It's been a while, but here I am. No longer Majo in Denver -
Majo is now in Frankfurt.
I found the gate of academia left open a crack, and I bolted. I'm now a translator for a huge company full of very, very young people. I may not have much of a future there, but for the moment it has got me out of teaching and out of Colorado, and life beyond work certainly has much more to it than Denver could ever offer.
Not that the transition has been easy - in fact, it's been a bit too much of an adventure (ein Abenteuer!), and if I'd had the benefit of foresight I probably wouldn't have come at all. In spite of having moved countries before, I'd never moved anywhere where I couldn't communicate at least to some limited degree. Though of course almost everyone in Germany can speak some English, it doesn't always mean that they actually will, and it has been a long and painful struggle to get practical things sorted out, from setting up my prepay phone to finding an apartment to getting my internet working. Still, now a month and a half in things are settling down. I have a nice apartment, the internet was finally sorted a few days ago, and I bought a Korean rice cooker yesterday - life is civilized again.
In another month and a half I will go back to Colorado (Lufthansa-cabin-crew-willing) and fetch J and the cats. The latter are, of course. blissfully unaware just now that they're going to be uprooted from their home and garden, stuffed into bags and stuck under plane seats for ten hours, but I assuage my sense of guilt by remembering that I have at least found them a place with a garden here too, and that this one often has bunnies in it. They will go out on leashes only (landlady's decree, as well as my own inclination), so there should be no unfortunate confrontations - but it will be fun to see how they react.
We also have lovely red squirrels, and blackbirds. I have missed the sound of blackbirds in the evening!
