How I got kicked out of Germany: the COVID effect you haven’t heard about
Munich, Germany Since the COVID-19 pandemic took over the world more than one year ago, many single people have reported a rise in “single shaming.” That is, the way the coupled/throupled of society tend to feel superior to those who are still enjoying the solo experience. Apparently, despite all the progress we’ve made as a species, the old fashioned idea persists that a single person is single because they are somehow less desirable than a non-single person. You know, because the world doesn’t have its fair share of shitty human beings in shitty relationships or anything like that (sarcasm).
Strangely, yet somehow predictably, though, the pandemic has caused our non-single friends to be very concerned for our mental and emotional well-being. They worry that, as a result of COVID, our singleness is suddenly unbearable and practically life-threatening. I mean, how could we possibly handle a lockdown alone (gasp)?! If you’re one of these non-singles guilty of thinking this way, then I’ll say this for your benefit. Singles are still dating and swiping and going out. The only difference is we’ve had to get a little more creative with how we organize our dates.
Now, I wouldn’t say that I personally felt that I was being single-shamed more during the pandemic than at any other time in my single life – that is, until I would go on particularly bad dates. Of course, if you read my book Good Trash: vol. 1, then you already know that bad dates can strike at any time regardless of deadly viruses. However, I can say that whenever I have a bad date nowadays, I always get the same response from my non-single friends, “Oh, it’s probably because all the good men were able to find relationships at the start of the pandemic, so only the bad ones are left.” Riiiiiight… if you ask me, anyone desperate, needy, and codependent enough to panic and scramble to find a romantic relationship to ride out the COVID storm is the furthest thing from a “good one,” but what do I know? And, of course, it has to be said that by their logic I, too, am one of the “bad ones” since I didn’t find a relationship at the start of the pandemic either.
Being single-shamed by concerned couples is one thing, but getting single-shamed by the German government is quite another. A few weeks ago, and after living here for nearly five years, I was informed that my residency permit for Germany would not be extended. Naturally, working in the tourism sector and running my own tour companies meant that I really wasn’t working that much at all over the last year. Unluckily, my residence permit expired right in the middle of the pandemic, which meant that German Immigration became aware of my loss of income and was basing their decision to let me continue on in the life and the businesses that I built here on my current COVID reality alone. Had my permit expired in 2019 or 2022, they never would have known. Anyway, after nearly seven months of waiting for my new residence permit, and essentially being trapped in Germany as a result of the waiting process, the final decree came down that I was being rejected, “Since you are single and not really earning money right now, we don’t think you have a reason to be in Germany anymore.”
Yes, I did demonstrate to the government exactly how I was supporting myself during these crazy times, that I was still paying my rent, and not skirting my financial responsibilities, but I guess it didn’t matter. Apparently, the only collateral they were willing to accept was in the form of a German man formally claiming responsibility for me and supporting me through these difficult times, and since I didn’t have one, well, then I’ve got to go. In the end, it kind of makes me feel like I really am one of the “bad ones,” the bad singles, after all. If I was actually girlfriend material, I guess I wouldn’t have this problem, right? 🙄
If you are a skimmer or one of those TL;DR people, then you can probably stop here now that you know exactly how I got kicked out of Germany – the lethal combination of working in tourism during a pandemic while being a single woman. If you want to do something to help me, then go to Amazon and buy my book! After all, I’m now a starving, unemployed writer, who is also currently both homeless and country-less, and can use all the support I can get. 😅 As for the rest of you, read on as I tell you the longer version of the rise and fall of my time in Germany.
The struggle was real…
On paper, the verdict from German Immigration kind of makes sense, doesn’t it? Despite being born in the country, I’m not now, nor have I ever been, a German citizen. COVID has made financial burdens of millions of people, and even though I wasn’t receiving any COVID-related benefits from the German government, they assumed there was a risk that I may have sought them out as the months of the pandemic dragged on (although this was not my intention, and I told them that). If I had a man, well, he could take care of me and those government funds would be secured for use by full-fledged Germans in need.
Like I said, I’m not a German citizen, I’m a Canadian citizen, meaning I’m not Germany’s problem, I’m Canada’s problem. Again, it kind of makes sense, right? Except when you consider that true expats likely have more of a life developed in their expat nation than they do in their country of origin. In my case, I’ve been abroad for the better part of twelve years, I barely have friends in Canada these days, let alone anything even remotely resembling a professional network or business contacts. If you ask me, it is highly irresponsible that any world government would start deporting people during a fucking pandemic. I’m sure this is happening all over the globe right now, but no one is really talking about it likely because they are too busy trying to scramble to pick up the pieces of their lives, just like all the “good ones” were scrambling to find their lockdown lover over a year ago.
