We moved to Germany two-and-a-half months ago. Sometimes we still can’t believe it. We actually live here. We are immigrants.
There were a few places that I had never been before being with Michael that, since we coupled up, have either become like-home or literally home to me. I had never been to the midwest; I then moved to Madison, WI. I had never really spent time in the south; I now have a plethora of southern in-laws and frequently travel to Jacksonville, FL. I had never been to Europe; now I am living in northern Germany.
This blog post will be a more typical “this is what’s happening in our life” post, telling of our journey here and what life was like in our first month. In many ways, Germany does not feel so dissimilar from America. It is a wealthy, industrialized, Western nation. It is also, definitely (of course,) discernibly its own thing.
We left our beloved apartment in Madison at the end of April. We had been working steadily for months to clear it out. We tried to get rid of most everything. All of our furniture for the apartment was initially bought second-hand from Facebook Marketplace, and back to Marketplace it went. I had fallen in love with my local “Buy Nothing” group on Facebook–anything that I felt like could get more use–but I couldn’t in good conscience sell–was posted there. Through the “Buy Nothing” group I was able to find homes for half quarts of furniture paint, broken appliances, old art supplies, and old shoes. For old clothes we mostly utilized the “Take Back Bag”, a service that sustainably reuses or resells old clothes so they don’t end up in the landfill (a service that, unfortunately, Goodwill does not consistently provide).
We had a lovely farewell party in our beloved nearby Hoyt Park where we were able to give away last minute things, like opened pantry and cleaning items (anything unopened was, of course, donated to food pantries). We enjoyed a sunny evening in the park with so many of our dear family members and friends, and were able to carry on the festivities back at the empty apartment once the sun went down. We were very fortunate to have Michael’s extended family nearby, and they offered to store everything that we couldn’t part with–our beloved records and books, board game collection, memorabilia, art, and Michael’s homemade bed frame.
Our last few weeks were a fervor of moving, selling, cleaning, and saying goodbye to a town we genuinely loved. We had pizza on the floor of our empty apartment from our favorite pizza place in Madison, Luigi’s–a fitting capstone to the apartment, as our first meal in that space was also pizza on the floor. When we finally left the apartment, we walked around to each room and thanked it for all it had given us. We were sobbing. We loved that apartment. It was our first apartment on our own as a couple–it was where we lived when we became engaged, and then married. It hosted many wonderful Halloween parties, dinners, and board game nights. It was Daisy Mae’s first real home.
We spent our last night in Wisconsin at Michael’s aunt and uncle’s house before we made the drive the next day down to O’Hare. We were meeting Michael’s dad, Mark, at the airport. He was flying up from Florida so as to meet us and take our truck. It was nice having a quick dinner with him before we left. We were unfortunately, understandably, very stressed during the dinner; however, it was still nice to have one more chance to spend time with a loved one before our big journey. Mark dropped us off at the airport, and we had to, once again, say goodbye to a cherished part of our life–our beloved truck.
We made sure to get a direct flight so that we were sure we were never separated from Daisy Mae during the long journey across continents. We had asked a few people we knew who had traveled to Europe with their dogs what they suggested, and across the board it was recommended we fly Lufthansa. Lufthansa airplanes have cargo compartments specifically for live animals that are both temperature and pressure controlled. We had bought Daisy Mae a huge travel crate a couple of months prior which she had become comfortable in. There was some stress around the crate, because she needed the largest one possible. Of course, the measurements for her crate were in inches–but Lufthansa is a European airline, and thus works in centimeters. Her crate was slightly larger than their max size allowance for crates, and after a morning that we had spent calling various customer service departments to see if it would work out, we were left with a definitive “it’s up to the people who check you in at the airport”.
Luckily, the people checking us in did not whip out a tape measure to verify her crate met their exact specifications. We were encouraged by how thoroughly and earnestly the check-in people took care of us and Daisy Mae (and our immense amount of luggage). They had asked for food and water for her, and wanted us to let them know when to feed and water her. We dropped her off, as comfortable as we could make her, before we headed into the airport for our flight.
Our flight to Munich was pleasant enough. When we landed we were eager to get through customs to reclaim Daisy, but were held up when they checked Michael’s passport. It turned out that, for some unknown reason, his visa was issued to begin on June 1st, instead of May 1st, when it was supposed to begin. No one had caught this before this point. My visa, which is contingent on his (he’s got essentially a “skilled laborer” visa and I have a spousal visa to be here with him) was good to go on May 1st. The customs agent informed us that I was all set to work in Germany, but Michael could not legally work here until June 1st (a problem because I did not have a job nor any plan to get one–and we were thus both reliant on Michael’s income).
