Munich: the first quarterly report

Our first three months in Munich have flown by. Well, on one hand it has felt fast, and on the other it feels like we’ve been here forever. Since I’ve lived in Germany before and speak passable German, it was a pretty soft landing. It also helped that we were able to move into our permanent apartment right away, and for once there were no delays in receiving our belongings. The immigration process involved a couple of ridiculous hoops, but luckily we had company lawyers to assist us in jumping through them. And overall the process was much closer to the über-efficiency of Switzerland than the clusterfuck of Italy.

Although I feel quite at home in Munich already, there are still plenty of things I don’t know about the city. When people try to describe where certain things are, I often stare blankly, not having a clue where the mentioned streets or landmarks are. I’ve never been particularly good at street names, anyway, and if you consider that my brain is already full of mental maps of about 20 previous cities of residence, it’s a wonder I can even remember my own address (which I do, most of the time, except for the zip code, which sounds kind of lame, but can I impress you with the fact that I still know my zip code from when I lived in Bologna 12 years ago? No? I didn’t think so.). I wonder how long I can get away with this before the “I’m new here” excuse wears off and I start to sound like a scary recluse who never leaves her house.

We still don’t know very many people here, but we have met some great folks and started to make some friends. Meeting other expats is pretty easy (even though I tend to dread large happy-hour-type get-togethers), but I wish we had more social contact with locals. This is one of the perpetual challenges that foreigners seem to face all over the world, to varying degrees. (I have much more to say on this topic, but I think I’ll leave that for a post of its own.)

Munich has a lot going for it in terms of livability: safety, cleanliness, good public transport, good & affordable restaurants, good beer, good pubs, green areas, nice architecture, and so on and so on. Not to mention the cheesy pretzels. So far I’m really liking it here. And with beer garden season around the corner, I’m thinking it can only get better.