Most expat blogs either paint a rose-tinted picture of how amazing, perfect, and instagrammable their new life is, or go all-in on warnings towards wannabe expats as to how challenging and and hard it all is and that only the strongest should embark on such an adventure.
We, Julia and Philipp, dare to cover the middle ground. Give you instagrammable stories about summer cottages, hiking, interior design, and culture, but not mince words about the fact that moving to a new country in your late 30s isn’t all fun and games.
There will be amazing sunsets and torrential rainfalls at the Mökki, there will be Calamari Union walks from Kallio to Eira, there will be roadtrips to (not) see the Northern Lights in Lapland, but there will also be desperate loneliness, frustration in dealing with foreign-language administration, and a general feeling of “why did we ever leave home again”?
But this actually brings us to the one question Finns ask when we tell them we are moving to Helsinki: WHY? Why would any sane person move to Finland? Voluntarily even?
So we’ll start this blog with