As I said, I’m preparing to go to Germany. My flight is 18 days later. I still don’t have a place to live in, but I’ve sent some messages to some people needing roommates. I hope they’ll answer me in the following days.
I mentioned that I’m stressed out in the previous post. I’m not that much nervous now. Some of my problems have been solved. It’s interesting that you put effort in a matter and quickly see its results. Not all problems are like this. You may put effort in something but don’t see an improvement, because there’s no improvement at all, or there’s an improvement but there’s not a measurable metrics to assess the effects of your work. The migration’s tasks’ results are binary; They’ll be either resolved or not. You’ll either receive a visa or not, you’ll either find an RA position or not, you can either change your money to Euro or not. Enough examples, I suppose you got the idea.
Anyway, now that I’m less nervous, I feel a bit excited. If I went directly to USA, I had to spend a big portion of my life there without being able to visit another country. That’s because most probably they would’ve issued a single visa for me. But now, I have the chance to visit Europe before going there. If I can save enough money, I even might be able to travel to some other European countries and see more parts of the world. Of course those probable trips won’t be very luxurious. It’s an invaluable experience though.
Regardless of living in the Europe, there are other reasons to be excited, but I’m not going to write about them. It’s almost 6 in the morning and I’m tired. As the last part of this post, I’m going to predict my feelings after arriving there. So, in the following lines, I’m going to foresee my upcoming situation.
The first few days will be hard. I’ll be struggling with a lot of bureaucracy. If I still haven’t found a place to live by that time, I’m going to be completely stressed out. If this unstable situation takes long, the people at the lab will be angry. I hope they can understand my situation at least.
After completing all the paperwork and finding a place to live, I will start to feel homesick. I’m going to miss my family and all my friends in Iran. I’m going to ask myself “Why did you leave Iran? You had a perfect life in there”, I might even think to returning to Iran. But in the end, I’m going to ignore that question and cure this pain by some solutions like chatting with my family and friends, watching movies, and hopefully by socializing with some new people and finding new friends. Trying to establish a workout routine might be challenging in such days, but maybe I’ll try that too. I’ve learned it helps me to deal with depression and stress.
Regardless of the homesickness, I’m going to learn some things that are simple parts of daily people in there, but are new to me. They’re most likely behavioral or related to social processes of that community. (Choosing proper words for this part is very hard, even in my mother language) Learning of these things is tightly coupled to embarrassment, because I’m going to do something in a wrong way and will learn about its correct way when someone mentions it and tells me the correct way to do it. (“correct” isn’t a good word. “expected” may be a better one) So, maybe I should ask some trusted persons to correct me whenever they saw an unexpected behavior from me. Or maybe I just should let it go and don’t care about embarrassment and how others see me.
After learning to handle these feelings and getting accustomed to the new routines, I’m going to order my life. I will probably try to learn German language, read papers, and all the stuff I’ve imagined to do before. I suppose at this point, my life starts to look like my current life more and more. After that moment, I will resume my continuous fight with myself to bring order into my life and there will be nothing new to foresee.