Moving Across the Ocean

Author: Jake Bauer | Published: 2024-08-25

Hey, hello, hi I’m still here!

It’s been a little bit over a year since my last blog post and quite a lot has changed. My wife and I moved from Canada to Germany almost one year ago and I wanted to share my experience with moving across the Atlantic Ocean.

Why Move?

The short answer is that my wife and I wanted to live in a place where we felt that we could have a better life for ourselves and our future child(ren). Between Germany and Canada, our respective home countries, Germany ended up being the clearly better choice.

Moving to Germany was always a possibility, and probably an inevitability since I began dating my now-wife.

We met online, with me being in Canada and her being in Germany. The first time I went to visit her in person—which was also the first time I had ever flown and the first time I had ever been outside of Canada aside from a brief road trip through ‘Murica in 2017—I spent 6 weeks total in Germany, saw a few cities (Braunschweig, Lübeck, Marburg) and met a few friends I had only ever known online. Later that year, my wife flew to Ottawa to see me for 6 weeks around the holiday period. Later the following year, she got accepted to a Master’s program at one of the universities in Ottawa and was able to move in with me for about 1.5 years; until she finished her program. As she was finishing her program, we had a choice to make: does she continue to live with me in Canada while doing a PhD for about 4-5 years and then we likely both move to Germany afterwards, or do we move to Germany when she’s finished the Master’s program and start lives there sooner?

I started seriously thinking about whether it would be a good idea to move to Germany in late May, 2023, when we came to Europe for 2 weeks to attend WGT¹ in Leipzig, see a few other German cities and visit our friends in the Netherlands. During that trip I started researching, making a pros-and-cons list of reasons to move or not, and asking my social circle what they thought were the good and bad aspects of life in Germany because I didn’t want this to be a “grass-is-always-greener” type of rushed decision.

It was pretty conclusive by the time I was done with all my research, but when we returned to Canada I pretty quickly settled on wanting to move sooner rather than later. We still sat on the decision for a bit, talked things through, but then set things into motion to make it happen.

Was It the Right Decision?

Yup.

My life is both materially and qualitatively better. I get paid more money (even after taxes) while working fewer hours at a more fulfilling job, the cost of living is noticeably lower, the housing/rental market is way better, I can see interesting places and hang out with friends in person much more easily and frequently, we now have a large garden plot where we can grow a wide variety of veggies, and I feel so much happier and healthier that multiple family members have commented that I actually sound happy over the phone when I’m talking about life here.

There is also the distinct lack of a feeling like I’m on a constant treadmill or in the “rat race”. This feels difficult to try to explain, but it feels like nearly everyone in Canada is in a rush to get through life: finish university, get a job, buy a car, buy a house, switch your job every few years so you’re optimising your earnings, etc. and so on. Even my wife got this feeling when she was living in Canada, and she was only a student with a part-time job. It just feels like there’s generally more to life in Germany (and probably Europe in general). I feel freer to spend my money on actually doing things, experiencing things or, hell, even trying new food from the grocery store rather than just constantly worrying about saving for a car, saving for a house, saving for retirement, saving for who knows what else.

My friend Steve Gattuso did a similar move from New York to Munich in early 2023, and had this to say about it:

It’s hard to deny it: our quality of life has substantially increased in basically every way since moving to Munich. The streets are clean, the bike lanes are plentiful and protected, the trains and public transit work well enough to feel a first class citizen of society without owning a car, our home is substantially larger and nicer for a fraction of the price, the access to nature is unlike anything I’ve ever had before. I want to say the politics are better, but honestly I just don’t speak enough German yet to understand them and, well, ignorance is bliss.

– New York, Munich on stevegattuso.me

Which sums up my feelings pretty well. (Also I’m not fluent in German yet, but I can confirm that the politics are indeed better, even than Canada.)

It wasn’t all sunshine and roses though. There were definitely some challenges along the way.

The Move

The moving part was actually kind of easy. As a Canadian citizen I could enter Germany without a visa for a period of up to 90 days in any given 180 day period. The only thing we had to watch out for was our trip earlier that year eating into that time, so we needed to leave Canada late enough that I would have the full 90 days to figure out what I was going to do in Germany.

