French in Action

Yesterday was the last day that our relatives from Calais were visiting. My niece, Manon, likes to run up to me, throw her arms around me and call me tonton Curtis, a sweet way of saying "uncle Curtis". It's very strange hearing that because I first heard the word tonton for «tonton Guillaume», the name for the favorite uncle in French in Action, a teaching course used to teach French to English speakers. The course is 52 half hour television episodes, accompanied by reading and writing materials. It's developed a bit of a cult following amongst those who learned French this way and they even had a 25 year reunion of the actors. Going from watching an educational TV series about French to hearing myself called tonton Curtis was a rather strange, but pleasant feeling. 

If you have a chance to learn French via this program (check your local university as many use it), I highly recommend it.

Not much of a post today

French relatives in town again today. Took them to an inexpensive Italian restaurant last night. It's right off Leidseplein and most plates only cost €5. With a couple of drinks, dinner for all of us came to only €32. not bad!

I keep forgetting that people over here often don't have "sliced" pizza. My wife tells me that in France, they always eat pizza with a knife and fork. Eating with the hands in public simply isn't done. Takes a bit of getting used to, but I had tortellini al gorgonzola, so no struggle for me.

Hackathon

This weekend I've been participating in the 2011 Perl QA Hackathon where many of the people involved in the Perl programming language come together from around the world and work face-to-face developing new tools or fixing old problems. Some of these folks are friends of mine whom I've known for years and others are new faces. I've no idea how many countries are represented but just off the top of my head I know of people from:

• Austria
• France
• Germany
• The Netherlands
• Turkey
• USA
• United Kingdom

My wife and I at the gorgeous
Crater Lake in Southern Oregon

I'm sure there are many more nations represented, but it's just after six in the morning here and I'm a bit too tired to think

My friend Phillipe from France asked about this blog and as he's also a father, he asked me how on earth I was able to post five days a week. I told him my tricks, including have many relevant sights bookmarked and having Google searches emailed to me daily and keeping my eye out for interesting discussions in Reddit's IWantOut community, but mostly I just manage to write two or three posts over the weekend and post them during the week. That only leaves a couple of more I'm actually writing during the week.

Which is my way of saying that since I was at the Hackathon for two days (and today), plus the fact that my sister-in-law and her family are now visiting from Calais to see her new niece, I've not written anything about expat issues this weekend. I try to have good posts with plenty of links, but those take a lot of time. This week might simply be quick posts about life (believe it or not, but this is a quick post because I didn't have to do any research).

Not Photo Collection: Paris

In this blog I have, roughly, four "types" of posts.

1. How to move abroad
2. How to stay abroad (assimiliation, dealing with homesickness, etc.)
3. Random stuff when I don't have much time
4. Dreams

Fridays are usually about dreams. These are to get your head in the right spirit. You need to be able to keep your dreams fresh and in your mind if you want to accomplish them. Normally on Fridays I post a photo collection. I originally did this because researching for this blog and maintaining it are hard work and I thought photo posts would be quick and easy and I was dead wrong. It's a lot of work to find six related photos which are both aesthetically pleasing and appropriately licensed. Then I have to post and caption the damned things.

Today is simply a pair of videos by YvelinesFrance. Just music, no words, and all Paris. It's 18 minutes of Old-World beauty and would have been quick to post had I not written all of this.

Getting your Overseas Exile Fix

This is very off-topic, but I know that a lot of folks simply bookmark this site, hoping to come back to it or they hope to find the URL in their email after being sent it by someone. I used to do that a lot.

For those of you who don't pay much attention to the Internet beyond reading interesting stuff, you can catch up with Overseas Exile by "subscribing" to this blog. You can subscribe to my Atom feed or my RSS feed in your favorite feed reader and automatically receive new content. Google has an nice help page explaining how feeds work.

My daughter at nine weeks

I personally use Google Reader. You can sign up fo a free Google account (if you don't have one already) and in the top left hand corner, you can click the "Add a subscription" button and paste in the URL of the site you want to subscribe to. If they have feeds, every time you log into Google Reader, you'll automatically see the latest content there without having to remember to go back to the site and check every time.

Feel free to share other suggestions below, but remember that people who know what they're doing may have already subscribed, so suggestions should be for easy to use software.

Danish Green Card

So I've posted about the Czech Green Card. The Danish Green Card is another beast entirely and it's a completely different way in to Europe, not just in terms of destination, but also method.

From one of my trips to the lovely city of Copenhagen

If you've been reading this blog for a while — or just researching moving abroad in general — then you know that the basic way to acquire a work permit is to apply for a job while outside of your target country and then the company applies for the work permit. You must not be in the country while the permit is issued lest it be considered invalid. The rules on this are so strict that I was forced to miss my father's partner's funeral in the UK because I was getting a work permit issued.

Countries do this because they don't want people seeking work on tourist visas and possibly becoming illegal immigrants if they don't find it. Denmark has tried a different approach, the Danish Green Card. This allows you to move you and your family to Denmark for up to three years and live there while you look for work. There are several preconditions:

• You must score 100 points on their assessment
• You must document that you can support yourself financially for a year
• You must have health insurance
• You may not receive any public funds

Again from a trip to Copenhagen

The points are fairly straightforward and are well-documented. You'll need at least a bachelor's degree (30 points) to qualify for the green card and you'll receive a bonus of 10 points if your education qualifies you to perform a job on in which they have a skills shortage.

You must also speak one of Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, English or German (since you're reading this, you can figure out which one you qualify for). They make it clear that even if you speak English, without the ability to speak Danish your opportunities in the Danish market are somewhat limited. You will also be given a few points if you've worked in your field recently, gone to school in the EEA and are young enough.

You'll need to have the equivalent of around $1,100 to $1,300 US per month (for a year) to prove that you can support yourself. Obviously, this will increase if you bring your family.

This is a fantastic scheme for a fantastic country. I've been to Copenhagen twice and not only is the city gorgeous, but the people are friendly and things are simply relaxed. It's also possibly more bike-friendly then Amsterdam. You should also be happy to note that Danish is a "category 1" language and thus is considered easy for English speakers to learn.

The Better Life in Europe

Just a quick post today, but in case you're wondering why almost 1 in 4 US expats live in Europe, I think this article sums a lot of it up. Many Americans came over here for the sheer beauty of Europe (thousands of years of history adds up over time), but we stay for the better life. We have better health care, less crime, and our politics, while arguably screwed up in many ways — as you'll find everywhere — are far less hostile than the politics of the US.

London, Houses of Parliament
Photo by Brianna Lehman

And it certainly doesn't hurt that you can drive for a day and pass though multiple countries, just waiting to be explored.

And a couple of quick notes about yesterday's Czech Green Card post. First, it was pointed out to me on Reddit that the Czech Republic does not usually recognize dual nationality. If you wish to us the Czech Green Card as a permanent route to Europe, you will either have to give up your own nationality if you take citizenship, or accept permanent Czech residency which means that you can't live and work in other EEA countries, but at least you'd still be living in a gorgeous country and can easily visit the others.

Second, in one day, the Czech Green Card post has become this blog's fifth most popular blog post of all time. I expect it to rise through the ranks even further as today progresses. Obviously the "secret back door to Europe" really grabbed people's attention. I knew it would be popular, but not that popular. I won't focus exclusively on Europe, but maybe I should put more emphasis there if that's what people want?

And while we're at it, I've found yet another article about Americans giving up their citizenship. The only major industrialized nation to tax its citizens abroad, but they refuse to count us in the census and a quarter of us who vote never get our votes counted. Truly this is taxation without representation.