Wow, lots of replies. Thanks for the advice, guys, I really appreciate it.
So I think in my frantic state of crazy stress, I may have been unclear on the situation and what the actual problems are. First off, I do not speak Czech. I know about twenty words, and those not very well. So anything involving use of the Czech language is out. I am also NOT an EU national. I have American citizenship and nothing else.
I am not currently working - I'm in a course that certifies me to be an EFL teacher. At the end of this month I can get a job teaching which begins mid-September. Once I get my first check, I'll be fine. I'll have more than enough money for rent and food each month, and even make enough to keep up with my student loans and travel back and forth to Germany for my Visa. The problem is lasting until that first check.
I paid a lot of money for this course, and that includes accommodation in a shared apartment for one month. At the end of August, I'm out on my ass no matter what.
I have extremely little money left in the bank. I did all the calculations before I signed up for this whole thing, and came out with the figure that I'd be okay for at least six months to a year just living off of my savings. Unfortunately, there were a lot of hidden costs, and I'm down to enough money to survive here for about three weeks (if I live on potatoes and bread and nothing else). This is NOT enough money to survive until my first paycheck.
I have been looking into the flat-share option (sharing an apartment with a few other people), but even in this case the minimum I'll need is a deposit of one month's rent, plus the first two months' rent (until I get my first check), so that's three months' rent right there. In addition, I will need at least a few hundred dollars to make that first trip to Germany to apply for my Visa, plus the 99 Euro application fee for the Visa. I also need to buy and activate a cell phone in order to apply for jobs (I currently don't have one) - another big chunk of change right there.
As for jobs, there are plenty around. I plan to apply to all the big schools this weekend and set up interviews. I'll need to get a phone tomorrow so I can put the number on my CV. Once I find a place who wants to hire me, I have to start the Visa application process - something that is MASSIVELY complicated, takes at least six months, costs a lot of money, and apparently is the number one cause of expat English teachers leaving the country before they had planned to. The more I learn about this process, the more unsure I become about staying here.
I mean, I'm okay with living here for a year or so. It's not a bad city, I'm getting familiar with it, and there's plenty of work. But it is incredibly difficult to become legal to work and live here, and looking at my finances, I will most definitely have to borrow money just to make it to that first check. After all this exertion just to break even, in the end I don't want to
stay here.
If my goal is to live in Germany, why am I going to go through all this trouble to stay here? In the end I won't really be any better off than I am now. After a year of working here, I'll probably have about as much in the bank as I do now.
But I can't find any feasible way to go to Germany yet. Not unless I can find someone willing to let me live in their house in exchange for chores and babysitting or something (and I don't know of anyone) - and find them within the next two weeks. The cost of living there is so high that I can't reasonably expect to borrow enough money from my family to get established - and really, the wages as an English teacher are not high enough that I could pay them back anytime soon. My family is not rich, and I just don't see that happening.
If anyone knows anyone who does live in Germany who could afford to feed someone (I don't eat much!) and let them sleep on their couch in exchange for housework, at least until I could find a job and get established, by all means let me know!
As for finding extra work, I have been looking into this. First off, being an EFL teacher is a very strenuous job. There is a lot of travel on a daily basis, a minimum of 26 hours of teaching each week plus 20-30 minutes to prepare each lesson (so very much a full-time 40-hour work week). The lessons are generally planned around business work days, so my free time would be anywhere from 10:00-15:00 (generally used as planning time), while my mornings and evenings would be taken up with lessons. By the end of the day all of the teachers here seem to be too tired to do much else.
I have heard of a few people who earned some extra cash in the beginning by working for a construction company painting rooms, but I've been looking for this kind of work and haven't found any. I will continue looking...
As for marketable skills: I am an excellent translator, but really I can only go from German to English at this point. Translating into German, I always make mistakes here and there, and that's not acceptable if you're doing it professionally. If I could find translation work that I can actually do, I'd be all for it - I'm good at it, it's not strenuous, and it doesn't take too much time. The problem is finding such work. There are a LOT of people, especially in Europe, who speak more than one language, and often one of those languages is English. That means there's LOADS of translators out there, and not all that much work to go around. If anyone can recommend a web site to look at, I'd be all for it.
I also draw comics sometimes, though I haven't had a lot of time to work on them recently. If there were enough people out there who found them funny and had enough money to spend on helping me out, I could try selling T-shirts and prints, but I'm not sure if there are enough people. Especially since I haven't been regularly posting comics lately (this class is extraordinarily demanding and I simply have not had the time or energy to draw new ones). The comic is at
http://asimplelife.thecomicseries.com if anyone's interested.
Other skills... I worked in a law office for a long time and am familiar with general legal procedures in America, but am not sure if the same things apply here, and anyway I don't speak Czech. I have an incredible eye for detail (high-functioning autistic level, actually) and am an excellent proofreader, but don't know if there's any market for English proofreading here. I suppose I could try posting on job sites here and see if I get any offers. I'd have no idea how much to charge for that, though - any ideas?
Wow, I've posted a whole hell of a lot more than I meant to. Guess I got on a roll. If you've managed to read all the way through this massive wall of text, I thank you for your commitment to helping me!!! You guys are really a big help. My current plan seems to be try to find a way to earn extra cash, if it fails borrow some from the family (I have a very strong resistance to asking for money, even as a loan, but I guess it's better than being homeless), and try to get established here. Meanwhile, try to get in touch with the people I know in Germany (they all seem to be on vacation) and see if anyone knows anyone who could use a live-in maid for a month or two.
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Topic: European Crisis Time (Read 3414 times)