Our primary support and resource for our move to Germany was Michael’s former boss and academic advisor (his doktorvater, or “doctor father,” in German), Benedikt. Michael got on the phone with Ben right away who was able to delay Michael’s resignation at UW until he started making money from his new job at IPP. This was a huge relief. It gave us breathing room to figure out Michael’s visa situation (which, it turned out, was super easy to resolve once we were here).
We finally made our way through customs to find Daisy Mae sitting, unsupervised, in her crate. She was overall alright–but she was certainly anxious and uncomfortable. The food and water that we had provided for her to be given during the journey was clearly untouched (I’m still mad at myself that I didn’t, at some point during the flight, ask an attendant to check on her). She had peed all over her bed. She needed to be zip-tied into her crate during the flight, and as she was unsupervised, we had no one to ask to undo her zip ties and get her out. Michael ran around the airport until he found someone who could loan us scissors to get her out. Once she was out, she was clearly so happy to be with us. We gave her water and took her potty, and she quickly settled down once she was reunited with us.
We needed to make our way to Benedikt’s house in the town of Grafing, just outside of Munich. This is where we were going to spend our first night in Germany and pick up the little Fiat Panda we had bought from him to use as our car over here (I told you, Ben was our godsend for this move). We knew that we would not be able to fit ourselves, our 100 pound dog, her ginormous crate, and our 6 pieces of stuffed luggage in a little Fiat Panda, so we also rented a car. It was clear right away that we would not be able to fit everything in the SUV I had rented either, and a very helpful person at the car rental agency really helped us out at the last minute, and upgraded us to a large van.
We made our way to Grafing, and soon found a delightful little noodle stand outside of the town’s local brewery. Manning the stand was a very sweet Ukrainian refugee who was excited to talk to us (he had pretty good English, as do many Europeans). He had fled from Ukraine towards the beginning of the war with Russia, and was settled in Grafing with his family. He made us delicious noodles from scratch right from his little cart, and it was a very comforting welcome to Germany.
We realized that I needed to return the rental car in Greifswald 24 only hours after we initially rented it in Munich, or be charged for an extra day. I had previously requested an extension, but that had perhaps been shifted when the rental got changed to the bigger vehicle. Munich is in very southern Germany and Greifswald is in very northern Germany (fortunately, they’re both also on the Eastern side). The drive on the Autobahn takes about 10-12 hours, depending on how many stops one takes. That meant I had to wake up at 3 am and head out on the Autobahn in the van with Daisy Mae. Michael needed to stay behind to handle the transfer of registration for the Panda, and so he joined us later in the day.
The rental car was very German. It had so many controls and alarms to ensure that you were always following the rules. It would chirp at me if I was drifting lanes, and it kept track of the speed limit and would beep incessantly at me if I went over it. Germans are very earnest about the speed limit. You do not go over the posted speed limit, unlike in America where most people treat it as a suggestion and regularly go 5-10 mph over. Speeds are tightly controlled everywhere, but the Autobahn is where people can let loose. In case you’re unaware, for most of the Autobahn (Germany’s interstate system), there is no speed limit. It is important to note that it is not always unlimited speed–sometimes it dropped into some sort of speed limit, especially if it was close to a town or city. For the most part, however, people would tear down the Autobahn fearlessly.
Some curiosities about German driving: the traffic lights are not placed in front of the cars at intersections (as they are in America–or, most places I’ve been). So instead of simply looking ahead of you to see the status of the light, you need to crane your head to the side to look next to you at the intersection. The light turns yellow not only in the change from green to red, but also from red to green. We hypothesize this is because there are so many more manual cars here, and it gives the drivers time to switch into gear. There are also no free public bathrooms available along the Autobahn, or indeed, most places. This, I found, is common across the continent. You need to make sure you always have a euro on you so that you can go to the bathroom at gas stations, malls, or even sometimes restaurants. You can occasionally find a “pissoir”, which is essentially just a hole that you can pee into. They are often very dirty and improperly supplied with TP and soap. The only convenient dining you can find along the Autobahn are McDonald’s and Burger King–although both have many more vegan/vegetarian options than they do in America. I hadn’t had McDonald’s in over a decade, and McNuggets in probably 2 decades. However, I admit, I’ve been delighting in the opportunities to indulge in Beyond McNuggets here and there on road trips now.
