Ex-pat Newlyweds

While the last two weeks has been a flurry of moving plans, Josh promised he can focus on the wedding now.

There are just 11 days to go before the big day, and for me, it’s all starting to feel very real. My relatives, affectionately known as “The Germans”, are all descending upon various parts of North America this week. Some are in Winnipeg, others touring the Okanagon and a few started in San Francisco and are puttering their way up the west coast for the sake of this shindig.

Things are coming together but it hasn’t eased my mind one bit. The social calendar is full of visits with people we won’t be able to see much longer and appointments with people I don’t have much longer to see.

I think it will all get done…

Well, a mere three sleeps after dropping Josh off, I got to see him again. He was exhausted. Some fun facts from his whirlwind tour:

• total duration: 70 hours
• time spent in Berlin: 43 hours
• time spent interviewing: 10 hours
• time spent in airports: 6 hours
• time spent on airplanes: 21 hours
• distance travelled: 17,013 kms
• carbon footprint: about 3 tonnes CO2
• number of interviews: 3

(Taken from his post on his Tumblr).

Environmental degradation aside, his trip was a success.

We’re moving to Berlin! Josh accepted a very exciting position for Nokia Gate5. It’s going to be an amazing opportunity for him and I’m excited because we get to live in Berlin.

Now only to figure out what I want to do…

But first I’ll deal with this wedding, which is all of 16 days away. Wedding preparations are all I do these days. It’s stressful. For those of you reading this who aren’t yet married: Be warned. Planning a wedding is not fun and no one will tell you that because they either don’t know (because they aren’t married) or they are trying to stay positive for your sake (they are just liars).

A little story about what the last two weeks of wedding planning reduces some one to:

When Josh returned from Germany, his other mission was to get some of my favourite treats. This include: Kinder bars, Milka chocolate and Haribo’s Tropifrutti. He got them all and then told me to pull them out of his bag when I got home from work.

I started ripping through the bag. I was eight-years-old again and I knew there was something good in there for me. It wasn’t a very big bag and I got concerned when the first thing I pulled out wasn’t treats.

“Where are they?” I asked, the anxiety quite apparent in my voice.

“They should be in there,” Josh says.

By now, I’ve more or less destroyed the contents of the duffle bag.

There was no candy.

“They stole it!” I moan. “You had to check your bag and some one stole my candy!”

“No,” Josh says. Dead. Serious. He told me that they made him check his bag. That he didn’t have a lock and…. and…

By the time he got half way through his explanation, I was in a heap on the floor. Laughing.

“Those little treats were all I wanted,” and the laughter turned to tears. And then sobs.

Josh quickly realized how serious I was about those treats. He moves from his sleepy position on the bed and looks over at me, face turning red and tears running everywhere.

“Oh Beenie,” he says, a face full of remorse. “I was only kidding. They asked me to check my bag but I just went with it on the plane and I thought it would be funny and we could do a treasure hunt and the treats are in the closet.”

It’s 2:30 a.m. Why is the phone ringing?

Right. It’s because that’s when Europe is in business.

Josh has been busy. He estimates he has applied for about 40 jobs since we got serious about leaving Vancouver in December. He’s had a few phone interviews, some promising but the one at 2:30 a.m. was what he called “embarrassing”.

After scheduling the interview for 11:30 a.m. her time, one German HR representative asked Josh to speak German, at 2:30 a.m. our time. Needless to say, it did not go well.

Oh, and our wedding is one month away.

This is happening.

I’ve always wistfully said that I wanted to live in Europe. And now we’re doing it. We’re moving trans-Atlantic with in months. You could almost even say weeks.

Oh, and did I mention our upcoming wedding?

We are Josh and Sabine. I, Sabine, will mostly be writing this, with some contributions from Josh.

After dating for four years, Josh proposed in front of the gothic cathedral in Cologne. It was a rainy, wet and miserable Monday afternoon. I said yes, of course, and now, we’re five weeks away from our wedding and three months away from being jobless and in the process of being homeless.

Josh and I have been living together for almost three years. We’re getting married on the fifth anniversary of our first date, which we spent the afternoon on the floor of my then-new apartment listening to David Bowie and the Cars. Since, we’ve grown together to who we are today. I was 20 then and am now 25. I can’t imagine I’d want to know what my life would be like without Josh in it. No thanks.

Well, to celebrate our first year of marriage, we’re doing something different. We’re saying “I do” on October 11, 2008. And instead of settling into the life we’ve known for the last three years, we’re packing up. We’ll be selling the Ikea college collection and the rest will go into storage. We’ll find ourselves in the arrival area of a European airport with two suitcases each, tired, hungry and restless to start the next step.

It’s going to be an anxiety-ridden step, but it’s going to be exciting. We’re hoping for a year that we can grow together, an experience that will bring us together that really will be, for the rest of our lives.

The location is still TBD and we’re three months away.