of Catholic guilt my family served up on the side.

But finally, after many long nights and “working from home” days, I did all of the things, and here I am!