Daisy and I made the trip to Greifswald just fine. I needed to meet the manager of our temporary apartment with more cash, to pay our fees for keeping Daisy Mae there with us and parking the Panda. I had a stressful afternoon of trying (and failing) to get cash in Euros from ATMs around Greifswald; meeting the building manager to get the keys for our apartment; moving everything from the car into the new apartment on my own; and then returning the car rental. However, it all got done and I was immediately relieved. We had finally arrived at our new home.
We had needed to get a temporary apartment to start our life here through the website Wunderflats. We had tried to find more permanent housing from the US, but the Germans are very sensitive and skeptical to scams. I did not hear back from anyone about housing, and so we resorted to Wunderflats. It was expensive, but it at least got us here, and provided everything we had immediately needed to live in the unit, including bedding, towels, and cookware. Most people who move to Greifswald to start work at IPP can live in IPP’s guest house while they find more permanent housing; however, we did not have that option because they do not allow dogs.
There was an initial snafu with the Wunderflats apartment that was my doing, and luckily I was able to catch it before the move. When I was renting the apartment on the site, somehow I rented it for May and June of 2026 instead of 2025. I caught this when we were less than a month out from moving into the unit and the landlord had not yet asked us for the rent or deposit (something they aren’t usually wont to do). The landlord and I were able to figure out the scheduling mishap and he said that he did have an available unit that we could use that was “in the same building, but larger” (important note here–it was not in the same building) and thus would cost a little extra. We were, of course, rather desperate, and so agreed. I spent another stressful morning wiring him the money, hoping beyond hope it was all legitimate. He said he couldn’t alter the rental agreement because that was crafted by Wunderflats and our new deal was more of a handshake deal. He also said that we won’t need to know the address to the new apartment because it was the same as the unit I had initially rented (again, note–that was not actually the case).
Arriving in our temporary housing, I was very relieved that it was not a scam. We got our keys no problem, and the housing managers that worked for the landlord were two very pleasant German women around our age. One of them was named Nell, but it was never clear which one that was, as they both would respond to texts that I’d send to “Nell”.
We knew that the apartment was a one-room apartment (a studio), but we hadn’t really realized how small it was. It was tiny–the size of a small hotel room. We had a nice bathroom, a very small kitchenette (with the requisite mini fridge and induction stove that are common across most German–and I believe European–kitchens). The whole unit was only about 60 square feet (and somehow supposedly larger than our initial unit?!). We had a couch we pulled out into a bed every night, and a TV, which was fun for a while, as TVs are not something we usually own. A lovely element of this first apartment was that it was ground floor (floor 0, in Germany) and so we could open up our doors and let Daisy out very easily. She grew to love lying in the grass right outside of the apartment, sniffing the air and basking in the sunshine, much to the delight of us and most passerby.
As mentioned before, once we were here, it was actually quite easy for Michael to amend his visa. There is definitely a deference towards doctors (people with PhDs) here. It was suggested to us quite often that when we apply for housing we should make it clear that Michael is a doctor and that he is here to work for the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP for short). When he was sorting out his visa at the immigration office here in Greifswald and explained the situation to them, it was cleared up almost immediately (them even saying things along the lines of, “Oh, you’re a doctor? Well then this should be no problem to resolve this”).
We needed to take care of a lot of details suddenly and urgently once we got here. A pressing issue that complicated our life manifold was the fact that we were, as you may have surmised, not living in the address our landlord had told us we were living in–we were living one building over. This proved to be very unfortunate for us in many different ways. It took us a couple of days to really realize we were living one building over from the address we believed we lived at. The arrangements we tried to take care of early into our time ended up being hassles because almost nothing could be delivered to us.
Quickly, here are some curiosities about the German postal system: they do not use unit numbers (or states) in their mailing addresses. The delivery people get directed to the correct building via the posted address, but then rely on the names posted at that address to actually deliver the mail. The idea of including the unit of the apartment in your address (if there even is one) is met with derision and confusion, as if doing so would suggest that the postal workers are incapable of reading the names listed on the mailboxes. It also seems that DHL and the Deutsch Post are essentially one and the same. I don’t know the details around this, but it does seem that they’re interchangeable, except that only DHL handles packages. Speaking of packages, deliveries are a whole ordeal. They often insist on handing them to you in person. You can, on your DHL account, specify that you’d like them left in a certain spot or at one of the myriad “Paket Stations” around–but in my experience those requests are almost always denied for some reason.
