For most of the time I’ve known my husband, one of his goals was working overseas. Approximately nine years into our relationship, I started a job providing program management support for our agency’s overseas program. Yet, I never really thought I’d be writing this from a suburb of Frankfurt, Germany three years into an overseas assignment.
Things I Would Have Done Differently
This could be a post of its own (and maybe someday it will be) but for now I’ll reflect on lessons learned from the trip itself and the early days in Deutschland.
Purged with more vigor: While I did start sorting through things soon after we learned of the assignment, we underestimated how long it would take to truly get rid of things that didn’t need to come with us. As a result, we were up until 2:00am the night before we flew out (and nights before that) yet still didn’t completely empty our house. We are forever in debt to our best friends and my parents who returned to the house in the ensuing days to finish what we didn’t before our renters could move in.
Packed less for the airplane: Christmas fell less than two months before our departure. Astutely, my mom wanted to get the kids meaningful gifts but was mindful of our need to be packing soon after. Both kids needed good quality backpacks, so I selected them and my parents purchased them and filled them with activity books and other fun things. Shoving as much as I could fit into their carryon backpacks seemed like a smart, well-prepared idea…until they were practically overturned turtles and we could barely fit down the aisle of the airplane. In retrospect, I wish I had put less of those things in their backpacks and saved more of them to pull out as distractions in the challenging early days upon arrival.
Things I Did and Recommend
Dressed the kids in pajamas on the airplane: A coworker suggested dressing the kids in hard-soled slippers for the airplane. We didn’t do this but did buy each child new pajamas in their favorite character (at the time; see photo above); I thought this would help trick them into understanding it was sleep time on the plane. While that failed quite spectacularly*, it did keep the kids comfortable and led to some amusing pictures from that first day; our first dinner in Germany had them still in their airplane pajamas.
*More about why it failed: we were in a section of four seats across, both kids in the middle two seats flanked by a parent on either end. We helped each kid curl up leaning on the adjacent parent and settle in. That worked until the first time sometime moved involuntarily in their sleep and kicked the sibling awake. They alternated this for most of the flight.
Hired a pet shipping company: We felt we were already going to be overwhelmed with checked bags, carryon bags, two kids, a stroller, and a language barrier. Bringing our dog with us on the same flight seemed destined to stress out him and us. Therefore, with my parents’ encouragement, we sent him for some last minute loving at his grandparents when we departed. The pet shipping company we hired picked him up from their house a few days later and handled all travel arrangements. They had even guided me through the confusing veterinary requirements before that. By the time he was delivered to us four days after arrival, we were still jet-lagged and overwhelmed but in a better frame of mind to welcome him and help him settle into his new dog-friendly country.
The First Day
We landed in Germany at barely 8:00am local time. Even getting out of the airport was difficult because our loved ones who’d bid us farewell in Virginia weren’t there to help us juggle everything. The number of bags we had outnumbered the hands we had (by a lot) even if the younger one hadn’t still been in a stroller. Colleagues were waiting just outside the security doors to escort us and our luggage to our apartment, but we had to get ourselves through the doors. Exhausted from barely sleeping on the plane, we were even more so by the time we finally got to our temporary apartment.
Fighting to avoid naps, we unpacked and settled in that first afternoon. Eventually, we succumbed and rested before heading to an early dinner nearby. Brahaus is one of the few restaurants we’ve returned to repeatedly over the last three years, especially when we have visitors.
After dinner we walked around to view our new home at night before heading back to our apartment. We’ve revisited these places frequently in the years since February 11, 2022 but that first day will always be particularly memorable.
