Where should we go? Partly a Christmas break wishful thinking thread...

[stormbrendan]

We've been living in our current location for 3 years but don't feel very settled or tied to the area. We have no personal history or family here and while we (pre-teen DC included) have a few friends they are more acquaintances than lifelong friends. We don't want to go back to our previous town as we'd felt we'd 'done that' so we're at a bit of a loss as to where to go next. DH has been made redundant but is in an occupation where he should be able to get another job fairly easily, and mine is temporary, so we want to make the most of the opportunity to move on.

We don't speak any other languages so it would need to be somewhere where the DC could attend an English speaking school, at least initially.

Where would you go if you could go anywhere? I'm thinking quality of life/interesting though sunshine would be a bonus.

Florence or Barcelona. I lived in both briefly many years ago and they are beautiful places (and both have an international or english speaking school)

I'd go to Canada or the USA, but if I went to the US I wouldn't go to the south or anywhere "too" Republican.

We live near Frankfurt. Lots of bilingual schools about, which are much cheaper than the English-speaking international ones.
We live in a still quite rural area with lots of woodland, lakes, etc. Takes us about 30 minutes to get to Frankfurt on public transport.

Thanks for your replies. I've thought about the States and even though I love many things about it I worry about the gun culture. Canada is tempting and I always thought I'd love Vancouver but a poster on here slated the place when they left saying how drugs had overtaken the city. Obviously not something you think about when a tourist but more pertinent when thinking about living there and raising children.

Florence and Barcelona seem pretty touristy to consider living in on a day-to-day basis. And possibly good as a young single or couple but possibly less so with non-Italian/Spanish children.

Frankfurt though is under consideration though. How long have you been there fuzzy? Do you have German connections or did you start from scratch?

My family are originally from Germany, so we've got someone around, which helps. DH is British, though, and I had spent all of my adult life in the UK.
We moved here nearly two years ago, sold our house in the UK last Christmas and moved into our current house early in 2019. We rented after moving initially to give us time to find a house here and to decide whether we wanted to stay for longer.
DS attends a bilingual kindergarten and we're still deciding whether to send him to our local state primary or one of the bilingual private schools here. His language skills are coming along quite well although he's still mixing languages quite a bit.
DH seems to enjoy it. His language skills are still quite poor but he is improving. He works in an international environment so doesn't need to use German much. There's also quite a large expat community around here and most people do speak English anyway.
I quite enjoy having seasons. We get 30+ degrees in summer and below 0 in winter. I do miss loving close to the sea, though. Our old house was 500m from the beach. We've got lots of woodland around here, though, which is also nice.

Thanks for your reply, fuzzy. That sounds really promising, particularly on the language front, and good that you're enjoying it there. Interesting about the weather. I remember some lovely hot summers by the lake after school when staying with my German penfriends - they were in the south though.

As I say, it's all up in the air at the moment but I may PM you if anything further comes up.