I am very fortunate in that I had a decent level of savings so that I didn’t have to worry too much about moving costs, and I also had a job which allowed me to take extended leave to give the move a try. So, if for whatever reason something went wrong (relationship troubles, couldn’t find work or any study opportunity, etc.) and I were to have to go back to Canada, I would be able to return to my previous job and at least not be starting from absolute scratch.

So, I gave the mandatory two-month notice to my landlord telling them that I would be moving out at the end of August, informed my job of my intention to take unpaid time off to try this thing out, booked the flights, and then started preparing.

I sold off most of the furniture and larger items I owned. With things being priced to sell quickly, I was able to recuperate about 30–50% of the purchase price of any given item, adding up to a grand total of C$3,065 which all went towards financing the move. Some stuff that wasn’t sold was donated to a student who was just moving into their own place for the first time; extra clothing, bedding, and other items that the student didn’t want were dropped off at a local charity shop, hijinx, that does really great work for the local community. Anything that I couldn’t take but still wanted, such as extra books, my typewriter, other retro oddities, and extra kitchenware are being stored at my parents’ place in two medium-sized boxes and will be slowly brought over. Overall, very little was thrown in the trash (mostly opened food items and toiletries which nobody else wanted), which I am very happy about.

We basically took a 65m² (700 ft²) apartment and condensed it into 2 carry-ons, 2 “personal items” (small backpacks), and 4 checked bags, plus two 42.5L (1.5ft³) boxes that didn’t come with us.

On August 30th, I picked up a U-Haul (I found out last-minute that I had to go all the way to Pembroke to pick it up—thanks U-Haul, your policies suck), slept one more night in the now-barren apartment, woke up early the next morning, loaded everything that remained into the back, and set out for the 4.5-hour long trip from Ottawa to Toronto where my family lives so we could store things, pack properly, and stay with them until those 90 days were fully recharged.

On September 10th we headed to the airport, checked in, and flew the approximately 8 hours to Frankfurt am Main where we crossed the border into our new lives in Germany.

We spent the first two weeks of our time in Germany at a short-term rental as we worked on finding jobs and getting situated. We rented in a village outside of Frankfurt (am Main) so that we wouldn’t have too far to travel from the airport and so it would be easy to take the train to other cities for job interviews thanks to Frankfurt’s relatively central location. It was also a nice time to get re-acquainted with Germany and settle into our new life a bit.

Within the first week my wife had found a job (and I had applied to the job that I would eventually get though I wouldn’t know this until four months later 😬). So we stayed the remaining time we had in our temporary rental and then moved into my wife’s parents’ house for a brief period while we searched for a flat in the city where my wife’s job would be.

We ended up finding an apartment in Aachen for October and moved in with the stuff that we brought from Canada as well as some furniture my wife had stored at her parents’ from when she moved to Canada to live with me. Slowly over time, with many trips to IKEA and searches on Kleinanzeigen (the German version of Craigslist/Gumtree/Kijiji/etc), we furnished our apartment and settled down.

In Germany it’s required that you register where you’re living with the city in which you live. This was actually a really simple process which didn’t require me to already have a residence permit; I only needed to bring my passport so my date of entry into the country and other information could be recorded. In return you get a document that can act as a proof of address, and in my case this triggered a whole bunch of bureaucracy on the back-end that resulted in me receiving my tax ID in the mail a few weeks later.

However, by the beginning of November I had applied to over two dozen or so jobs across a wide range of sub-fields of computering with basically no luck. Everything from sysadmin/devops to IT security to programming jobs. I wasn’t really sure what I could land a job as since I had worked in a very niche subfield of IT Security, so in addition to the very few job postings which fit my career path so far, I was applying to everything that I had the skills for, even if those skills were rusty or quite junior. But, by the beginning of December, all I had to show for it was a pile of rejections (in fairness, not a single company ghosted me), an interview that ended in a rejection, and a pending application to a German language course at TH Köln just in case I really couldn’t find a job. It didn’t help that I was only able to access a relatively small portion of the available job market since many jobs required at least B2/C1-level German (especially in my field), and I was probably only high-A2/low-B1 on the best of days.

