Okay, I'm in. I moved over to Switzerland last August to be with my new wife...after we found out that it would take 8 to 18 months for her to get a visa to come to the states (and she's a Swiss!?!?)...and THEN have to wait longer for her to get a work permit. So I came here and had a visa and work permit in two weeks (exactly on the date they said it would come, gotta love those Swiss). I'm most recently a psychologist by trade, though as I've mentioned elsewhere was a landscape gardener and farmer in Hawaii and California before that. I'm working to get my psychologist credentials established here, took some intensive German classes (though those stopped for a couple of reasons: 1. when the teacher started teaching us about the use of dativ and akkusitiv verbs, and 2. because the Swiss don't speak German, but Swiss German...oh, everyone tells you to learn Hoch Deutsch, but they all speak Swiss...which is not written...so I'm still studying, but on my own). Anyway, I digress, I also have been spending the last 6 months intensely "pounding the pavement" for work, and just landed a job as a research analyst (researching the use of sports as a psychosocial intervention for youth in humanitarian crises situations), which I spent the last 3 months writing proposals on to get the funding. So I'm psyched about that. I'm real happy that I chose to come here, though I do really miss my beloved San Francisco Bay area, my dear ol' friends, and such inane enjoyments as baseball, (Laura Scudders chunky) peanut butter and good tequila...not to mention the fact that it was a lot of work to get a job here. I've discovered that the process of becoming an expat can, at moments, be a very emotional and difficult transition...hey, we're foreigners...and as I've met other Americans here, found that they too have experienced the same. At my ripe young age (53), its not so easy to re-establish the deep friendships that I have back on the coast...but people here have been real friendly and welcoming, and thank god for email, phones, blogs and the internet. But it is also a great adventure being here, and my wife and I are doing lots of exploring...the quality of life here is SO much better. It was weird to wake up this morning and realize it was the 4th of July, and there be NO hoopla (or sales) like there would be back home. Very quiet...that will change on Oct 1st, though (Swiss day!). There you have the gist of my little story!

"Once in awhile we get shown the light, in the strangest of places, if we look at it right" - Hunter/Garcia

.
There aren't so many Dutchies on ET yet, so ...

The choice to make between 2 diaries wasn't so difficult:
-1- Since when did the Bush care ...? or Independence Day.

Choice beer in Amsterdam is more challenging. When, where or what and we have a date. I'm no good in color schemes or interior decorating except tearing and pasting wall paper, but will do anything for a beer ...
and to help you out. Do-it-yourself for plumbing, ducts or central heating and I can be of some assistance.

USA WELCOME: Make Yourself Known @BooMan Tribune and add some cheers!

Not sure if I'll be considered an expat or not.  I recently accepted a temporary (2 yr with possible 1 or 2 yr extension) position in France.  I'm already hoping to be there at least three years, though.  I've been living in the reddest of the red states for nearly ten years and am really looking forward to leaving.  Assuming all the paperwork goes smoothly, I'm supposed to start for Oct. 1.  I don't speak French yet but I'm trying to learn enough to get by before I leave (I've been told I have a good accent).  Not much else.  I came here by way of dailyKos and am usually a lurker at both places, although I've recently tried to buck up the courage to comment more.  So, yeah, that's my expat two euro cents.  

despite being French (and worse - Parisian) to the max, I can claim also to be American, of the Latin kind, as my mother is from Venezuela (came to study in Paris, met young man, et voilà, still here forty years later, still unhappy with the cold weather - especially in chilly Strasbourg).

So American, and also an expatriate - when I moved from Strasbourg (one of the capitals of Europe) to Paris, I felt I had really changed countries - from Europe to France, really.

So do I qualify? Being French is a state of mind. Being an American expat is also a state of mind, isn't it?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

Here's my story. My husband and I moved to the Netherlands in 1995. He took his 2nd post-doc at the University of Leiden. I had a great time, studied dutch, made some great friends and had my first child. We moved to Munich 3 years later when my son was only 6 weeks old and have lived here ever since.

