On Nov. 23, 2005 I moved to The Hague from Washington, DC. This is my new Dutch life.

3.07.2007

The Official Unofficial Withdrawal

There's no other way to say it, so I'm just going to say it. B- and I are leaving Holland. Well it's about 95% certain that we're going to leave Holland, and... AND... we're going back to the USA. Yes! I'm so psyched.

This is probably not a surprise to many of you. You can probably tell by now that we aren't exactly in love with the Netherlands. Some days, many days, I actually hate it here. On good days, we just sort of exist and put up with it. That's not a way to live, especially when you don't have to.

The When and Where is a bit up in the air. The When depends on the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, and how long they'll take to process B-'s immigration application. The Web site says 10 weeks. We're mailing the application next week. The When depends on where the bidness is, and it's this latter bit that makes it not quite a 100% done deal.

Nevertheless, with any luck we'll be shipping out this summer. Woohoo!

In the meantime, we'll do what we can to see still more of Europe and I'll be heading to Costa Rica in April for a yoga retreat with my teacher from back home. Good times. Good times.

4 Comments:

Blogger Reid said...

Woo-hoo! But, um, what are you gonna call your blog?

4:02 AM GMT+1

 
Blogger akaijen said...

Yeah I've been wondering that myself. And also what the point of my blog would be otherwise. Hmmm...

9:06 AM GMT+1

 
Blogger PeeKay said...

myolddutchlife-mynewUSAlifeagain-myhusbandsnewamericanlife.blogspot.com


very cool! im very certain you can find things to write about jen. come on now, dont be casting aside your faithful followers! we would follow you to smalltown IOWA!

3:31 PM GMT+1

 
Blogger akaijen said...

I'd definitely have something to write about if we moved to Iowa!

But Reid brings up a new question - should I redirect to mynew---life.blogspot.com and then write about living there? That wouldn't work if we went back to DC, b/c duh I lived there for 10 years, but it could be interesting if we moved to California or something (strong liklihood). Can I cope with fruity, loopy Cali after living on the East Coast for so long? B- lived in the US for three years, and my impression is that Aussie and American life are very similar.

One thing has occurred to me about keeping this blog, though - did it encourage me to focus on the cultural differences of life here and the negative things? And did that contribute to my bad impression of living here? B and I used to see something weird or offensive and think, "oh this would be good for the blog." We never noticed good things and thought about blogging about them. But maybe there aren't good things. Plenty of expats are miserable and they're not blogging about it.

Anyway, one of the reasons why I started to widen the topic was to give me non-negative things to think about sometimes. Accentuate the positive as they say.

10:02 AM GMT+1

 

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