Fearless

Guten Tag, Welt.

We survived packing our lives up, saying goodbye to our friends and families, flying across the U.S., the ocean and most of Europe, living in a rented room under a dance studio for 10 days, apartment hunting with no car, no help and no English during the hottest week of the year, moving into an apartment on the sixth floor of a communist concrete block building, sleeping on an air mattress for two weeks, having no kitchen sink for three weeks, dragging all we could carry from IKEA (an hour away) back to our apartment on trams nearly every day for two weeks, occasionally in the pouring rain, and going 47 days without home Internet access.

Oh yeah, and then there was the culture shock, the jet lag, the horror of standing at the brink of three and a half years here, the homesickness, the language barrier, and I got a pretty rotten cold that lasted for about a week somewhere in there.

But we did it. And we feel fearless.


JEM

P.S. Much much much more to follow. Still trying to figure out the ins and outs of running this thing.

A Girl and Her Things

I'm a nice girl from Idaho who got tied up with a brilliant scientist from Las Vegas, and in three days I'm following him to Dresden, Germany. He'll be getting his Ph.D. in computational biology from the oldest technical school in Germany, while I try to make a life for myself in a city older and farther from my home than any place I've ever been, surrounded by people I can only barely understand when I'm running on all cylinders.

Moving overseas is an ordeal. Over the past two weeks, I have sent carload after carload of possessions to the thrift store and even after I thought I had gotten rid of everything I could possibly get rid of, I filled another car and I have halfway filled another large black plastic bag that is currently sitting on the floor of my parents' garage next to my suitcase, which is packed so tightly I've vowed not to open it until we're settled in an apartment an ocean away.

In the garbage bag is a bright blue cardigan that I love. Himself remembers seeing me in it before we ever met, just passing as strangers on the university campus as freshmen -- both externally cool but internally combusting with a crush so intense it forced us later to be uncharacteristically bold. The sweater is too bulky to be jammed into a corner of the suitcase, and it's too late in the game to even consider rethinking the stuff that's already been crushed and vacuum-packed. So it goes.

I've always looked with pity and (I'll admit) a bit of disgust at people who hoard things -- things that seem so worthless and replaceable to me. But as a I realize how tender my heart gets when I think of an old, moderately itchy sweater with a little singe on the bottom from standing too close to the stove once, I can see how easy it would be.


JEM