Relocated to Berlin: The Special Thanksgiving Episode

My family and I have been in Berlin now for just over four months.  In some respects, it feels like we just got here.  In other respects, it feels like we have been here forever.  But as we roll inexorably toward the holiday season, one becomes somewhat introspective. 

Despite complaints from my American friends that the Christmas decorations go up earlier and earlier every year, Berlin transformed itself into a Weinachts wonderland promptly on November 1.  After all, without the Halloween sugar hangover to recover from, and without that pesky Thanksgiving holiday getting in the way, Christmas is pretty much all Berliners have to make the fleeting hour or two of daylight between freezing rain showers tolerable.

Even though they don't celebrate Thanksgiving, or really anything like it that I have found yet, I have been able to cobble together an ersatz one here in Germany.  I can watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade live online, as well as every NFL game that airs before I fall asleep.  Because both today and tomorrow are school/work days, we are planning our big Thanksgiving dinner for Saturday evening so that we can have most of the day to cook our favorites (mine is stuffing, and LOTS of it!).  We haven't really made friends with any other Americans in our neighborhood yet, so we might invite some of our new German ones over for an after dinner drink.  We would invite them over for dinner itself, but we couldn't find a turkey bigger than a few pounds, and even if we could, there would be no way to fit it into our oven.  We even found some pumpkin with which to make pumpkin pie.  Considering how far we have traveled, it's remarkable how small the world has become through the marvels of the Internet and the international distribution of foodstuffs.

But since this is a very special Thanksgiving in my household, I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on what I am thankful for here in my new home in Berlin. 

1. I am thankful for my family.  If a normal guy went to his wife and said, "Hey honey, I'm bored.  I want to give up my lifelong career and secure mid-six-figure income, sell the house, sell the cars, take our daughter out of a top-ranked private school, leave our friends and family, and move to a country where we have no jobs, no friends, and can't speak the language," she would be perfectly rational and within her rights to file for divorce and have him involuntarily committed to an asylum.  My wife said, "Alright, let's do it!"  And the rest is history.  As for my daughter, she is the most loving, adaptable, and forgiving person I have ever known.  She is my inspiration, and every day she makes me want to be better.
2. I am thankful for my life up until now.  After all, let's be honest, if I hadn't been so fortunate in developing a stable and lucrative career that gave me the background, the skills, and the financial resources to move half way around the world and to be able to take up to a year or two to find work, this would all have been a wild pipe dream.  Yeah, I complained (a LOT) about how bored I was at my old career, and about how meaningless it all felt.  And yeah, it was boring and largely meaningless.  But it made this entire adventure possible.
3. I am thankful for my new friends in Berlin.  My family and I have all been blessed by the remarkable people who have gone out of their ways to welcome us to our new home.  A lot of Germans that I have spoken to both before and after we arrived here have told me how cold and unfriendly Berliners are.  We have found the exact opposite to be true.  From our first full day in this city, people have reached out to loan (or give) us furniture until our things arrived from the U.S., have offered to loan us their cars so that we can get to shops to purchase large household items, have offered to help translate important information, have offered to bring us with them on holidays, and have offered to introduce us to business contacts and organizations to help us find work.  
4. I am thankful that pretty much everything related to our relocation has gone better than expected.  From finding a buyer for our American house who was willing to let us stay for free in the house between closing and moving in exchange for all the furniture we didn't want to bring with us, to finding a spectacular apartment in a wonderful neighborhood, to finding a space in an excellent public school for my daughter, to finding excellent ice hockey teams for me and my daughter, to my wife finding the perfect job doing PR for an English language publisher.  I am not inclined to believe in fate, and I'm 50/50 on whether luck is a tangible thing, but it sure seems that we are pretty lucky that the fates aligned so perfectly to make this relocation so successful.
5. I am thankful for all of my old friends who have been supportive of this relocation from the start.  It is incredibly difficult to leave behind the relationships that have lasted for years - and sometimes decades.  But through all of the upheaval of the 10 months since my family and I finally pulled the trigger on starting this relocation, everybody has offered us unfailing encouragement and support.  In our darkest hours, when we sometimes wondered if we were making the worst decision of our lives, our friends always helped to remind us that they are always with us no matter where in the world we are.  Plus we gave them all the perfect excuse to come to Europe for vacation.

I thank you all, my dear readers, for making it this far through my little bout of self-indulgence here.  I wish you all the very happiest of Thanksgivings, and if you're in either Washington, DC or Pittsburgh around Christmas/New Year's, I hope to see you then when we come back to visit.