I wish I had started to write and capture my memories earlier. Over the years, so many of them seem to have faded away to make space for the new. Some moments are still very much present, some of them are no more than fragments. I hope this blog will help me to slowly recover them one by one. Today I am travelling back to the year of 2012, the time just before I relocated to South Africa.
I remember that I felt A LOT of feelings. I was excited, happy, overwhelmed, stressed and scared. And all of it at the same time. In particular because it was a rather spontaneous decision. One that I had not really thought through or planned. And now that was it - I was about to move to East London, a little town thousands of kilometres away from home that I had only passed by on a whirlwind backpacking trip. I had met my new manager in a video conference but I did not know another single soul. I was on the way into the absolute unknown. And this time it was not for a holiday but a two-year work assignment.
Luckily, moving abroad requires a lot of preparation. And that kept me busy enough not to faint and fall over. Or to change my mind. There were lots of decisions to be made, forms to be filled and boxes to be ticked. And for that I had lists. And lists of lists. Relocating with the help of my company surely made the work a lot easier and helped me not to overlook anything. I had to collect documents for my visa application, get a police clearance, go through health checks and update my vaccinations. I also had to decide on what to do with my apartment (It was a rental so I started looking for a tenant to take it over) and whether or not to take all my belongings with or store them in Germany (I chose the first option).
And then there were trainings. The Going Abroad Seminar to make us aware of all the emotional phases we would most likely go through when moving to another country and how to handle them. A Security Training that prepared us for worst case scenarios (We even practiced the situation of being hijacked in our car). And because I was moving from the truck to the passenger car division I also went for a two week on-the-job training in Bremen in order to learn about the processes and meet my German counterparts.
In November, about two months before relocating, reality kicked in for the first time. I jumped onto the plane for my look-and-see trip. I was dying of excitement. I would finally get to see my new home, meet my new colleagues and hunt for a house. It was an adventure. On the first day, I was equipped with a car, a map and a list of addresses of houses. And then I just drove, on the left (and thus "wrong") side of the road, in crazy South African traffic, up Oxford Street, trying not to run over one of the hundreds of people that randomly crossed the road, while simultaneously figuring out how to get to my first destination. I think there was a total of thirty minutes set up per house. And that included finding it :D In the evenings, I met up with a few other to-be expats who stayed in the same B&B. We shared our experiences of the day over supper. There was also a bit of time to explore, get used to the surroundings and sort a few other things. And... I made it to the beach. But on these very first days, I was rather cautious because I was not sure where I could go without worries and which areas I should rather avoid. And so the first week passed really quickly. And in the end I had also chosen a house (Which I eventually never got to move into. But that is yet another story). On the last day, just before I had to return to Germany, I finally got to visit the plant as well. My manager had decided to run a team workshop and that was an awesome opportunity to get to know everyone a bit better. The look-and-see trip was a success. I liked what I saw. And that made me feel a lot more at ease.
One of the moments, I can still remember very clearly, was the day when three men came to pack up my apartment in Stuttgart and to move all my belongings into a truck that would bring them to the container to cross the ocean. I think they were all finished after half a day. Half a day, and I was standing in a completely empty apartment (despite a mattress that I planned to sleep on for the last two or three nights). Half a day, and my life was all packed up. They had even taken out the lightbulbs and I had to knock on my neighbour's door to borrow a lamp so I would not have to sit in the dark (Thank you, Uwe). That was the moment when I knew... This was no dream, I would not wake up. But this phase of my life was indeed over. And a new adventure was about to start...