Yet, the Germans love their physical mail. Almost anything that can be mailed instead of done digitally, is done so. Do you need a verification PIN to activate your insurance account? Great, that will be mailed to you. Do you need to pay for a service on our website? It couldn’t be easier, just print out this form and mail it in, and then we will eventually charge you and activate your service! Any forms you turn in for the many, many, registrations needed–it’d be best to be done either in person or via mail. I think this is tied to their nigh paranoia about scams.
This reverence for physical mail became a hassle for a number of reasons. First, some of our necessities for living in Germany–like our insurance cards, German debit cards, and German SIM cards–we could only get via the mail. Unfortunately, we took care of signing up for these necessities in our first few days in Germany, and so these were all sent to the wrong address. We could not call anywhere to amend this because 1) We did not have a phone plan anymore (our American phone plan we let lapse thinking we would have our new German SIM cards promptly–luckily we eventually were pointed to some other temporary SIM cards we could use while we waited, because it took weeks to sort out); and 2) If we were able to borrow someone’s phone to call the respective agencies, the phone trees were all in German and thus non-navigable by us.
However, far and away the most stressful struggle we had around the postal system involved boxes of our stuff that we had shipped from America before we left. We had shipped five heavy boxes full of things that we knew we wanted here, but that we didn’t want to lug with us on the planes due to their general bulkiness–things like winter jackets, boots, shoes, books, etc. Each box was heavy and cost about $200 to ship–meaning, of course, it cost us about $1000 to ship all of these things. Of course, we sent them to the address we had on hand at the time, which was not correct.
The boxes took a while to get through customs, and in that time we had realized our error and were trying to figure out how we could make sure these heavy, expensive boxes got to us. We tried posting notices at the incorrect address to direct the delivery to us; we tried going through the DHL app to have the packages delivered to a “trusted neighbor” (me, at the building next door), but that was denied for some undisclosed reason; and we tried calling DHL, even asking a German colleague of Michael’s to help us navigate the phone tree, to only be told by the customer service rep that it would all work out just fine (as an aside–so far German customer service is so much worse than it is in America. It’s honestly unreal to us at times).
DHL attempted to deliver 4 out of the 5 packages at the incorrect address, despite our efforts. They were deemed “undeliverable” and sent straight back to Wisconsin. No second attempt was made where we might intercept them, nor were they kept at any office where we might pick them up. They travelled across the world, were for a few minutes only 100 feet away from us, and then immediately sent back across the world.
Finally, the last package (it took longer than the rest to make it through customs) made it to us–the delivery person actually heeded the posted notes and I was able to intercept him. The contents of the four packages that went all the way back to Wisconsin (to Michael’s uncle) are making their way back to us through the help of friends. Our friend Dieter has been picking up the boxes from Michael’s uncle’s house, then delivers them to Benedikt, who brings them to us as excess luggage on one of his many flights between Madison and Germany. We are very grateful to all who are helping us with this disaster, and try not to think about the staggering carbon footprint all of these things now have.
Eventually, we were able to sort out most things. We got our insurance and SIM cards. We successfully registered as Greifswald residents (something everyone is required to do–even Daisy Mae–and must be done in person. You actually need to register every time you move, even within Greifswald). We’re fumbling our way through most interactions with people who don’t speak English with our poor (yet growing) German vocabulary. Fortunately, most Germans–especially our age or younger–speak English very well (when you ask them, “Sprechen sie Englisch?” they almost always respond with, “Of course!”)
We’ve been able to enjoy walking through Greifswald’s charming old town and the Marktplatz. We’ve been trying cafes, Bäckereien (bakeries), and restaurants. As noted in previous posts, we love hanging out at the Hafen (harbor) on sunny evenings (the sun doesn’t set till around 10 pm). We have explored the nearby beach communities of Wieck and Lubmin. I’m slowly learning how to drive a manual transmission so I can use our Panda. Michael is learning how to sail and is training for a marathon. He is loving his work at IPP and I’m loving spending my days creating as I wish.
A week after we moved, I actually had my own whirlwind adventure around Europe with a group of my oldest and best friends. I think that I will save that for its own post, along with our life in our second month.
We have so far felt grateful as often as we have been frustrated (or, probably, more so). We’ve definitely both been homesick for Madison, but recognize our lives are nice here. Greifswald is a very pleasant place to live.
Reading now: A Little History of the World by E.H. Gombrich , The Well of Ascension by my boi Brandon Sanderson, and We Are Three by Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)
Listening now: My Greifswald Summer playlist. It’s pretty good, I think.