Fortunately, I am one of the lucky ones in the sense that I at least have a few family members in Canada and, therefore, won’t be forced into total homelessness after being abruptly stripped of my working privileges in the country I’ve called home for the past five years. And don’t forget that whole being unceremoniously sent back out into a depressed job market in a country where I have absolutely no network thing. So, you know, I may not be able to find a job anytime soon, but, hey, at least I’ll be one of those super cool thirty-somethings living with her parents. 😅
Others in my position won’t be so lucky, though. Over my twelve years abroad, I’ve met plenty of fellow expats with sad stories of living in cars, and escaping abusive families to build a small but happy little life on distant, foreign shores. What happens to those people once they are forced to return “home” to conditions like these with no job and no connections and no place to go during a goddamn pandemic? Like I said, highly irresponsible.
I’m not trying to sound bitter. I’d be outraged by this fact even if it wasn’t happening to me personally. Surely, you’ve noticed by now that I love chaos and drama and change, but because of COVID I can’t even get excited about the fact that my life is about to do a somersault. If the world wasn’t totally shutdown right now, I’d probably be setting off someplace new, or at least returning to Canada with the confidence that I’d be able to very quickly and very easily start putting the pieces of my life back together. But I just can’t see it right now, and I get super depressed imagining myself leaving behind my legacy and my freedom in the next few weeks, and boarding a plane bound for a hopeless situation and one of Canada’s highly questionable quarantine hotels. And it has to be noted that I took a little sneak peek at Canada’s Tinder, and it actually made me want to cry in the exact same way that one wants to cry after a very, very bad and traumatizing haircut, knowing that it will be months, years before you even start to look and feel like yourself again. But you know, maybe that’s just because all the “good ones” are already in pandemic relationships… 🙄
Maybe all my negativity towards returning to Canada stems from the fact that making a life in Germany was really a major ordeal, and the thought of having to do it all over again just makes me want to die. Although I had been an expat for seven years in Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore prior, coming to Germany really meant coming out of my comfort zone. Previously, I always had a job and an apartment lined up in advance of my arrival in a new country, which meant that, for me anyway, moving abroad wasn’t actually an adventurous thing. It was pretty damn easy.
But I didn’t have that security when I decided to come to Germany. If you read Good Trash: vol. 1, then you know that I was (or at least I thought I was) in love with a certified idiot from Munich. The only good thing about it was that I kind of suspected that he was an idiot, and so I came here under romantic pretences, but more so in the sense that I just wanted to know for sure that he wasn’t the right guy for me. And he sure fucking wasn’t. That said, I got myself a one-year visa, packed a suitcase, and boarded a flight to Germany not knowing if I’d be there a month, a year, or for the rest of my natural life.
Motivated by stupid, stupid love, I was determined to survive here. I landed my first client within a few days. Six months later I had too many clients to manage, and found myself working upwards of 16 hours a day, running around the city all day and all night. I gained 31 lbs in the process, as train station pretzels became the only food I really had time to consume. A minor, 31-lbs factor that I’m sure somewhat contributed to my lack of success in the dating department and my current predicament. By the way, that guy – you know, the idiot – was already long gone by the six-month mark.
With the guy out of the picture, I thought I’d stay on in Germany until my one-year visa ran out. I needed to anyway, as I hadn’t really saved any money for those first six months. Munich has an insane housing shortage, and a whimsically romantic, single expat woman working for herself was not considered a desirable, stable tenant by any landlord’s standards. I considered myself lucky to find the place I was in for the first two years. But… I was paying more than triple the rent, which is why I had to work so hard, and if I’m being honest, could probably only afford to eat all those pretzels. 😅
The place was a total shit hole, though – tiny and derelict. There was frequent flooding, black mold all over the place, and a very large spider living in the tiny closet next to the bed. I allowed him to live with me, though, and just prayed every night that he didn’t crawl out for a visit while I was sleeping. Further to this, the landlord was highly questionable, violated my privacy on the regular, and was just so sketchy that I wouldn’t be surprised if he had hidden cameras set up in the shower the entire time I was there. Looking back, I can’t believe that I really lived like that for two fucking years.
By the way, I’m not telling you this story to bore you, I’m actually writing it more for myself. As an expat, all of my previous lives abroad feel like they only happened yesterday. It feels like I was in Japan only ten minutes ago, but really it’s been ten years now. To me, it feels like I only just arrived in Munich, but it was almost five years ago. So, I’m writing this to remind myself of what I actually went through, how far I actually came before being forced to leave in the middle of the pandemic because the one thing I didn’t manage to do was to pick up a boyfriend somewhere along the way. And because right now, it feels like I only just landed in Munich, and then a mere minute after settling in somehow managed to fuck it all up, fail, and was then ordered to promptly turn around and head back to the airport.
