It happened a long time ago, when I was still a child growing up in Germany.
My family had just moved from the UK — not all of us kids (the older ones stayed behind). It was just my Mum, Dad and me — and suddenly everything around us was new: a new house, a new school, a new language, a new life.
Before moving, my parents and I had all taken German lessons, but inevitably, they forgot things I remembered. I was only eleven, and my mind was still fresh — a sponge soaking up every word and phrase. Before long, I’d become the family’s emergency translator — the one they called for help with bills, banking, insurance, housing, and all the small, terrifying grown-up things that come with life abroad.
It made me feel oddly important for my age.
At eleven, you don’t usually get to handle “official” things. And I must admit, I loved the sense of responsibility — standing beside my parents at the bank or the post office, explaining something I’d only half understood myself, feeling like I was helping steer our new life in this unfamiliar place.
There were days when I got completely stuck too — this was long before Google Translate, and if you forgot your dictionary, you were quite literally in der Scheisse.
I’ll never forget the sheer terror of having to phone someone about something in German that I didn’t even understand in English. That was a special kind of panic — the bureaucratic kind.
And looking back, I think those were the moments when it really sank in that I wasn’t a tourist anymore.
Tourists don’t call insurance companies.
Tourists don’t do tax forms.
Tourists don’t get scolded by a man in a government office for bringing Formblatt C instead of Formblatt D.
For many of us who move abroad, the realisation that we’ve “crossed over” from tourist to local survivor comes not when we settle in, but when we’re forced to face the systems that keep a country running — the bills, the taxes, the forms, the rules we didn’t know existed.
That’s when you truly understand you’re not just visiting. You’re living.
And honestly? That first taste of German bureaucracy might have traumatised me slightly, but it also taught me something: once you’ve wrestled with admin in a foreign language, you can handle anything.