Posted by Oxlaey on Monday, January 12, 2015 · Leave a Comment
My grandmother, Clara, loved to travel: Spain, South Korea, Japan, India, Alaska, Galveston. When I was 17 she sent me on a two-week church mission trip to Kenya in Africa. There, with a group of 12 other boys, we visited some local schools, helped out a little in building a few mud churches, went on a safari and generally had our eyes opened to a much different world than what we knew from Texas. In 11th grade, I met a German exchange student, Marcus, who got my mind thinking about going abroad on an exchange program but my cheap dad vetoed the idea saying it was too expensive.
In college at LSU I met and fell for another German exchange student, Kristina. She helped me fill out the application to go abroad and with that I was off and moved in 1994 to Giessen, Germany.It took me a year of hard training, drinking the regional beer Licher Pils, but by the end of the year I was finally able to swear in the local vernacular: “Leck much”. During that year, after traveling all across Europe, I promised myself I’d stay in Germany if I ever got the chance to come back. Oddly enough when I got back to campus in the United States, I was walking across campus one day when I ran across the lady in charge of exchange programs. She said if I wanted to go back to Germany, there was a scholarship available – no application required. Thus, just a few months later I was back in Germany.I finished up my USA degree (Bachelor of Arts) from abroad and at the same time got into German university as a regular student. That took me from Marburg to Bonn where I interned ($$$) in the German Bundestag. When the German government moved from Bonn to Berlin, the parliamentarian I was working for took me on as a regular employee. So I moved to Berlin too and finished my Political Science degree at the Free University. I started working for the American Chamber of Commerce in Germany and – fast forward a few lobby jobs later plus an MBA – and we get back to where this blog started off: quitting a 6-figure job to travel the world.
During all my years in Europe, I’d travelled through every country in Europe, with the exception of Portugal, Montenegro, Kosovo and the Baltic states. From bicycle trips through the Crimea, Ukraine to pastis in France to pig roasts in Serbia.
I still had one big hairy European dream: to cycle from Berlin to the northern most point in Europe, the Nordkapp in Norway.
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