Anyway, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t leave at the end of that first year like I said I would. Well, German Immigration being far more agreeable back in 2017, granted me a three-year residency permit, and only a few days after that I landed my biggest client ever. For the next two years, the majority of my week was spent making the commute back and forth between Munich and the Bavarian city of Ingolstadt where I was now working on site at the world headquarters of a famous luxury car maker. It seemed like the epitome of all workplaces in this neck of the woods, and I was honestly so grateful to get the chance to experience the corporate culture of the German car industry as a way to understand the country on a deeper level. I mean, who doesn’t think about cars and beer when they think about Germany, am I right?
I’m sure a part of me suffered through this purely for the sake of improving my own general knowledge of the world, because my days actually got much longer once I took on this client. I’d wake up somewhere around 3:30am in order to make the train and be in the office before the sun came up (as required), and I wouldn’t get home again until about 8 o’clock at night if I was lucky. Looking back, it’s crazy to think that I was living like this, running on almost no sleep at all for two fucking years.
Simultaneously, I was being drawn to the tourism industry. I was always drawn to it I guess, but the longer I lived in Munich, the more the creative juices started flowing. The city seemed to be lacking in terms of their tourist offerings, and I started devoting a portion of my so-called “free time” to crafting tour experiences around the city and beyond even as early as the tail end of my first year here. I was doing it for fun mostly, but I learned pretty fast that people were actually willing to pay me for it.
So, during that two-year period that I was waking up at 3:30am, I’d be downing my morning coffee and eating my breakfast while German history documentaries played in the background. On the 40-minute train ride to the factory, I’d be reading travel guides for all of Bavaria. If I had any free time, I’d be taking tours, visiting museums, and test driving new bars and restaurants until I really could say I was the expert on all things Munich. By the end of my two years at the factory, I had so many tours booked by eager tourists that I could finally do it exclusively, and I stopped working with nearly all of the corporate clients I had procured during those first three years in Munich. The only problem with that was the timing. I shifted all of my eggs into the tourism basket right at the end of 2019. So, when the pandemic hit a few months later, I had nothing to fall back on, and here we are.
2019 was when the tour companies really started taking off, and all that slave labor I had done came in pretty handy because I actually (somehow) had to start working even harder. Oktoberfest was absolute murder, but luckily for me, I had already recruited and trained other tour guides to lighten the load because trying to run four sold-out tours a day was a lot for one single gal. The forecast for 2020 was also good. There were guests booked on nearly every tour scheduled for the whole of the year, and the year hadn’t even started yet. I planned to train more guides and offer more tours, but all that came to a screeching halt mid-March. The borders shut down, and every 30 seconds or so I’d get an email notification that yet another guest had cancelled their bookings. Within a few weeks, all the bookings were gone, but I remained optimistic that tourism would eventually return, and used this precious down time, which I hadn’t actually had at all in the previous four years, to finally write the first instalment of my travel memoir, Good Trash: vol. 1.
Tours began trickling in again over the summer when inter-European travel was declared acceptable after the first wave. One of my proudest moments of all happened that fall. I always wanted to run my own ghost tour because ghost tours are my favourite tours. Munich didn’t have one in English, which I found a bit strange. It took years – four years – but I had finally done enough research to put together a fun and ghostly experience and realize that dream. Within an hour of posting the experience online, I received my first booking, and ran my very first ghost tour a couple days later – practically unheard of for a small startup tour company in the middle of a goddamn pandemic. I know, it probably doesn’t sound very impressive to you, but I was really proud of that tour and its instant success, and it also made me feel very optimistic about the outlook for tourism in 2021 and my future in Germany in general (ha!).
My residency permit expired around that time, and I had submitted my application to extend in September of 2020 as well as all the supporting documents and financial statements necessary. But you see, at that time I still had income. Tours were still running, not nearly as profitably as the year before, but there was still some money. But as German Immigration struggled with the backlog of applications from the first lockdown, they dragged their feet with my application, and needed to request all new documents by February 2021. Since we went into our second lockdown on November 2 (which we still have not come out of as I write this nearly six months later), I had obviously stopped working again, and by February couldn’t show any incoming money from the previous three months. Leading to my deportation, and the inevitable destruction of everything I had worked for over the last five years. I had considered myself a self-made Ambassador for Munich – it’s not exactly a transferable title now is it? 😅
German Immigration seemed unmoved by the fact that I spent years dedicating myself to the city and their culture. They only cared about the bottom line: 0 income + 0 husband = 0 residence permit. It didn’t matter that I already had bookings for tours later this year, mostly from excited, already-vaccinated Americans, but still the light at the end of the tunnel was looking brighter every day. But instead of getting to pick up my business where COVID left it last fall, I’m going “home” with literally nothing to show for all this hard work and all these sleepless years. You’d think they would have been a little more flexible given the global crisis, but yeah, Germany isn’t exactly famous for that.
