2019 in Review: An Intense, Globe-Hopping, Change-Filled Year
Now that 2020 is here along with a brand new decade, I thought I would take a moment to look back at 2019. The contrast of the content of my 2019 New Years’ resolutions with what I have actually accomplished this year, as well as what I have chosen for some of my resolutions for 2020, helps to highlight the exciting life-changing events that I have been through over the past 12 months.
In this post, I will do my best to run you through all of my highs and lows of 2019. This year has been a wild ride, so strap yourself in!
A Graceful Start to 2019
2019 started innocently enough. In the weeks running up to the turn of the new year, I launched the Expat Empire Podcast, proposed to my girlfriend Natsumi on December 17, and spent the Christmas and New Year holidays celebrating our engagement with family and friends in the United States.
On the long-haul flight back to Berlin, I spent a few hours thinking about my New Years’ resolutions for 2019 and what I hoped that the year would bring. I knew that Natsumi and I would get married in the summer — we were planning on it happening in Copenhagen given the bureaucracy involved in getting married in Germany.
Outside of the wedding, I had mainly expected to spend the year getting more comfortable as a senior product manager on the game that I had been working on since October 2018 and pushing Expat Empire further by releasing more podcast episodes and blog posts. I also wanted to take full advantage of the remote work-friendly policies that my company offered, and so I traveled on my own to Greece in January, Montenegro in February, Serbia in March, and Lithuania in April.
In addition, Natsumi and I were starting to make plans for how we could eventually make the move to Portugal. We visited the country together for the first time in October 2018, and while we came in with high expectations, the experience of seeing Porto and Lisbon surpassed all of our hopes and dreams. We visited with the intention of seeing if it could be a place that we could live in the future, and that trip quickly confirmed for both of us that it would be the perfect candidate for our next international destination.
Our original plan was to see if I could work remotely for my Berlin-based employer from Portugal. This would have at least given us the chance to start our adventure there and see where our lives would take us. However, with our marriage already planned for mid-2019, we thought that adding an international move in the same year would prove to be too complicated for us to manage, and so we decided to wait until 2020 to try to make that dream a reality.
With those plans in mind, 2019 was beginning to look like it would be a fairly normal year for us overall. At least, that was the case until April rolled around.
Turning obstacles into opportunities
With the moving timeline pushed back until at least 2020, we felt strongly that we did not want to wait another year to be in Portugal again, so on April 8th we optimistically booked a 2-week trip for the 2019 holidays from Berlin to Porto — more than 8 months early! We were already thinking through how we would best use that time to figure out which city in Portugal we wanted to move to.
However, plans rarely work out as you expect them to. Only 9 days after booking two round-trip tickets to Porto, I found out that I would be made redundant at my job in Berlin. Plans for investment in the game I was leading were reduced, and there were no other games at the company for me to transition onto. My entire life plan for the next 12+ months evaporated over the course of a 30-minute meeting.
Though I was crushed to receive the news, I called Natsumi immediately afterward, and we quickly decided that it was a great opportunity for us to move forward with our plans to move to a new country. We were getting tired of Berlin, and with me not having a job after June and her work-study program at a German bakery wrapping up in August, the timing could not have been more ideal for us to start our new adventure.
On the pursuit of international jobs and juggling a packed calendar
Though I had initially been eager to move to Portugal, the entire idea was predicated on the notion that I would be able to work remotely in Portugal while living on a German salary. That idea has transformed into the harsh reality of having to find a job-on-the-ground with decreased salary expectations, and so Natsumi and I decided to initially focus the search on two of our favorite cities in Europe — Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
To give you a sense of the craziness of this period of time, here is a high-level overview of our activities from April to September:
- April 17: Received the news that I would be laid off
- April 18–23: Took a previously planned trip over Easter break to Vilnius, Lithuania
- End of April: Started applying for jobs in Amsterdam and Copenhagen
- Mid-May: Got married in Japan (the original Copenhagen plan was scrapped due to paperwork difficulties)
- Mid-June: Went to Amsterdam for several rounds of interviews
- End of June: finished my work, applied for German unemployment, and organized a wedding party with friends and family in Berlin
- Early July: Expanded the job search to also include Tallinn, Barcelona, Porto, and Lisbon
- Mid-July: Traveled to Tallinn and Copenhagen for interviews
- August 5: Got my first tattoo (!)
- August 7–18: Attended my two favorite music festivals back-to-back
- August 19–20: Returned to Copenhagen for more interviews
- August 29 — September 3: Natsumi finished her baking program and then met me in London to attend a friend’s wedding
- September 4–5: Took a Reiki class in Berlin with Natsumi
- September 6: Day-trip to Amsterdam for an interview
- September 7–15: First of our honeymoon trips, this one to Budapest
Despite feeling emboldened to use this disappointing career development to our benefit, these five months held much excitement, joy, worry, and frustration for us. Throughout that time, we did not know what we would be doing for work, or even where we would be living, by the end of the year. We were living in limbo, unsure of what would come next.
As a result, even though I had many great travels during those months, I was not able to enjoy them as I had hoped to. I was well aware that my German work visa would expire at the end of December, so I knew that the pressure was on to figure things out soon or we would be deported. This fact was always lurking in the back of my mind, and it came to the forefront many times over those months:
- Even while I was at my favorite music festival, I regularly slipped outside of the festival grounds on a remote farm outside of Bristol, UK, to try to position my phone just right so that I could get an Internet signal strong enough to check my email and see if there was any news regarding my open job applications.
