How quickly time flies. It’s been 1 month today, since I moved to Munich! And in this 1 month, we have packed a lot of mixed memories, good and bad, and maybe pages to write on the blog! We haven’t been able to touch the blog for 1-2 months when we were trying to move, get used to the new city, start a business life, adapt.
Here we are!
This is a park near our new house below.. After a childhood spent in this garden, a person becomes a writer or an artist, but nothing worse than that person.. Let’s settle in well, we are waiting for tea or coffee in our garden, let the one get hurt, pull open!. I think it’s best to talk about the very beginning, why we chose to move to Munich and our job search process.. With your permission, we rewind…
Dear first-time readers, you can check our story of moving to Germany for postgraduate studies here, here for our post-graduate article, and below for our moving to Munich story!
Our story of moving to Munich
We moved to Frankfurt for master’s degree in September 2015 and it’s February since Umut’s master’s degree will finish this July (2017). like, we started thinking about what we’re going to do after school ends. In fact, we also thought of going crazy and entering the last months without a plan, but we gave up because we could get into a financial dead end.
We had a long-term plan to return to Istanbul, but we did not want to return immediately.. Despite what we often messed with in Frankfurt, we had managed to establish order and got used to Germany.. But at the same time, we were thinking, ‘Should we try another country, is this country more beautiful?’. Umut had lived in London for a short time and always had a sympathy for London.. The countries that went through me were changing once a month.. Sometimes I wanted to go to Dublin, sometimes I just wanted to stay in Frankfurt and not move.. That’s why, in our job applications, we started to look for job positions in London, Dublin and Switzerland, primarily those in Germany.. We didn’t know how long it would take us to find a job, so we applied to positions that we saw in other cities and that we thought were suitable for us.
You can skip here for the article where we explain the websites and documents we apply for jobs, and what questions are asked in various interviews.
Some Visa Issues
We got 3 answers from the positions in London in the first month, and if we have a ‘current UK visa’ in all three of them, they wanted to be called to London in the second ’rounda’. they said. When we said it wasn’t, we got knocked out of the head.. We gave up on London after this happened 3 times in a row.
The next month we went through the same process for Dublin.. Once you have a work and residence permit in Germany, you can travel in Europe (except for the UK and Ireland), but your work permit is only valid in Germany.. While obtaining a work permit from other European countries is ‘relatively easy’, Ireland and the UK are more stingy and companies often want those with a work permit already in place.. We have also learned this through experience.. ( ‘we’ who are still newbies here, actually, we don’t want to say that if you don’t have a UK work visa, don’t apply, you won’t be selected, we just had limited time and budget, so we gave up our love for UK because we wanted to hurry up! )
Application Since we have written the process and interviews in a separate article, we skip the application process here and come to the point immediately!
When it was time to decide where to move, namely in May, we had the following from our finalized applications; I was accepted from Berlin and Luxembourg, and Umut was accepted from Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Aachen and Munich.. So, as you can see, in the application process that we started with the idea that ‘whichever city chooses us both, that is our new city’, we couldn’t find the same city in the first place!
Deciding on Munich
At this point, we had to decide where we would live, by evaluating the pros and cons of the cities we mentioned above and our job positions.. When we came to Frankfurt, we came because the schools we wanted were in this city and it took us 2 years to get used to the city.. It took almost 2 years for us to greet this city, which we looked like a makeshift bride at first, with belonging and inclusion! That’s why this time we didn’t want to go to a city that we don’t know and that seems cold to us from afar.. Stuttgart, Aachen Düsseldorf and Luxembourg were therefore eliminated from the start.. It’s like the weakest link.
There are Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich left. The salary that Umut would receive in Frankfurt and Munich was close to the salary that I would receive in Berlin.. So we had to decide which city we wanted the most.. And of course, depending on the city we chose, one of us had to keep looking for work.. Since Umut is a little easier to find a job (in Germany they like architects very much, because there is a great need for architects and there are no young architects around, Lawyer? Ohooo..), we thought of choosing Berlin first.. But uh-uh, there was something we didn’t like, we realized that we want to choose our ‘city’ first!
We loved the quiet state of Frankfurt and our friends.. Although we learned to ‘play around’ when there was no one else around, we had friends with whom we could have a raki night, gossip and get along well once in a while, and leaving Frankfurt meant starting over in a new city (picking up everything again!?)
What we didn’t like about Frankfurt was that it was too quiet.. Calmness, but what a calmness makes a man a Sufi! It was nice to get up in the morning and take a walk to the horse farm behind our house, and to sow and harvest in the garden we shared with the neighbors on the weekends, but only up to a point.. Especially in our last months, we realized that we don’t even want to go out on the weekends, all we want is to lie down and read or write something.. In other words, we are on the way to ‘sufiism’, as you know, our hearts and eyes have been opened!
When this happens, we said, let’s work in another city, what have we to lose, and Frankfurt was eliminated… For those who have order and belongings, it may be difficult to make this decision, but it was not difficult for us.. Moving for us was to carry 4 suitcases and our books..
The remaining options were Berlin and Munich. We knew Berlin more than Munich, and we loved its chaos of streets, coffee shops and messy life.. But on the other hand, Munich, especially not in the very center of the city, had houses like a smurf village with a maximum of three floors and a garden, a quiet but not so stable life, entertainment and culture.. Berlin was a road that we knew little about, and we had never experienced Munich from this perspective.
We thought, moved, measured, cut, slept, got up and Munich
