A Year In Köln

We moved from Istanbul to Köln/Koeln/Cologne at the beginning of February 2021. Amidst the lockdowns, fears and confusion of a pandemic that turned everyone’s world upside down, we made a radical move and changed everything about our lives. It hasn’t been a bad decision so far.

I am an Adult Third Culture Kid. When I was five we moved to Oxford in the UK, two years later we moved back to Turkey. A couple of years into elementary school, we moved to Ibadan, Nigeria. Five years after that we moved to Fairfax, Virginia in the US. After university, with an undergraduate degree in English Literature and Creative Writing, I returned to Turkey on my own and started living in Ankara. Two years later I was moving to Istanbul. In the thirty three years that followed, I got married, had a son, started my own business teaching creative writing and thought I had set roots and this would be where I would live out the rest of my days.

About five years ago, my husband, half Turkish and half German, applied for German citizenship for him and our son. With the refugee crises that followed it took four and a half years for the paperwork to finalize.

Things change. That’s the one constant isn’t it? So we decided we’d give Germany a try. Could we live there? Did we have enough income to see us through? Would we like it? We bought plane tickets, came for two weeks to Köln in January of…