Today I finally received my Moldovan residence permit.
Writing that sentence feels considerably simpler than the process behind it.
For the past several months, Moldova has already been our home in every practical sense. We live here, we are rebuilding our daily life here, and increasingly our plans for the future are centred here. But today was the day when that reality became official.
I am now legally resident in the Republic of Moldova.
Why Moldova?
The decision did not happen overnight.
Toward the end of last year, my partner and I started seriously discussing whether remaining in Berlin still made sense for us.
The fundamental problem was actually quite simple: we never really felt at home there.
Berlin is an extraordinary city in many respects. It is international, historically fascinating and full of opportunities. But a city can have all of those qualities and still not feel like your place.
For us, it never really did.
We lived there, worked there and built routines there, but there was always a certain feeling of being temporary residents of somebody else's city rather than people building a permanent home.
My partner is Moldovan, so Moldova had naturally been part of our lives for years. I had visited the country several times before we moved here, and my experience was almost the opposite of what I felt in Berlin.
From my first visits, Moldova somehow felt comfortable.
Not perfect. Certainly not without problems. But comfortable.
The pace of life, the people, the size of Chișinău, the accessibility of everything and even the somewhat chaotic mixture of Eastern European and increasingly European influences appealed to me.
It felt human-sized.
And, perhaps more importantly, I felt that I could imagine building a life here.
The Car That Disappeared
There was another event that pushed us further toward making the decision.
On 13 November 2025, my Peugeot 5008 was stolen from outside our home in Berlin.
I had owned cars for decades.
Brazil, New Zealand, Ireland, Germany — many countries, many cars, many years.
I had never had a car stolen before.
Not once.
Then it happened in Berlin, directly outside where we lived.
The insurance report from that day is painfully concise:
Schadenbeschreibung: My car was stolen.
That was it.
A car that had been part of our daily life simply disappeared.
Of course, one stolen car is not a rational reason to leave a country. Cities have crime. Bad things happen everywhere.
But life decisions are rarely made because of one isolated event.
The theft became another item in a growing list of things that made us ask ourselves a more fundamental question:
Why are we still here?
If we did not feel particularly attached to Berlin, if our future did not feel anchored there, and if Moldova already felt more like home, perhaps it was time to stop treating Moldova as somewhere we visited and start treating it as where we lived.
So We Moved
Eventually, we made the decision.
Not as tourists.
Not for a few months.
We were going to try to build our life in Moldova.
At the end of March 2026, we left Germany and drove east.
There is something psychologically important about relocating by car rather than simply boarding an aeroplane.
Your old life does not disappear instantly behind an airport security gate.
Instead, kilometre by kilometre, country by country, you physically move yourself from one life into another.
Germany disappears behind you.
Then Central Europe.
Then Romania.
And eventually Moldova appears ahead.
We arrived in Moldova at the beginning of April.
And then the process of turning a move into an actual life began.
Starting Again
Moving countries is much more complicated than moving apartments.
You need somewhere to live.
You need banking.
You need insurance.
You need government registrations.
You need to understand rules that everybody born in the country considers obvious but nobody has ever explained to you.
You discover that seemingly trivial things — opening an account, registering an address, buying a car, obtaining insurance — suddenly become projects.
We bought another car in Moldova.
Nothing particularly glamorous: a large, inexpensive, practical car that could carry people, boxes and whatever else we needed while reorganising our lives.
Shortly afterwards we returned to Germany for a period to collect more of our belongings and deal with unfinished matters there. Then we drove back to Moldova again.
By that point, psychologically, the direction was very clear.
Germany was becoming the place we were leaving.
Moldova was becoming home.
Then Came Immigration
The next obvious step was to formalise everything.
As a German citizen, I could enter Moldova easily, but visiting a country and actually living there are two completely different legal situations.
So began the residence-permit process.
This is where I learned one of the more interesting characteristics of Moldovan bureaucracy.
Government institutions generally have a statutory period — often up to 30 days — to answer requests.
And, remarkably often, the answer appears very close to the end of those 30 days.
If you need clarification about something, you ask.
Then you wait.
If the answer creates another question, you ask again.
Then another clock starts.
