I was born in Poland, but lived most of my life in Germany where I went to school and then to university. I hold a master’s degree in business administration.

At the moment I keep myself busy with being a member of the parents association in my children’s school, selling second hand uniforms in school and teaching children religious education. I enjoy going to the gym, to run, to hike or to bake cakes.

When I was younger, I was always picturing myself living my whole life close to my mum, who I dearly loved.

A whole lot of incidents later, I definitely was not an expat, it just happened that my husband and I were living on a 2-year one-off (I thought) contract in the UK!

Since we were living rather rural in the east of England with only one other expat around us, it honestly did not feel like being an expat at all. That was just our life now! But maybe the gradually extension from 2 to 5 years should have made me think…

After returning to my husband’s company home-base Hamburg in Germany, I honestly did not think we will ever move again!

Although it did feel a bit awkward in the beginning, being kind of “new” to Germany (you would not think that so much would change in 5 years) and already then, I was feeling more comfortable around the expats in Hamburg, I was still happy planning along for our future in Hamburg.

It was not more than 1,5 years later; I just started to feel comfortable in our new surroundings, that we were packing up for my husband´s new assignment in Norway.

Here, expat life struck me! In Stavanger, the oil capital of Norway, it feels that every third person is an expat. Here, being an expat really feels like it!!

Having two children in an international school, since our beginning in Stavanger, my whole life revolves around the international expat community.

Here, a lot of the people have seen places, I have never even heard of before! Here, people have left their home countries long time ago to travel around the world and move every couple of years. Here, people do not know what their future (future in terms of: in 3 months) holds. Here, people think in a different way than people do, who normally do not move.

I still struggle to see myself as a proper expat, I mean, I still hope to return to Hamburg after our second one-off assignment. But the longer we stay away from “home”, the more “complicated” it feels to return to a “normal” life.