The Reluctant Migrant: Trials and Tribulations of

I hadn't really expected to feel much in the way of culture shock. I did know that Germans did things differently, but I knew quite a few Germans, and had been here a few times before. However, it is very different to live somewhere and experience life rather than to just pass through.

As a typical inhibited Brit, I have been amazed by how Germans seem quite happy to speak their mind. They seem quite happy to look into your business and are quick to tell you if you are doing something wrong. Obviously, this is simply my experience. But I have loads of examples.

This all felt particularly painful when I first arrived and was in shell shock, feeling insecure and very exposed. Thus to have another customer come up to my 7 year old in a supermarket and not stand on a child step, persumably meant for slightly smaller children was a surprise. To be told by a German how bad food in Britain is (this from the home of pickled vegetables and boiled potatoes). To be clapped at for sweeping the street alongside our house; to be told off for walking over a road when there are no cars insight; To be shouted at when I hadn't weighed my vegetables in a supermarket (my mistake but the only other supermarket I had been to, weighed them for you, and I simply got it wrong).

The more unpalatable examples have occured on 3 or 4 occasions when older people have decided to try and shove my kids of the pavement, or even in an aisle in a shop. Presumably they just didn't think they should be there. But rather than walking past or even pushing past, they decided to swipe away. Unfortuantely, Ihave stod open mouthed when this has happened. I've also stod open mouthed when I waited at a station to let someone through some double doors (rather than swinging the doors into the face), only to have someone push past me, barge into the doors and thus swinging them back into my face and telling me there are 2 doors you know. I knew, he'd just flung them straight back in my face!

As an immigrant, it's difficult to judge when somepne is simply a horrible person or when it is a cultural attitude that you're up against. In the UK it is easy to meet unacceptable rudeness. Those people are to be avoided etc etc, and here, it could easily be the same, and not knowing how things are done, means that we're more likely to experience difficulties. Although as I didn't know that there was a law against children being on pavements, I find that hard! Still, perhaps I should feel pleased that people are happy to interfer in each others lives or toot if you haven't moved away from a red light the second before it's gone green. People are not afraid to show their feelings - no fear of a litter-lout morphing into a knife-wielder for the sake of thrown wrapper.

Today is day one of a new me. Well, not a new me at all. But a consistent me. A me who writes more and thinks less - at least that is the idea.

So me and blogging. Not new to it exactly, but new to talking openly.

I moved to Germany from the UK last year for a 4 year stint and have so far survived just over 7 months. I moved with my husband "Sci" and 2 kids "One and "Two" for want of better names. I moved with enormous reluctance.

Some boring but explanatory background:

There is a background to this as obviously I did not move kicking and screaming - and was fully a part of the decision making process. For 6 years our lives had been shadowed by a move to the West Country which had never felt right to me. Yet at the same time, the area where we lived was changing rapidly. Students amoungst you might sniff at this, but our road seemed to be converting into a student halls of residence - buy-to-let city with landlords packing in students from the backrooms to the rafters. Bang goes the community feeling and as this was a Victorian road and so many students appear to have cars, this made parking a daily battle.

Add to that our local school sliding down the scale and graffiti appearing all around us, a council seemingly impotent to create a safe crossing to get my children to school a full 3 minutes walk away and you have a picture of discontent. I'm not sure you could count the drug dealers occasionally seen in the pub car park at the end of our road or in the alley between the primary school and our road, as they are presumably everywhere. But, I really don't want to be anywhere near them.

Discontent is only the background though as meanwhile we had a house we had believed that we would end our days in, the vestiges of a community spirit which was fantastic and neighbours like family. I had after a long time looking found the job of my dreams (unfortunately without the salary but seemingly you can't have everything). We had great friends and aside from wanting the area to change (I know we couldn't make it, but still), we were very happy. But trapped. Trapped by an impending move that for various reasons became if anything less attractive, we could not move within our adopted town nor it seemed anywhere else. We could not afford to move, and even by using mortgage simply to change areas, we ran the risk that a few months later we might simply have to move again.

And of course, a new job locally might have solved this issue. But when you have a loved one who loves their job, who loves their niche field, how many could really ask them to give it up for something else? Well I couldn't, and so had resigned myself to moving. But the move appeared to get delayed and the feeling of entrappment - and then let down continued, so when an exciting secondment came up in Germany, it seemed like an opportunity to apply for it. Better for my husband, better opportunities for my kids, and if I would have to give up my job anyway, what difference did it make to me?

But loss of that job and distancing from family and friends, together with a feeling of loss of self have been and still are a constant burden, so I am blogging myself out of a cycle of why? and allowing myself to look and laugh at the many scraps we have seen and cultural clangers committed by us and to us over the past few months.

That I will change, now seems inevitable, but I have no idea what I will change into. I doubt I could possibly exist as a lady-who-lunches, and so 7 months in, still wonder what on earth to do. More anon.