I started to feel pretty dejected with my pile of rejections and the stress was mounting as the deadline for my 90 days was quickly approaching. While there were still a few options remaining that would let me remain in the country, by this point I felt like my future in Germany was totally uncertain. We made an informational appointment at the Ausländerbehörde (Foreigner’s Authority) where we at least figured out what all the possibilities were, but it pretty much hinged on the same things that I was trying already: get a job, study at university, or do a language course.²

As a semi-last resort, I booked another appointment at the Ausländerbehörde for the day before my deadline to see if I could get a Fiktionsbescheinigung (Fictitious Certificate) which is a document that would allow me to stay up to an extra 6 months so I could continue my search for a residence permit. From what we understood, this is normally granted to people who already have a pending application so they can legally stay in the country while it’s still processing, so I had no idea if I was even allowed to be granted one. However, it is possible to apply for a resident permit by physical mail, so, about a week before my appointment, I mailed a large envelope with my documents (university degree, pending university application, and so on) and a letter explaining my situation and intentions to the office, and hoped for the best.

Thankfully, that seemed to work. The person at the Ausländerbehörde was understanding of the situation and recognised that I was trying to apply for a residence permit but needed more time to figure out what exactly I would be applying for, so they granted me the certificate. That at least took the stress levels down several notches; I had another 6 months to find a job, and if I had no luck at least it would be enough time for my university application to go through so I could start the language program. Later that week I received a letter in the mail notifying me of an appointment at the Ausländerbehörde set for the end of January 2024 with a list of documents to bring, and that was my new (soft) deadline to figure out what I would be doing.

But remember that job I applied to when I first arrived? Around the time the above was going on, I received a personalized email asking me to re-apply to the position. Apparently when I had originally applied they had a candidate most of the way through the hiring process and decided to go with them, but it didn’t work out and they were re-opening the position. Not only was this the job that most closely matched my previous experience, it was also one of the most interesting ones I applied to. I was still skeptical I’d even get it since the job posting listed a hybrid work arrangement in their offices in Munich and we had already been living in Aachen for some months, but I figured “Well, why not, what’s the worst that can happen?” and re-applied to the position.

Within a week I heard back and got the first of three interviews. Turns out they were totally fine with almost-fully remote work as long as I was open to coming in for the occasional all-hands meetings and in case of emergencies and so on. So, hey, maybe it would work out after all.

The same evening after I did the first interview, I got a message from the next interviewer asking me if I was free for an interview the next day, to which I said yes and attended. After that interview though, I started doubting that I would get the job. They asked a lot of questions about Windows and I hadn’t done much work with Windows in my career so far, so things felt like they went pretty rough even though I thought I was able to answer other questions pretty well.

Thankfully, a few days after the second interview I got an email asking me to attend the third and final interview which consisted of doing a 20-minute presentation in front of the whole team about an IT security-related topic of my choosing. I did my presentation at the end of December, just before the holiday period started, and things seemed to go very well. (In case you’re wondering, my presentation was about the security features of OpenBSD, because of course I had to.) I was told that it might take a while to get back to me, so I hung tight.

The holiday period came and went, with me feeling pretty alright given the feedback from the final interview. We celebrated Christmas, attended 37C3, met some friends for the first time that we had only ever known from the fediverse³, had friends over to celebrate the new year, and all the while I was waiting for a response.

In early January, a little bit after the holiday period, I received the final verdict: I got the job! I had a little information session with someone from HR, signed and sent back the work contract, and contacted a public health insurance provider to get that sorted.

Come the day of my assigned appointment at the Ausländerbehörde, I packaged up everything I needed to apply for an EU Blue Card and headed there. As soon as I showed the employee my work contract, it seemed like a switch flipped and everything instantly became easy. The employee took a copy of the contract, asked me a few questions, typed some information into some forms, had me go pay the fee for the application, and handed me a paper document that I could use as my Blue Card before the actual physical Blue Card arrived, all within about 15 minutes. They told me that it would take about 4-6 weeks for the Blue Card to be available for pickup, but otherwise everything was set.

It actually took only 2 weeks for the Blue Card to become available! Which was convenient because I only had a few weeks before I needed to travel to Munich to spend my first 2 weeks of work getting acquainted with the team and things before I could be fully remote.

