Michigander to EuropeanPatti - October 10, 2017
How did I end up in Switzerland?
The short version:
My husband is Swiss. We attended the same university in the U.S. We fell in love, got married, and moved to Switzerland.
The long version is so much cooler though:
It starts with me as a little girl being fascinated by the glimpses of other cultures brought into our home by visiting missionaries. I’ve always felt a romantic attachment to Europe, and after my first two-week breeze through seven European countries at 17 years old, the attachment became more like a fish hook in my heart, and Europe was reeling me in.
My parents started raising support to become missionaries to Germany when I was a freshman in college (Sep 2009). My degree in history required a language, and German seemed to be the obvious choice.
Fast forward one year to my sophomore year. I was involved in multiple musical ensembles, and my first day of Concert Band, I was seated next to this very shy, but very intelligent looking young man whose name I could never quite get. The few times we spoke, I noticed he had an accent, but it wasn’t until several months later that I found out he was from Switzerland. I may have “let slip” that I was learning German, which seemed to please him very much ;) .
The summer of 2012, Elias and I were chosen to travel with our university’s European Musical Mission Team. For ten weeks, I watched him play the trumpet, translate, and minister to others, and I knew I liked him a lot. I also fell deeper in love with Europe. Though our feelings were mutual, neither of us said anything until the spring of 2013, right before we were supposed to travel a second summer with the team. Our team had a strict no dating policy, so after briefly acknowledging our feelings, we politely ignored each other until the end of the summer, at which point we were both certain that we wanted to be together forever.
That fall, I started a master’s in cross cultural studies, and Elias started a second bachelor’s in premed (because getting a bachelor of science in math in only three years is not impressive enough, he got his premed degree in two years.). We got engaged December 31, 2014 and started the long and difficult process of applying for a visa. Moving to Switzerland was never even a question for me. I loved the culture and I already had a head start on the language.
Finally, everything went through, and we got married August 15, 2015. We moved to Switzerland immediately after the wedding, with a stop in the Azores for a honeymoon. My husband started med school in Zürich and my in-laws’ neighbors kindly let us stay in their guest apartment while we looked for a place to live. We chose to live in Gossau, St. Gallen because of the wonderful church, and because my friend Anna was married to the pastor’s son.
We welcomed Miriam Ann to our family on July 4, 2016 – she is definitely half American! Elias travels to Zürich every day for class, and works from home as a part time computer programmer for the university (told you he was smart). I have the privilege of staying home with my daughter and enjoy being a Swiss Hausfrau!