It’s actually funny now that I think about it. Over the last five years I had really convinced myself that German men just didn’t like me (maybe they don’t 😅), but now that I’ve played back the reality of what my life was like here, I think the truth is that I just didn’t have any time for them. At the end of 2018, I finally moved out of that horrible first apartment, and only then – after two fucking years- did I even feel comfortable with the idea of inviting a boy over to my place. But I still had to go out and find said boys, and by the start of 2019 I was already so busy with trying to fully transition into the tourism sector that I had even less time for dating despite spending more and more of my work days in Munich.
I remember around March of that year I had been out on a couple of dates with a guy. I think he really liked me (maybe he didn’t 😅), but he didn’t seem impressed that my tours were getting in the way of date nights. I remember thinking that he was being pretty unreasonable, though. The night that was the “final straw” for him was when he wanted to take me out for a late dinner. I accepted the invitation, but asked if we could meet at 8pm instead of 9pm. I had a tour scheduled early the next morning, and since I was still trying to find my footing in the world of tourism, my tour schedule had to take priority at that point in time. Instead of moving the date up an hour, he just cancelled the whole thing, claiming that we’d go out another night because he didn’t want me “thinking about work” while I’m with him. Naturally, I thought that was a bit fucked up, but despite a few attempts at rescheduling we never saw each other again, and I was, of course, way too busy to even try to go after him. But, to be fair, he probably wasn’t worth chasing.
I guess all of this can be a lesson in finding that healthy work/life balance. Maybe if I had made more time for the “life” aspect of living in Germany, I wouldn’t be in this position now. But, I actually think the real problem is that nobody really likes an independent woman – even when their dating profiles insist that they do. I remember being on a date in my first year in Munich. Over sunny cocktails, the guy confessed to me that he “wouldn’t feel comfortable dating a woman with a PhD.” He felt alright telling me this, though. All I had was a pitiful Bachelor’s degree, and in Germany, the land of free education, this was practically the equivalent of being uneducated. So, obviously, my level of education certainly wasn’t intimidating to the men in this town, but apparently running your own business is. Oh, and so is writing a book.
Once I assumed the identity of a self-made tour operator, I noticed many of my dates turned into pissing contests. I’d frequently encounter MBA holders who wanted to use our date to pull apart every aspect of my businesses until ultimately deciding that I was really nothing more than a glorified tour guide. Apparently my reward for even just beginning to succeed with my ambitions was being less attractive, and certainly not the type of girl that even the most desperate single man would want to quarantine with. And I guess that’s what has ultimately led us to the end of this story, and the end of my German chapter.
You have to wonder, though. Would a single man in my position be banished from a country during a pandemic because said pandemic put a dent in his livelihood? Maybe he would, but I’m not actually convinced. I think a single man is expected to be independent and versatile. A single man will surely bounce back from the pandemic. But a single woman, even one who has survived alone in foreign countries for over a decade, is a liability unless she stops being single. It’s the ultimate single-shaming.
Now, if you read Good Trash: vol. 1, then you’re probably happy that I’m finally leaving this place. And I suppose I should be happy about it, too. And maybe I will be one day because, as I said in the book, if I stay in Germany, I’ll probably be single forever (gasp!). Who knows? Maybe there will be a last minute German hero, who is just so madly in love with this glorified tour guide that he’ll sign whatever legal document he has to just to prevent me from crossing the Atlantic and leaving his side. But, since Germans tend to roll into relationships about as quickly as they apparently roll out COVID vaccines, I really wouldn’t count on it. 😅
See you soon, Canada.
P.S. If you have been waiting for the publication of Good Trash: vol. 2 and the prequel, you’ll unfortunately have to wait a little bit longer as I deal with my unforeseen banishment from Germany. Stay tuned.
Not reading Good Trash: vol. 1 yet? Click on your marketplace below to order your copy today!
🇺🇸 Amazon.com | 🇨🇦 Amazon.ca | 🇩🇪 Amazon.de | 🇳🇱 Amazon.nl
🇬🇧 Amazon.co.uk | 🇦🇺 Amazon.com.au |🇮🇳 Amazon.in | 🇫🇷 Amazon.fr
🇯🇵 Amazon.co.jp | 🇪🇸 Amazon.es | 🇸🇬 Amazon.sg | 🇮🇹 Amazon.it