In the roughly 6 months since then, things have been great. I continued integrating: opening savings accounts at my bank, converting my Ontario driver’s license into a German one, buying a BahnCard, slowly learning more German, and so on. My goal now is to learn German to the C1 level, apply for permanent residency, and then eventually apply for citizenship. While the journey getting here was a bit rough, things worked out very well in the end, and I can see myself living in Germany forever.

Feel free to ask me any questions you have about this process or what life is like in comparison and, if you’re willing, I’ll add them below.

Assorted Questions, Answered (AQA)

Q: How’s the poutine?

A: Very good actually. There’s a chain called Frittenwerk here which do poutine and poutine-inspired dishes, and it’s very good. No complaints.

Q: How does the use of cash and card differ? I heard that Germany still uses a lot of cash.

A: I’ve heard this as well, but I found no issues paying by card at any major shop. I have encountered smaller independent shops like Kiosks which only accept card if you spend above a certain threshold to avoid the card payment fees eating an entire transaction, but it’s usually not a problem since I carry around some cash anyways. The minimum-threshold thing was common in Canada for a while too, but now everyone just accepts card and small shops these days are going almost entirely cash-free.

Personally, I don’t understand why people are so horny for cash-free societies. Cash is difficult to trace (i.e. privacy respecting), facilitates easy person-to-person transactions without a middleman, and is subjectively nicer to use than a card. Card payments are convenient, but I worry how much data is being collected and sold by vendors and payment processors. Also depending on systems like these is risky when you can have things like the Crowdstrike incident or a country-wide telecom outage (happened twice in Canada) totally cripple the system.

That being said, please get rid of your 1¢ and 2¢ coins, EU. They’re practically useless at this point. Canada did it and it made cash quite a bit nicer to handle.

Q: How antiquated is the bureaucracy here? Did you have to use a fax machine?

A: It doesn’t feel antiquated to me. So far my experience has been pretty unremarkable. Processes have felt reasonable and normal compared to what I’m used to in Canada. Actually, in some ways they’ve been better, such as when I chose my health insurance provider where I was able to do everything over e-mail and through their website, and then the health insurance card and information showed up in my mailbox a few days later. Opening a bank account could have been similarly easy (even at the local Sparkasse, a public bank which has the reputation of being antiquated compared to many private banks) but I decided to go in person because it’s nice to have someone to ask questions to.

Aside from that, watching my wife renew her license plate looked similar to how we would do it in Ontario, going to convert my driver’s license was the same as how we’d do it in Ontario, applying to university was very similar to how it’s done in Ontario, and the processes for obtaining a residence permit seemed totally fine. And no, I have not had to use a fax machine. The only thing I encountered that I’d like to see improved is not having to go in person to register yourself as living at a new address, but it also wasn’t that hard to find an appointment and not that big of a deal.

Q: How does the public transport compare?

A: Oh it’s leagues better than in pretty much any Canadian city. We live in Aachen which unfortunately only has a bus network (for now; a tram is in the planning stages), but the public transit has been stellar in pretty much every city I’ve been to when I compare it to my experience in Toronto, Ottawa, or Montreal. Admittedly, my standards are not super high after living in Ottawa where the backbone of the public transportation network turned into a failed infrastructure project with multiple continuous months of downtime (including during the period when we were moving out), but still.

The regional and long distance public transit (S-Bahn, RE, RB, IC, and ICE trains) has also been just an infinite improvement over the incredibly limited service we have in Canada. I’m used to taking a 4.5h train trip from Ottawa to Toronto (350km point-to-point) for a minimum of $50 (cheapest possible ticket booked several months in advance) via a diesel-electric locomotive running on rented single-track freight lines with lower priority than the freight trains, so being able to go from Aachen to Berlin (540km point-to-point) in about 6 hours in first class on a comfortable high speed train for like 40€ (booked about a month in advance) is incredible.

Hell, even just basic busses are better. They’re far more comfortable and modern-feeling than most of the busses I’ve ever taken in North America.

The system is not without its issues, of course (this is something you’ll hear Germans complain about a lot). I have experienced the delays and track reassignments and service cancellations and so on, but the service remains by far and away better than in most other places in the world.

Overall… 8/10 would train again.

Q: How welcoming are the Germans?

