Facts

Alix is a mum of three children who is from England but was raised in two cultures as her dad is English and her mum is French. 

She moved four times already and really appreciates living in Norway now! Alix does not think that she will stay in Stavanger forever, but she would love to stay a couple of more years.

Alix is a geophysicist but she is establishing her embroidery business more and more these days and is selling her work around the whole world! 

Childhood and Youth

Alix spent her childhood and youth in the UK with her parents and siblings. The family was used to travelling to France a lot as half of their family lives there!

For university Alix moved away from her parent’s house to Leeds, where she started off with mechanical engineering. Whilst working on a course team project, she realized that all of her peers were very excited about the topic, only she did not care about it very much! That is where she found out that she did not really want to study mechanical engineering and switched to study a Bachelor’s in geophysics. She absolutely loved her new field of study because it contained maths and physics and it was even connected to geology, which she was also passionate about!

After her Bachelor’s degree, Alix did take a gap year from university and went travelling. She went backpacking for eight months in South America and Asia and worked as a waitress as well as in factories to save for her trip.

Once Alix came back to the UK, she did the best and most exciting Master’s she could have dreamed of: a Master of Research in Physics of the Earth and Atmosphere! As her Master’s supervisor was a Volcano Sciencetologist and was on the Board of Advisors for the Montserrat Volcano in the Caribbean, Alix did her Masters in Volcano seismology and ended up going to the Caribbean’s for a one month’s research!! 

Working life

After graduating from university, Alix got a job with a geophysics company in England which required her to go to Houston for three months as a part of her training. On her flight to Houston she met another novice of the company who as well as her was going to have the same training in Houston. 

They started dating straight away, but were together only for six weeks before he had to go to Egypt with the company! They did not really plan to stay together nor had they broken up, they just tried and got through a lot of phone calls, emails and different time zones! After he had been to Egypt, he had to go to Thailand next and Alix had to move to Oslo for nine months, but they still “stayed together” and made their long-distance relationship work somehow.

All in all, their long-distance relationship lasted for three and a half years. He was working nine weeks away to have a break of five weeks afterwards where he would first go to Tunisia to see his family and then he had a couple of weeks to stay with Alix. 

As they were still so young, she never thought about marriage although they were serious with each other. For her boyfriend though, it was very different because culture-wise he started thinking about marriage straight away when it got serious with her! 

After she came back from Oslo, Alix worked in the UK for the same company for another six months until she got a new job with a company she had also interviewed for after her graduation! It all fell into place for Alix! With the new company she was able to take a position in Tunisia for six months and whilst she had her own flat there, she was able to spend time with her boyfriend’s parents and his family on the weekends to get to know them and their culture better! 

When Alix’ future husband proposed to her, it was a total surprise for Alix! Of course she said yes straight away but they definitely had not planned for it together! He proposed in 2009 when Alix was in Tunisia so that she would be able to get to know his broader family as well, because as culture works in Tunisia, his parents would not have been able to introduce “a girlfriend” to the rest of the family.

After her exciting and one could say life changing half a year in Tunisia, Alix worked in the UK again whilst her future husband was working in Qatar. 

In 2010 they celebrated a full Tunisian wedding in Tunis with friends and family from all over the world. The wedding lasted for five days and had many traditional ceremonies with more than 500 guests!

Who would have thought back then, that in the end she would get married to that man that she had met on the plane!!!

Family life

Unfortunately, even after their wedding, they were still living apart from each other for another year! When they finally decided to settle down together, he received an office job in the UK within his company and soon after they became parents to their first baby in August 2012! 

As they both had insane commuting times to their offices each day, which made their working day much longer, Alix had started working part-time after their baby boy had arrived. This way, her son only had to spend three whole days in childcare, the other two days she was able to spend a lot of wonderful time with him!

In July 2014 Alix’s daughter was born who then joined her son in childcare for three days a week.

Around that time, Alix company was taken over by another company and lots of jobs were going to be lost as well as that the office was to be moved ever further away from Alix home! Therefore, Alix was happy to take the voluntary redundancy package as she did not have many chances to be taken over as a part-time employer anyway. 

For Alix it was a great gift to become a stay-at-home mum because secretly she wished for more time with her children the whole time! But surely, you would not step out of your career without a good reason. So from now on, Alix stayed at home with her daughter whilst her older son started primary school.

A year later, her husband was offered to move to Texas together with his family as expats. Although they knew Houston already, Alix did not really want to move as they had settled in the UK now within a nice community with lots of friends around! It was a good opportunity for her husband though and they wanted to have another baby anyway so why not to have it in the US? Finally they moved and stayed in Houston for 18 months.

After nine months in Houston Alix found out that she was pregnant again and only a few weeks later it was announced that her husband’s company was bankrupt!! Of course, job losses were expected and it was all going to go very quickly! Alix and her family were already getting ready to go back to the UK… At least his boss wanted to keep him, but the UK offices were to be shut down sooner or later…there was so much uncertainty!!!

In the end, Alix’ husband started to search for a new job all the quicker…and he found a job offer in Norway! The interview went so well that he received an offer from them straight away! So much luck in such a situation! The next problem was though, that they did not get any spots for their children in the British school and the move to Stavanger was supposed to be only six weeks after Alix was expected to give birth to her third child!! We can only imagine how stressful and very uncertain Alix’s situation back then was!! Of course they had not been to Stavanger before either and did not really know what kind of a city they were moving to.

Only very soon before they moved to Stavanger, they were able to get spots in schools and nurseries for their two older children so at least that worry was out of the way but they still did not have a house to live in! 

In their first three weeks in Stavanger, Alix and her family had to stay in an Airbnb with their two pet cats, their dog, their two children and their new-born baby…not to forget the owner’s cat!! It all sounds funny now, but I would not have wanted to be in their situation at all!!

At least, Alix and her family were reimbursed soon after, when they found their dream house by the water for their time in Stavanger!

Second career

Alix is not sure if she would want to go back to her career when her youngest starts school as she really likes being there for them in the holidays and making it possible for her children to play with their friends on their street in the afternoons as much as they want!

She would rather like to be able to make a living out of her embroidery business, her second career which she started with her move to Norway! Alix taught herself the art of embroidery in order to find some piece in her challenging moving life and she has the incredible gift of copying people’s faces including their feelings and emotions from pictures to embroidery!! It definitely is worth it to find her work on Instagram (@alixsouissi) or facebook (alixsouissi embroidery art)!

As Alix grew up having family in two different countries, it does not feel strange to her to live far away from her family. She actually could imagine staying in Norway for much longer as she really loves the country and the lifestyle the country brings with it! Of course, as expats we know, we might want things, but they do not always turn out the way we imagined…but I am very curious to see how Alix’s story will continue!!