desdemona

The only burning question that I could take from this thread is: does the girth of a man’s head determine his penis size? For a long time I thought it was the hand! 

So, you do not work, have special needs, but you want to migrate to Germany and have children. As a full time working mother of three little children, why do I find that you’re very selfish? You do realise that the society will have to pay for your and possibly your children care if you’re in the public insurance system in Germany? And if the marriage doesn’t work, what then? You have the extra stress of divorce, fighting parental rights, being a single parent, worry about income (is the society supposed to support you in this too?), loneliness, and your special needs on top of that.  By all means, come over and try out a life here. But please wait for at least a few years, until your relationship is settled down (you’re not even married yet!), your life is all sorted out, you can speak decent German and have circle of friends and social life, before you decide to start out a family. Maybe even try having a pet first.  Because I don’t think you understand very well what it means to be a parent.   

Music lessons are never offered for free even in socialist Germany. It’s in fact one of the most expensive courses on offer. In city music schools, you can pay cheaper rate only if you’re a Hartz IV recipient. But no one wants to be one do we?  Other courses such as language or adult education are more affordable, and it’s anyway another story when you’re an adult and have means to pay for your own education. My complain here is because I’m a parent supporting three kids.

It works perfectly, just go to any atm with maestro sign on it. Cc will have higher charges so stick with EC + atm. It’s the cheapest option for cash overseas.

My parents put everything they could afford into our education, so that we could do better than them. I grew up with that mentality and did the same with my kids.

That’s exactly the point isn’t it, we want the kids to do better than us, because that’s how humanity could progress. So we offer them the best things we could afford, be it music or else. That’s a given thing for being parents. I don’t see that as “luxury problem”.

What Kiplette said. The music school we had was the city’s music school, so that’s probably why they’re very inflexible, but I heard other music schools are not much better. There’s a long waiting list to get into the school, anyone in that list could jump in when one kid quits. In reality they’re just too bureaucratic and inflexible to do the extra work, therefore they’d just rather give a very long notice.    Easy to say in retrospect, but at that point I had to make a decision that fit best into our situation (schedule/timing, what the kid wanted to learn and how to approach it best..) That music school was the best option. As it turned out not to be one, we had to change course. It was a tiring one year to wait until we could stop paying, but lesson’s learned. The kid don’t learn any musical instrument now until primary school, where she’ll go to a school that offers private music lesson. So at least if she’s interested to learn again the option is there, and we don’t have the schedule / timing problem because the lesson is carried during school time. 

Another victim here, been there done that with music school cancellation. In my case my daughter didn’t like the lessons after a few tries and we had to wait a whole year after sending out our Kündigung until we could stop it properly. I really dislike the inflexibility of German Abo system. So much that I dread signing up to anything now until I completely sure that I could get out of it within a short notice. 

Yup, no immigration officer will want to see your cash. Just take your EC Karte with you and withdraw from atm after you go through immigration. 

Don’t understand the hype about French supermarkets. My husband and I lived there before and still go there often, so we went to supermarkets there a lot. There’s leader price which sells cheap but low quality goods, there are other normal supermarkets such as Auchan, casino and Monoprix. Beside good cheeses and cold meats, I don’t find any goods there more outstanding than our local edeka or Rewe. 

Thanks for the calculator, that helps to gauge what kind of amount we’d expect. My mother in law is also in a care home and I kind of expect that we’ll have to foot the bill one day when my father in law is no longer around. He’s not really fit anymore.

Just good old homemade  lasagna that the kids and my gerMan like.