A: Pretty welcoming, I think. I haven’t had any bad encounters, people have been nice and friendly to me, and nobody has gotten annoyed when they hear my accent or made rude comments or anything like that. The few times I’ve asked if it was okay to switch to English were also totally fine. Everyone at my job has been very nice as well. I really have nothing to complain about.

Q: How are the neighbours?

A: The neighbors have been largely good. Each one that we’ve met has been quite friendly and they haven’t caused any major issues or been particularly noisy. We have encountered instances of neighbors throwing plastic-bagged waste in the organic waste bin, people being a bit messy in the laundry room, and people leaving their cars in inconvenient places while they get up to whatever shenanigans neighbours get up to, but really nothing major; just typical neighbour things.

Q: How helpful were the immigration services (language, patience, etc.)?

A: Surprisingly helpful. I expected them to be much more stern and serious, but all five people I encountered through the process were polite and friendly, especially the person who was handling my Blue Card application. They were all trying to be of help with explaining my options and how things worked and so on, and everyone spoke pretty good English except for the person I encountered when I went to pick up my physical Blue Card, but that interaction was easy enough that I didn’t have a problem doing it in German.

Q: How did you pick which city to move to?

A: That was just determined by my wife finding a job before me. We just chose the city where her job is.

We could have moved to a smaller village or to a much larger city like Cologne, but we like cities that are about the size of Aachen. They seem to provide a good mix of connectivity and big-city amenities, while not feeling too busy or crowded (except during the Christmas market here, good lord).

Q: What about health insurance?

A: I won’t go into all the details I learned about the German health insurance system here, but I can give you my brief story: I was using travel insurance before I had any kind of residence permit and then, once I got my job, I switched over to a proper public health insurance provider (public health insurance is not administered directly by the state, but by special organisations which are classified as Körperschaft des öffentlichen Rechts which are basically like a for-the-public-good-but-not-nationalised utility company). The whole experience was quite easy and my health insurance company has English-speaking representatives who have been able to answer any questions I’ve had about what is or is not covered.

(You do also have the option of completely leaving the public health insurance system and opting for a private health insurance provider, but this comes with its own set of caveats and regulations and all that.)

I’m not sure what else to say about it. It’s been a pretty painless experience so far and I’ve found that it covers a decent chunk more than public health insurance does in Canada (e.g. dental checkups are covered, more forms of therapy are covered, and prescription drugs are covered with a tiny 5€ deductible).

Q: Do you have a library card yet?

A: Yep! One of the interesting differences is that in the USA and Canada public library cards are ostensibly free, but in Germany you have to pay a small yearly fee. In Aachen it’s 15€/year, which isn’t bad (it’s also free for certain groups of people), but also is a bit strange that it’s not just included in taxes.

Also libraries in different cities have different opening hours, policies and other fees. For example, in Aachen it costs an extra 2€ if you want to borrow something marked as a “Bestseller”, 1€ if you want to reserve something, and the opening hours aren’t that great. Also, the foreign language section is quite limited, so I don’t get much use out of the card at the moment.

The RWTH Aachen university library is probably where I would need to go to find English-language books and they have way better opening hours, so if I wanted to study somewhere I would try to go there.

Q: How do you even determine if you can just… move there and live there (indefinitely)? Were there government sites you checked, or some nice unofficial resources that summarized “requirements”/technicalities like that?

A: The site make-it-in-germany.com was a very helpful resource for figuring out what kind of visa/residence permit options exist for citizens of various countries, and they provide some information and resources for finding jobs, language courses, and so on.

So I researched my residence permit options, found the one that fit me best (and chose a backup) and then went for it. The people at the Ausländerbehörde were actually very helpful, telling me exactly what my options were and what I would need, so if I was unsure about anything I could always book an informational appointment (which I found to be readily available) and ask my questions there.

Turns out it can be surprisingly easy to just go and live in another country, especially when you get a job in an in-demand field.

Q: What was the border experience like?

A: It was very simple actually. We went up to the border officer together and explained exactly our intentions—that my wife was returning to her home country after studying in Canada and I, her partner, was intending to immigrate to live with her in Germany, with the goal of finding a job. The border officer asked a few questions like what my field of work was and where we were intending to live, then wished us good luck and sent us on our way.

Q: How do you cope with the language barrier?

