Inspiration from the Cat

Take your time, think a lot, think of everything you’ve got. For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.

Cat Stevens sung those words in “Father and Son.”  He’s one of my favourite artists, and I posted this specific lyric for a few reasons. First, even though here I am nine weeks later, successfully living a quarter of a world away from “home,” getting here wasn’t easy. It took a lot of thinking and a lot of work. In the end, I always have wanted to live and work abroad, and this opportunity has allowed me to do so with the comfort of staying within the same company and – for the most part - within the same field. In this essence, I imagine Cat was right. If I waited too long, the opportunity to achieve my dream with this level of comfort could have gone with the wind.

Secondly, if you were to listen to the song in its entirety, you’d hear the father telling his son to live  for the day.  I think that’s also a very important message. People always are rushing, running, moving so quickly that you can’t see them and they can’t – really – see you.  I believe it’s important to stop and reflect on life, be it through a journal, revisiting emails stuck in the back of your inbox, or sitting with friends and a big glass of red. (I miss this last bit and really look forward to a few good, long nights with friends and family when I come home for the Holidays, or – if I’m lucky – they come out here, first.)

I’ll leave you with another lyric, and if it entices you to experience other Cat songs (like “Another Saturday Night” or one of my two favorites, “Can’t Keep it In” and “Peace Train”) click here for a YouTube playlist.

If you wanna leave, take good care. Hope you make a lot of nice friends out there, but just remember there’s a lot of bad and beware, beware. Oh baby, baby, it’s a wild world …

Home, at last

The past week was a whirlwind of life happening. The good news is that I’ve learned that I can manage through crappy situations as a resident of Europe. The bad news is that I ran into a number of crappy situations in the first place!  I’ll just point out two, because the first relates to the title of my post, and the second is just an example of on-the-fly craftiness, ha.

1. I was about to sign a lease for an apartment near the EU Commission, and as I began to tell people my good news, a) colleagues had worried looks on their faces and told me which streets to avoid, and b) the landlord asked me multiple times for cash (not cool). At about 5 p.m. after talking with one more colleague, I broke down and decided that this apartment wasn’t for me after all. I told the landlord I just was not willing to do business with them. (Sidenote: I considered blogging the nasty response I received from the landlord’s rep, but at the end of the day, the response made me that much more certain that I didn’t want to work with them.)
2. After realizing that I needed to be back on the market for apartments, I had to work late on Monday, which resulted in me being over an hour late for my French class. On my way home afterwards, I broke my shoe. I was literally a half-an-hour away from home, with a broken sandal.  Fortunately I had many bobbypins in my hair that day, so I used them to “pin” back together my sandal and made it home. Crafty, right??

Okay, so you’re sitting there thinking, “Steph! Get on with it! Why is this post titled ‘Home, at last’?”. I’ll tell you why: after spending all day yesterday online looking at advertisements, playing with different search options, trying to respond to French advertisements in French, I received a phone call. The woman was calling about a place I had sent two emails to, and she mentioned that she had a tenant-couple lined up and who were haggling slightly too much about the conditions of the lease agreement. She said, “I would much rather have you if you like the place, because then we can talk about Chicago!”  And boy, did we when I viewed the place this morning!

I’ve pasted a few pictures here for you to get a sense of the apartment. I love it, I really do. In fact, at one point I got so happy that I nearly cried. It just felt like home. You know? The landlord additionally offered to give me a day to think it over, and to come out to my office at the end of the day tomorrow so we can sign. Then I get the bank agreement on Tuesday, we schedule the “professional assessment” for Wednesday, and I move in at the weekend, as the soonest.

So, at the end of the day, I ask you to please keep your fingers crossed. I really like this place and it would be a big disappointment if it didn’t work out.

When opportunity knocks…

I haven’t posted in a while – and for good reason. In addition to not knowing what I want this blog to be about, 1) Work is BUSY (and who wants to be on a computer after staring at one all day?), 2) I vacationed in Brazil for two weeks, and 3) I’m moving!

I’ll jump to No. 3, because I’m pretty sure it is going to be the basis of this blog from now on.

Where am I moving? To Brussels, Belgium, for at least two years, for work. Despite there being one million questions to answer, two million items to consider and three million loads of second-guessing my strategy, I’m incredibly excited for this opportunity.

Currently, the plan is to head to Brussels one time prior to my actual move, which would occur some time in June for a July 1 start, which means I likely would close out my Chicago-based work the first week of June.

So what’s that mean? Well, if I want to enjoy summer at all, I’d better get packing (in the sense of boxes, suitcases and actual activity on other things like returning my apartment walls to white and selling my car), and get packing fast! It’s bittersweet to leave my friends and family, but it’s the opportunity of a lifetime, and well, not to be cliche, but I will live only once. As they say, bon voyage! (?)