One Year Later: Life, Love and Living in England

It has been a whole year since my last post, and as always it has been quite eventful for me.

I spent my last year working as a full-time volunteer for a not-for-profit organization in Washington, D.C. called City Year. If you're scratching your head and wondering how "full-time" and "volunteer" go together, suffice it to say they shouldn't. It was an incredibly awarding and challenging position and hands-down the most difficult experience I have ever had in my life.

The basic idea of City Year is to bring together a group of 17-24 year olds for one year of full-time volunteer service in inner-city schools to be mentors, tutors and role models in order to end the dropout crisis. I went into the program bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and ready to change the world. After all, the motto is give a year, change the world. I expected the students to be rough, but I was far from prepared for what exactly "rough" meant. The vocabulary of students often didn't extend beyond four-letter words, many times those words were directed toward adults in the school, a day without a fight was a success, seeing students covered in tattoos or pregnant was commonplace. I worked in a high school, which is grades 9-12, and specifically I worked with 9th grade repeaters. This meant, some of my students were 16, 17 or even 18 years old in the 9th grade. I could write a book of my opinions on the causes and solutions, but I'll just leave it by saying the challenge of ending the dropout crisis will not be solved in one year by a handful of young idealists, it will take the entire country to understand this is a real and costly problem that everyone must work together to solve.

The proposal!

On to the love section, I got engaged! I met my fiancé, Alexander, while living in Germany. He was also an English Teaching Assistant, but he was from England, so of course everytime we met up I had to tease him about his accent and explain that he couldn't speak English properly. We stayed in touch after we left Germany, and eventually we realized we belong together. He proposed to me on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on November 10, 2011, and we'll have our wedding ceremony in Karlsruhe, Germany (the last place we visited together in Germany) on July 4, 2013. The whole story of how we met and the proposal is on our website.

Of course, nothing can be simple and straightforward with international romance, so we've had a lot of decisions to make in a short time. We spent seven months away from eachother. Well, not the entire seven months. He visited me for Christmas and New Year, a few weeks for Valentine's Day, a few weeks for Easter and finally he came to see my City Year graduation and pick me up to bring me with him to England. Still, seven months of Skype conversations, a 5-hour time difference and a 4,000 mile distance is far too much for two people in love. So, we looked into visas and figured out how to avoid having to be separated again.

After much research, I decided to get a non-settlement visa for marriage in the U.K. Why non-settlement? We decided we would like to go back to Germany for a while and eventually to the U.S., so there would be no reason to pay thousands of dollars to get a visa to settle in the U.K. for two years when we wouldn't even be here for that long. Why marriage? We realized in order to avoid any more separation, the odds would be more in our favor if we were spouses as opposed to just engaged. Thus, we'll be having our beautiful German wedding ceremony with family and friends on July 4, 2013, but for visa/legal purposes we're getting legally married on July 14, 2012. Yes, in two weeks.

That brings me to my final chapter: Living in England. I arrived in London's Heathrow airport on June 6th. From there it was a whirlwind of meeting my new family. I met Alexander's father, mother, sister, aunt, uncle,  a few cousins, grandmother, grandmother's dog, best friends and the most important member of the family, Angus (the family dog). And all that was in the first 5 days. Eight days after I arrived, we had to go to Birmingham to give our Notice of Marriage. This is an official thing that we have to do to let the government know we're getting married, so they can check and make sure we're legally able to get married and then send us the papers confirming we are allowed to get married. Usually it takes 7-10 days to receive the papers, but seeing as I'm an international divorceé it's taking longer...we're still waiting.

On the 15th of June we went to London so I could meet Alexander's brothers. Unfortunately, I got a kidney infection, wasn't able to meet the brothers and spent my Friday night in London in the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. I  was released the next day and got to meet a cousin of Alex, but it still was NOT the weekend I had hoped for.

At graduation ball

Besides my first few days of excitement, life in England has been pretty quiet. We're living with Alexander's nan (grandmother) and spending most of our days job searching. I've seen a lot of the Midlands including Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of Shakespeare. We went to a graduation ball last week to celebrate Alexander's graduation. He'll be graduating with a 2.1 Degree! It's been fun to learn all the English words and figure out the American translations for them. I've thought about writing an English-American dictionary. Maybe that's what I can do with all my new-found free time...