A: There isn’t actually that much of a language barrier. Germany is rapidly becoming more English-friendly and in the few places/situations where English fails, well… I get my wife to help as I slowly learn the language 😅.

It was very helpful to have had prior German knowledge before emigrating from taking three semesters of German in university. That put me around the upper end of the A2 level which is enough to get by in daily life. I also picked up lots of common phrases used in shops and announcements just by being exposed to them constantly. For more complex things like going to the dentist, I’ve had my wife accompany me since I am definitely not at the level where I could explain or understand German in something like a medical context. Even so, the dentist I saw spoke English very well, and I could fill out the first-time patient forms in English, it’s just the dental hygienist who did not speak English.

Also the larger the city you’re in (e.g. Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Berlin), the more likely that the people you come across will know at least enough English to have a simple conversation with you. In large cities that are especially popular with expats who come to work for a few years it’s usually possible to do almost everything in English without learning much German at all, as long as you don’t want to actually settle here permanently.

Q: Do you miss the niceness of Canadian people?

A: Not really? I haven’t found Germans to be rude or cold or anything like that compared to Canadians. I know that the state I live in, North Rhine-Westphalia, is known for having people who are more friendly than in other states, but I also haven’t found people to be particularly different elsewhere in Germany. People tend to match whatever energy you give off, so as long as you aren’t rude/cold/scowling yourself then I’ve found that others aren’t either.

Q: How does it feel to get far far away from American influence?

A: VERY EXTREMELY GOOD.

Okay we’re not that far. American media and cultural influence is pervasive across the world, but it’s really nice to not live in a place where a sizeable portion of the population buys so heavily into American politics and media to the point that they don’t even know how their own country works, and instead just start parroting American brainrot. There’s a thing someone somewhere said sometime that goes like: “when America sneezes, Canada catches a cold,” and that’s just about the most accurate way to describe things, going as far as heavily influencing the decisions Canadian judges make when they have no Canadian precedent to lean on.

I wrote more here, but I was just ranting, so I’ll leave it at that!

Q: Is there something from Canada that you miss here?

A: Not… not really? I know that’s maybe a weird thing to say but every time people have asked me that question I just can’t come up with anything I actually truly miss. My wife tells me she misses being able to easily buy Better than Bouillon, clothes from Roots, fresh kimchi from the Korean store, and the large farmer’s/handcrafts market at Lansdowne Park. But like I dunno I can get maple syrup here and we can make our own kimchi so it’s fine.

Except, well… now that I’m thoroughly divorced from the environment that I grew up in I’m realising that perhaps there is something about Canada that I miss: the promise of what life could have been.

Growing up, I developed a certain perception of Canada through the media I consumed and the things I encountered during my education that gave me an idea of what life should have been like when I got older. A vision of going to university, finding a good job, buying a home within a few years, being able to afford to go on regular vacations, living in a good community with a sense of neighborliness, and so on. A vision of a well-functioning country in which one could easily live a good and fulfilling life; the way the older generations in my family could.

None of that exists anymore though. At least not for my generation. Perhaps my perceptions were being clouded by some of that nationalistic pride that governments love to impart on their citizens, but when I look around today all I can see is the crumbling of nearly every national, provincial, and municipal institution as a result of corporate and political greed; roads being left to decay for years before being haphazardly patched over; people struggling to pay for basic things like food and shelter; rates of homelessness and mental health crises through the roof; entire generations locked out of the prospects of being able to move out on their own, let alone buy a home; and communities becoming more and more poisoned by toxic politics. A stagnation, even a regression, in the development of the country. One that shows no signs of stopping anytime soon.

Every time I interact with something from before 2000—a bit of radio equipment that says “Made In Canada”, a documentary from a much more official sounding CBC, a government project from a bygone era—I can’t help but feel like we’ve lost some kind of drive, some kind of national identity, some sense of the reason why we were considered important enough to be invited into the G7. It feels like everyone is living wearing rose-tinted glasses, watching re-runs of the Canada-that-used-to-be while their house is falling apart around them.

I don’t think this is unique to Canada. In fact, this seems to be happening across practically the entire West. Though, to what extent in all the different countries I can’t really say. What I can say though is that while Germany may share some common problems, things do not feel as dire here, nor do they feel like they’re actively collapsing under the hopeless death march of neoliberalism.