I’ve been talking about Germany/Berlin a lot and I tried to keep people sorta in the loop, but things have moved fast 😅. For context my wife and I have been together 13 years and we moved quite a lot within France as our situation and needs changed, as well as ourselves. We tried to be more isolated for a while since life in cities had alienated us, and we needed peace and quiet for our growing family of cats and for stability. But ultimately as major events washed over us and our family got sadly smaller and smaller, it just ended up feeling like just us bored to death in a big empty house in the middle of nowhere.

Pictured: lots of cats

End of 2023 this situation was fully weighing on us and we needed to change air. I have the retreats every year but otherwise we haven’t traveled with my wife since we met. So I gifted her a small solo birthday trip to Berlin, which was the city we wanted for our first real holidays. And it was such a positive and radical shock that we ended up going back a few times. Both to experience more of a beautiful and lively city we were falling in love with, but also to spend time with the people we had already made friends with.

And the more we talked to them the more the appeal of Berlin – outside of the magic of holidays – became concrete in our heads. It was a city that aligned more with our values, with the kind of people we were and wanted to be, and with a vision of city life that was less bleak than what we had known in the past. It’s hard to put it in words what was a complex mix of factors, but at the end of the day we just wanted the rest of our lives to be different and this was the kick.

So we had looong talks and set ourselves a goal to be living in Berlin earliest mid-2024 or latest by the end of it. Which was an insane commitment to our vision, but also a reflection of how much we felt we were wasting away. There was so much to organize and to plan, so many problems to solve, between the cats and the car, or finding a place and job, and so on. It was a gordian knot of timing and scheduling and for a while it started to feel like an impossible pipe dream.

My office and its broken blinds, (almost) before the last goodbye

Enjoying the magic of drowning in vegan places and options on arrival day

But then luck started to shine our way, and despite Berlin’s housing situation being as hellish as in most international capitals – with people sometimes looking for years or flat-hopping forever – we found a place that ticked all the boxes. And we found it so ahead of schedule that suddenly things started to fall into place at a very rapid pace, perhaps faster than was needed for a perfect move 😅. But with enough motivation and willingness to adapt on the fly we overcame the hurdles as they came, until we crossed the point of no return where we had both signed on the new place and on leaving the current one in time.

This is when the stress really went through the roof for me and it showed at times. But we powered through and the actual move happened mid-june, and it was an incredibly tiring week (or three really) of clearing and cleaning the old place and setting up the new one, plus all the travels and pensions and headaches. But ultimately it went smoother than we expected in a lot of ways, even accounting for hiccups 😀.

So I can now gladly say we’re settled in! The new place is great (altho not yet ready for photos), the neighborhood is super pretty and has lots to offer, the cats are happy, we have utilities and amazing Internet in place, most boxes are unpacked. And more importantly we’ve loved every single day here so far, there is so much to see and to do... and to eat! Plus I personally love the greenery everywhere and the wildlife that goes with it – it’s kinda amazing to see foxes and ferrets wandering the streets 🦊. I mean we know both our new country a city have their underbellies, but it was all a trade and we're just glad to be able to enjoy where we live and what it can offer us for now.

Of course life is chaos and it’s impossible to say where this will end, maybe I’ll eat those words fast, but we’re both incredibly excited for a fresh new chapter of our lives and the possibilities it brings. So there you go! That’s the story of how we uproot our entire life, family and possessions to our new home in unknown territory, ~1500km away. Now wish us luck for the next 13 years! Or okay maybe let’s start with the next week 😛.

Before/After. Yes this is the graph of my internet speed for most of my life