I was planning on finding a job here after my son started Kindergarten but ran into a few obstacles. I got pregnant again just a year after arriving and then discovered that my first son was not quite normal. After reading many books regarding children's health problems and many visits to the Kinderzentrum, we discovered that my beautiful boy had autism.  It has been quite devastating but in the same breath, we have been quite lucky in that Munich is really one of the best places to live when facing a crisis such as this. Our public health insurance pays for all of his medical costs and his special Kindergarten "Heilpaedagosischen Tagesstaette" is free. When Matthew was three, he spent his first year of Kindergarten in a Waldkindergarten with "normal" children. I thought that to be best because I was hoping his behaviour would change being around "normal" children and most of all, he loves the outdoors and I thought he would learn more by playing outdoors all day in the Englischer Garten and he would learn more about nature.

Anyway, I later discovered that my second son also has autism but not as severe. His behaviour is much more normal and his speech is not as bad but he is still way behind most children at his age.

I found politics and reading blogs a great escape from my problems at home. Actually, it started with genealogy and then turned to politics when I joined the Democrats Abroad group here in Munich. I have  been spending a lot of time putting a database together for all of the local election officials contact information to help Americans living overseas and the military to vote in the 2006 election.  

I have not travelled much since I have been in Munich. It is very difficult to take the children anywhere and my husband travels all the time so he is burnt out when it comes to travel.

I loved living in the Netherlands but I also love it here in Germany. I honestly cannot think of a place that I lived that I didn't like with the exception of Ohio. I was born and raised there and although the people are rather nice, it was extremely boring.

I love teaching.  I love the theater, Cinema, live music, even the opera now that I can finally understand the ones in Russian and German.  Oh, and I can't forget The Flaming Carrot comics.  Art museums for me are great on a rainy Saturday afternoon, so is having a glass of wine and a discussion at the local philosophy club.  Of course I love getting stuck too from my favorite piercer.  To ease stress and get away from it all, I truly love x-country skiing through a snowy birch forest (and a sauna afterwards).  Musically, everything from the Clash and Rage Against The Machine to Miles Davis, Cuban jazz, and the great classical geniuses.  I guess because I study literature and culture through the eyes of Marxist and Critical Theory, I love seeing events of the same movement through different media, such as seeing an Expressionist art exhibit, watching an Expressionist film afterwards, then listening to Stravinsky or something to really put the pieces together.

About me - where to begin?  I'm 39 and grew up mostly in Sioux Falls, SD.  Spent quite a few years as enlisted in the Army then as a Naval officer.  I attended the University of Michigan and majored in Russian and Eastern European Studies and Creative Writing.  I spent my junior year abroad in Moscow from '94-'95.  In between active and reserve time I sold drugs for Bristol-Myers Squibb where I really felt like a prostitute.

 Now I am a PhD candidate at the University of Virginia in Germanic Languages and Literature.  This year is an exchange year and I am teaching comparative literature at the University of Dortmund, Germany.  My first class was titled Pornography and Literature: Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Sacher-Masoch, and Vladimir Nabokov.  Something that I have an interest in, what is the difference, if any, between porn and art, can we truly define the two in distinct categories, etc.  My second course Collision of the Avant Garde looked at modernist and "post- modernist" theater from Dada to Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, to Heiner Müller.  I plan on moving to Germany permantly in the fall to conduct research and write my dissertation.  Plus I really grok Europe, it's too cool and soooo laid back (except for a few neo-Nazi assholes in the area).

 My dissertation will be over Aesthetics and Ideology in Revolutionary Theater: Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Federico Garcia Lorca.  I hope to contribute through my work to the understanding of how aesthetics are used to propagate ideology to the theater audience and how it is received; I will look at semiotics involved as well.  I guess I am a theater guy.  I just love it and it's very inexpensive here in Germany.  I've also swung pretty far left in my personal political views, so Germany seems to be a good place for me to live.  If I can't work in academia, then I also have the option of dramaturgy in the theater scene.  My creativity was unleashed in this society here where everything seems to be so laid back.  It sparked my interest in body mods and in the last six months I've become pretty heavily pierced but other than my earring, you wouldn't be able to see them ;-).  So I guess that's a little about me.

Marrying my girlfriend from the last time I was here and I hope to get a second MA in Theaterwissenschaft from Uni-Bochum, just to give me some German credentials.

"Schiller sprach zu Goethe, Steck in dem Arsch die Flöte! Goethe sagte zu Schiller, Mein Arsch ist kein Triller!"

Not an expat, just dropping in to read a bit about all of you and the local areas/culture you describe.  Through you and others here is the only way for me to get any kind of first hand 'traveling' in and am envious of all of you.

"People never do evil so throughly and happily as when they do it from moral conviction."-Blaise Pascal