And Now What…?
A bit of background. Native Texan (OK, missed native by six weeks, but damn close), Austinite, gay, former Presbyterian (current who the heck knows), and now expat. 24 years in the same school district teaching a few different grade levels and now unemployed after almost two years in a call center in the Czech Republic.
Trump and Covid. Is that the beginning of pretty much everyone’s story these days?
My husband and I had a lovely life in Austin. Steady teaching job for me, warehouse work and then pharmacy technician job in a hospital for him. Great family, great friends, an adopted son who was out on his own and doing well. And then two things coincided…we took a two month trip to wander central Europe, and we returned to Charlottesville and then Trump.
Moving abroad was a foregone conclusion…we just needed a timeline. We locked it in at a two year plan. Two years later we were here, employed, and settling in.
Life in the EU, if you have a job that pays average to above average for the area you live in, is so crazy comfortable and pleasant that it really is hard for an American expat to wrap one’s brain around it. We walk downstairs for groceries, hop on a train to visit wherever, easily and safely get home after a night out drinking. It’s just so nice.
Then Covid.
We were insanely lucky. We had a job that allowed for work from home, we had each other and actually still love and like each other after a year of this, we had money coming in and not much money going out. All great. But lockdown is lockdown, and work from home on a dead-of-night shift for months and months is basically house arrest when there’s a curfew every night.
So, step two.
We have now resigned and are on our way to Albania. For those who don’t know, Albania is an affordable country that allows US citizens to live visa-free for a year at a time. We will live on savings, some passive income (not much), and take a year to reevaluate. A friend told me to blog about it, so here it is. I hope I have enough life experience at this point to maybe throw out some ideas about what we see along the way, who we meet, what we decide to do, that might help others out there who are also transitioning.
Transition has certainly been our constant for the last two years. And I know we are not alone in that.
So that’s some background. Maybe some more detail about where we are, where we are going, how we did it, and ideas for what comes next when I write tomorrow.
Best to all as we all live through these interesting times. Please be kind to those around you and kind to yourself. It helps.