A process that theoretically looks straightforward can therefore stretch across months simply because every uncertainty introduces another waiting period.
Much of my difficulty came not from hostility or deliberate obstruction, but from inconsistent information and communication.
One office tells you one thing.
Another interpretation appears later.
A document turns out to require another document.
Something you believed was completed turns out not to be visible in another system.
And because you are a foreigner, you do not necessarily know which part of the process is normal and which part represents an actual problem.
The Payment That Apparently Did Not Exist
Eventually, I reached what I believed was the final stage.
The required fees had been paid.
The documents had been submitted.
Everything appeared to be finished.
Then, when I went to collect the permit, the immigration authorities could not find evidence that the fees had been paid.
Fortunately, I had kept my receipts.
I handed over my copies as proof.
So instead of receiving the residence permit that day, the collection had to be postponed once again while the payment issue was resolved.
Another delay.
Another appointment.
Another small bureaucratic adventure.
At that stage, there was very little left to do except wait.
And Finally, Today
Today I went back.
And this time there was no new missing document.
No unexplained payment problem.
No additional request.
No new 30-day clock.
They handed me the card.
Republica Moldova — Carte de Rezidență.
Temporary residence.
Purpose of residence: EU citizen.
Issued: 18 August 2026.
Valid until: 11 August 2031.
Five years.
I looked at the card for a while because it represented something considerably larger than a piece of plastic.
It represented the end of one very long administrative phase.
And the beginning of another part of our life.
What Changes Now?
In practical terms, quite a lot.
I now have a Moldovan personal identification number.
My residence and address are registered in the Moldovan system.
I can establish a much more normal relationship with Moldovan institutions, banks and services.
There are still plenty of things left to organise.
Health insurance is one of the next bureaucratic puzzles.
Banking is another.
There are financial arrangements in Germany that need to be reorganised.
There are business projects I want to develop here.
There is property to renovate.
There are still boxes to unpack and administrative ties to Germany to unwind.
But the central question — Can I legally build my life here? — is no longer open.
The answer is yes.
Moldova Is Not Germany
And that is part of the attraction.
Moldova has problems.
Infrastructure can be inconsistent.
Government procedures sometimes require patience.
Administrative systems do not always communicate perfectly with each other.
The economy is much smaller.
Salaries are lower.
The country is still transforming itself.
But Moldova is also changing extremely quickly.
There is an energy here that I find difficult to describe to people who only know the country from statistics.
It feels like a country still deciding what it wants to become.
Moldova is moving toward the European Union while carrying with it an extraordinary mixture of Romanian, Russian, Soviet, European and local Moldovan influences.
Sometimes those worlds collide.
Sometimes the results are frustrating.
Sometimes they are fascinating.
For somebody who spent much of his life working with technology, infrastructure, organisations and transformation, it is a very interesting place to be.
Feeling at Home
Perhaps the most important part, however, has nothing to do with economics, politics or bureaucracy.
It is simply this:
I feel comfortable here.
I can walk through central Chișinău and feel that the city makes sense to me.
I like that the centre is compact.
I like the cafés.
I like the parks.
I like that families are everywhere.
I like that there is still a sense that neighbours know one another.
I like that people can be remarkably direct while simultaneously being extraordinarily generous.
And because my partner is Moldovan, this is not simply another foreign country for us.
It is connected to her family, her history and now increasingly to our shared future.
From Visitor to Resident
For years I came to Moldova as a visitor.
Then I started spending longer periods here.
Then we began talking seriously about moving.
Then we packed the car.
Then we crossed the border.
Then came months of documents, translations, registrations, payments, appointments, questions and waiting.
And today the process reached its symbolic conclusion.
I arrived in Moldova as a German citizen trying to understand whether this country might become home.
Today I received a card saying, officially, that I live here.
That feels like a rather significant milestone.
There will undoubtedly be more bureaucracy.
There will undoubtedly be more surprises.
There will probably be moments when I wonder why a seemingly simple procedure has somehow turned into twelve emails, three offices and a 30-day waiting period.
But that is part of relocating to another country.
You learn the system.
You adapt.
You solve one problem at a time.
And eventually the unfamiliar place stops being somewhere you moved to.
It simply becomes home.
Today, Moldova officially became mine.
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