- I had to juggle multiple at-home interview assignments that each took 10+ hours to complete, and there were no guarantees that doing the work would even get me to the next round of the process.
- I spent a lot of mental energy planning how I would manage my ongoing interviews in the event that I got to the next round in the interview process, especially if the next round might be an on-site visit, alongside my ambitious personal travel schedule.
I truly felt stuck between the need to find a new job quickly and the desire to take advantage of the opportunity of us both being unemployed to enjoy some time off together.
During those busy days and nights, there were plenty of times where I questioned if going for such an ambitious goal was the right decision. There were dozens of jobs that I could have applied for in Berlin, and I am sure that I would have found something that would have at least kept the roof over our heads and allowed us to continue living near all the close friends we had made over the last years.
However, rather than taking the easier route right in front of me, I pushed forward on the crazy idea that I would yet again be able to find a new job in a new country despite a constant stream of rejections.
Offer acquired
Thankfully, everything finally began to make sense in September. While on our honeymoon trip to Budapest, I received a call from InterNations with an offer to lead the product team for their new business unit in Porto focused on expat relocation called InterNations GO! In addition to being located in our dream city, the job was also a perfect match for my interest in expat topics and the closely-related work I am doing on Expat Empire.
I knew immediately that this opportunity was a perfect match for what we had been searching for all along. From one second to the next, all of the anxiety we had endured over those five months transformed into excitement for the new adventure ahead of us. Natsumi and I cried as we held each other after the call, deeply relieved that this prolonged period of uncertainty was finally coming to a close.
The irony that all of my job search efforts led me right back to Portugal is not lost on me. However, I am also glad that I was forced to seriously consider which cities around Europe I truly wanted to focus on in my job search. It is easy to think that many places would be nice to live in from afar, but when faced with making the decision to actually move there, the final list of cities that you would want to live in gets much shorter. I also had the chance to get an honest sense of the job opportunities that are actually available in those cities, so now I can rest easy without being plagued by questions such as whether or not I should have further broadened my search to other locations, job titles, etc.
Despite all of the setbacks and frustrations from April to September, I know for certain that this is the right place for me to be in at this point in my life. You never know what is waiting for you around the corner, but I am content now knowing that everything worked out as it was meant to in my most recent job search.
Farewell Berlin, Hello Porto
After I signed on the dotted line, we changed our focus to moving to Portugal. We booked one month at an Airbnb, two one-way flights with 2 checked bags each, and started packing everything we owned of emotional or physical value into large cardboard boxes. We sold many extra things on eBay Kleinanzeigen, the German classifieds website, and managed to transfer our lease to a friend and he bought the rest of our furniture. On a side note, we only got final confirmation from the landlord that our friend would be able to take over the lease within four days of us leaving the country! We had been praying that it would work out for weeks, and so we felt a great sense of relief after receiving the final approval.
Besides the short honeymoon trips we took to Mallorca and Ukraine as well as our favorite nearby Polish town of Szczecin, I spent most of my free time seeing friends and checking the final few things off of my Berlin to-do list. One of my 2019 New Years’ resolutions was to be able to leave Berlin “without regrets.” Regret for me, in this case, meant leaving the city with many items still on my to-do list. I can definitely say that I fully completed that resolution last year!
After a final farewell party at our flat, we packed our suitcases and left Berlin early in the morning on November 5. I started taking Portuguese lessons two days later, saw some flats the next week, and then started my new job on November 18. The weeks since then have been filled with moving to our new long-term apartment and getting everything set up there including ordering furniture and signing on for utilities, getting up-to-speed on the new job as quickly as possible, preparing paperwork for my upcoming visa appointment in January, and trying to take in everything wonderful that Porto has to offer.
The past 8 months have been truly emotionally and mentally intense, but that has made the last couple weeks with Christmas and New Year holidays all the more relaxing. While we did not end up needing to use the flight tickets that we bought back in April to get to Porto, we were lucky enough to spend the holidays relaxing in the very city that we had been dreaming about all those months ago! Christmas Day 2019 was the first one that Natsumi and I were able to spend together, and we commemorated it with a photo back at the Douro river in downtown Porto:
Resolutions for 2020
With 2019 behind us, I am hoping for a considerably smoother ride in 2020 — I think we deserve it. While I certainly want to get more comfortable in my job at InterNations GO! and bring the learnings from my experience moving to Portugal to my work on Expat Empire, a big part of my dreams for 2020 are centered on getting more integrated into life in Portugal. In particular, this year I hope to:
- Acquire our Portuguese residence permits
- Help Natsumi to get her new business off-the-ground
- Continue my Portuguese language studies to get to at least an A2 level
- Make friends and build a professional network in town
- Give surfing another try at the nearby beaches
- Add a dog to our small family!
While even these goals alone are a lot to take on in a single year, not to mention all the other things that I have on my list, I am sure that we will make the most of 2020. I am also sure that there will be a few unexpected curveballs thrown at us next year, but, with the craziness of 2019 under our belts, I think we will be ready for them when they come.
Originally published at https://davidmcneill.co on January 1, 2020.
