Expatriatism

A quote from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun also Rises:

“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You're an expatriate, you see? You hang around cafès."

I read this quote to illustrate what I think is a common American view of Europe – that life here is easy, holidays are frequent, and stress, along with polio and malaria, has been virtually eradicated.

Indeed, most of my friends and all of my family members believe that my expatriate lifestyle is not only exciting, but also deeply relaxing, culturally rewarding, and virtually free of the normal hassles of daily living. And to a degree, they’ve got a point – for example, in my professional life, I can walk or bike to my classes, I do most of my editing and writing at home, and aside from my mother-in-law, I don’t really have a boss. So yeah, I see what they mean.

But when it comes to one’s personal life, things can be challenging for an expatriate. And with apologies to all the lucky students who go on foreign exchange programs, I'm not talking about a semester spent studying abroad. Because while these are highly beneficial and expanding in many ways, the challenge of striking out on one's own is largely taken out of the equation when one deals with two cooperating institutions that take care of housing, living permits, classes, excursions, etc. Hell, sometimes they even feed you.

Instead, the challenge I'm talking about here is day-to-day LIFE abroad. The daily grind, but with that added foreign twist. We have friends, for example, who are also expatriates and have a year-old baby. The mother has had to maneuver through the complexities of child care in a foreign context for the last year and a half. Can you imagine your baby having a fever and during a hospital visit you only understand maybe ¾ of what the doctor is telling you? How’s that for stress?

Indeed, if you’re looking for a courageous undertaking, try working your way through a foreign bureaucracy to secure a living permit. You’re looking for adventure? Try finding a decent, affordable place to live in a foreign city.

But I don’t mean to bitch. I chose this lifestyle and I very much enjoy it. I merely want to illustrate that life can get stressful no matter where you may be.

Case in point: we are going to move from Germany to Spain this October, and of course both my wife and I are deeply excited about it. We’ve been speaking about virtually nothing else since she was offered the job there, and we are beginning to realize just how complicated a move between foreign countries is actually going to be.

A partial list of stressors that will feature heavily for us in the near future:

Learning a new foreign language.
Both of us changing jobs, only I don’t have one lined up yet.
Selling our car.
Having to vacate our apartment and paint it.
Either unloading all of our stuff, or driving a rental van, with all our stuff in it, the roughly 2,000 miles to Seville. And then back.
Finding an apartment in Seville.
And lastly, we have to get our living and working permits sorted out, which spells hours and hours of sitting in shabby waiting rooms for the privilege of being condescended to by surly paper-pushers with veto power over your future.

Sigh.

All of this naturally begs the question: is it really worth it? I mean, one only undertakes such a move to improve one’s lot in life, and we’re fundamentally happy where we are. In the five years that we’ve lived here in D-land, we’ve jumped through all the hoops and now it’s just a matter of coasting along as if we were normalized citizens, even if I’ll always speak pidgin Deutsch.

Anyway, to apply some external criteria to the question of whether or not expatriates suffer from stress, I Googled the The Holmes-Rahe Scale, a sociological instrument based on the premise that “good and bad events in one's life can increase stress levels and make one more susceptible to illness and mental health problems.” The two scientists came up with their scoring system nearly 40 years ago to test the observation that their patients tended to have experienced several life events in the months before the onset of illness.

Moving to a foreign country wasn’t on the list of choices, though I imagine it would have put me well above my final score of 294 points, just five shy of the major stress threshold of 300.

When we first considered moving to Spain, I reckoned that the dry, warm climate there would be good for our health. But the way the Holmes-Rahe Scale sees it, I should be in the hospital pretty much anyday now.

The flip side of efficiency

A pair of seemingly unrelated topics have occupied Germany of late. The first, obviously, is the Soccer World Cup, which is allowing the German national team – and the country itself – to present their best face to the world. Across the board, critics are lauding the German organizers, football fans and overall population for their ability to put together such a world class event.

Columnist Steve Richards of British daily The Independent wrote this week that Germany had already won the tournament off the pitch with, “the ease of travel from city to city, the cleanliness of its towns, the class of the accommodation, the cycle-friendly paths… and the ability of its cities to stage late-night festivals without them ending in a drunken brawl."

In addition, German flags, once a source of shame due to the grim specter of German history, are again being waved proudly. People are happy, and a previously lacking sense of community has formed. All of which are surely bright spots and worthy outcomes of the World Cup’s slogan “A time for making friends”.

The second engrossing topic of late is related to the World Cup only in how it illustrates what one might call the Flip Side of German Efficiency.

About a month ago, you see, the first brown bear since 1835 was sighted in Bavaria after having raided a beehive.

Soon after that first spotting, Bavaria’s Environment Minister Werner Schnappauf said the bear, dubbed Bruno, was "Welcome in Bavaria". Schnappauf went on to tell people they had nothing to fear from Bruno, who had been released in Italy in an attempt to repopulate the northern Alps with brown bears.

A few days later, however, Schnappauf was in the news again. He was now describing Bruno as "a problem bear" because, as bears are wont to do, Bruno had taken to killing sheep. A lot of them. And not just killing to eat, but killing to kill. Bruno ran through a couple of herds of sheep like, well, like the adolescent bear that he was, excited to try out his God-given hunting tools on such easy prey.

After pronouncing him a nuisance and possibly a threat to humans, the same minister predicted that a man-bear encounter could occur at any time and that the bear could not be allowed to roam freely. “We will ask hunters to shoot the bear,” he said.

“Hysterical,” pronounced Bavaria's animal rights groups, who, in cooperation with the World Wildlife Fund, decided to employ alternate means. A special bear trap was flown in from the US State of Montana. A team of Finnish tracking dogs and their handlers, confident they would find Bruno and deliver a dart into his considerable backside, were presented to the media with great aplomb.

But the bear was wily and for weeks eluded all attempts to capture him. He criss-crossed the Alps, leaving the hounds far behind, and was even seen, in the best Yogi Bear style, sitting in front of the police station in the town of Kochel.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs created a Bruno teddy bear, on sale for 120 Euros a pop, and a website sprang up where you could shoot darts at a virtual Bruno. In short, the country had Bruno Fever until Bavaria’s government bear expert, Manfred Woelfl, faced the cameras last Monday and announced, "The shooting has happened. The bear is dead".

Almost immediately, Austrian animal rights group Four Paws called for a police investigation into Bruno’s ursinicide. They also released a statement that perfectly captured many people’s opinion on the matter. It read, "We are extremely dismayed that Bruno had to die."

Farmers and sheepherders, on the other hand, couldn’t believe the fuss over killing the big varmint. He was a nuisance and a threat to their livelihood, they reasoned, and in the cosmic struggle of man versus nature, well, man has to come first.

A blogger from Canada summed up this idea when he wrote, “We occasionally have bears in our backyards. We live with it and accept that they too have a right to be on this planet. It seems the Germans only have room for one species -- Homo sapien. So sad and so narrow a viewpoint. In many ways, I believed European countries were more "mature" than us savages of North America. Perhaps not.”

To come full circle, how is it, exactly, that the soccer World Cup and the handling of Bruno the bear are related? In my opinion, they both serve to highlight the inherent strengths and weaknesses of two well-known German characteristics: logic and efficiency.