Katharina + Katharina

Getting lost in the city while searching for the best ice cream, Sevilla showed us its prettiest corners and it literally felt like paradise. Living the dream while being sick, we were optimistic until we got to Barcelona. Stay tuned to know who stole our smiles and ruined our optimism.

Social Butterflies were hitting a new level of volunteering work: social media takeover for Alissa Katharina and classy bed-climbing (or in bed-staying) for Maren Katharina. Sharing the housekeeping-workload with our volunteer buddies, working for this Hostel was fair. We had our first monthly editorial job besides badge-optimizing and portfolio-power.

Starting the next hostel experience as a volunteer, we arrived together with a french invasion to the biggest hostel we worked for – so far. Our days in Sevilla were fueled by chia pudding, tapas, Tinto de Verano, as well with antibiotics and rooftop sun-bathing while working on our laptops.

With a 12 hours holiday in Lisbon, we found ourselves in the South of Spain after a nightbus ride. Welcome summertime in Sevilla. Not knowing this will be the last city of our adventure... Optimistic that we will have the time of our lives again in a new setting, it all came to an end with a boom. And this boom was expensive. Listen to the whole new season, and you will know what happened.

Having weekend-visitors brought back some weekday routines. Enjoying the time, guided by our tour guide incognito, we discovered new places – although Alissa has been in Porto before. Living a network-life, we felt the 21st century with connecting via Instagram. Even though there were no green spaces and it was hilly, hilly, hilly, Porto got our hearts in those 5,5 weeks. Obrigada to everyone!

The firsts continue: first time in a Co-Working space for us. And it wasn’t the only one. In Porto we extended the variety of working spots in the name of change while making new friends and job collaborations. Coffee culture is big in Porto and we have seen it all (?). Go and listen to this episode the whole way to get some recommendations.

Loads of firsts in Porto: yoga in the morning, (extraordinary) self-made breakfast, a netflix series and audio books scream "self care". Calming down in our home base with a Porto (Tonico) and friends.

In season 05 we talk about our prime time in Porto, living in our own apartment, being the boss of our daily routine and deciding for which healthy cooking option we are going for. Learning the lesson that paying rent can be relaxing. You want to know why? Go and listen to the upcoming season.

Exploring Rotterdam and exploring the Netherlands. This is about what we have done in our free time with welcoming visitors and visiting friends, making new friends while being on the construction side and falling in love with the ironic culture of the dutchies.

Fulfilling bigger jobs and random tasks, we spent hours doing extraordinary work. Part of the daily hostel routine was drying floors, wiping stairs, vacuuming stories and carrying bed sheets. Listen yourself if you want to find out what „Extra Attention“ means.

Talking about our contemporary home in Rotterdam in between the trash and the storage room. Living in the basement while people are partying in "Clock Tower" four stories above our heads. The dutchies introduced us to their beloved toasties, to Stroopwaffles and Oliebollen all the way to Kapsalon.

Season 04 is all about our month in the Netherlands. Our time in this harbor city is best described with walking stairs, eating (mostly) unhealthy, visiting friends and building a "Tiny Villa". Staying in the city with the motto "Rotterdam Make it Happen", Rotterdam made it happen and they made us work. Receiving vouchers for the Hostel bar and working our butts off resulted in not spending a lot of money and not having time to explore as much as we wanted to. But hey, our motto became "Saving money" and in the end it was successful – listen to this short episode and you’ll get to know the details and a bit more.

"Many cents make a Euro." That is definitely the motto of Latvian market stand owners. For us this was a big change after spending six weeks in Stockholm where we didn’t use a single coin at all.

Talking about what we did in Rīga work-wise, we combine talking about our jobs and tasks. So it is about climbing beds, no-shoe-policy, Corporate (Social) Design and Photography (Clients).

To continue with the things we experienced in city number two, this is a quick episode about many „first-times“. Rīga was filled with loads of nice discoveries - regarding our alimentation as well. It was about tasting sours and bitters, about bread in various forms and about (liquid) sweets.

New season, new city. Welcome back! With the last episode we finished the Stockholm season which means this one is about city number two. A lot of people asked us why we had chosen this capital - and where the heck it is located. Seemingly not a lot of our buddies knew it. Neither did we. But the little bit we had heard about it made us curious enough to find ourselves on the ferry, crossing the Baltic Sea on a rainy day in October 2019. Most of you probably already know where our way through Europe led us next. Listening to this episode and to the entire new season, you will dive into our experiences in the middle of the Baltic countries.

The final of Season 2: "Apple Pay + No Cash" is about our fixed monthly costs as well as differentiate expenses. We are completely open about everything. This is probably a great summary, because you know everything about our accommodation, food, jobs + tasks if you’ve listend to the previous episodes and now you’ll get to know the financial aspects about them. So here we go: quick, short and simple.

It's about the random and funny tasks which we happily fulfilled to survive in Stockholm. Stockholm might be the city we had the most random things to do – so far. We don’t want you to think, we went traveling as graphic design freelancers and had enough clients to finance our adventure from the start. Some tasks aren’t that glorious or what we’ve ever dreamed of, but they always brought a bunch of laughters and smiles. And they were part of the whole deal.

Did we work while we were staying in Stockholm? Did we work on design projects? Or did we only helped people out to have a roof above our heads? What exactly did we do job-wise in six weeks? We will take you on a user journey to introduce our first "Katharina" clients, we talk about what we did for them, about our struggles and learnings and about the things we would improve the next time.

Invest 13 minutes of your time if you're interested in our food choices while living in Stockholm. We will talk about our hostel choices, workaway benefits and our serious Kanelbullar addiction.

We did not bring our throw tents to Stockholm neither did we sleep under a bridge. We couldn't find a volunteer job in a hostel nor found a trustworthy host for couchsurfing. And in the end we still had 44 amazing nights in Stockholm. Curious where we stayed? Check out our Accommodation Episode for Stockholm "Carpet + Gårdshuset".

This episode is about planning and bureaucracy. We'll talk about what we did to get ready for our digital nomad adventure and what german bureaucracy obstacles we needed to overcome to make it happen. Book a ticket to the first destination Tell everyone what the plan is Start networking with locals (friends, clients and agencies) Contact possible sleeping locations Create accounts (workaway, instagram, splitwise) The biggest part tough will be about german insurances. Here's a quick overview what we cover and our expenses to be covered. health insurance – Krankenversicherung (Maren + Alissa: reversionary insured) reversionary insurance –Anwartschaftsversicherung (Maren: ~60€/month + Alissa: ~60€/month) foreign health insurance – Auslandskrankenversicherung (Maren: ~30€/month + Alissa: ~60€/month) emergency insurance – Notfallversicherung (Alissa: part of foreign health insurance) foreign liability insurance – Auslandshaftspflichtversicherung (Alissa: part of foreign health insurance) travel accident insurance – Reiseunfallversicherung (Alissa: part of foreign health insurance) travel luggage insurance – Reisegepäckversicherung (Alissa: part of foreign health insurance) liability insurance – Haftpflichtversicherung (Maren: ~6€/month) legal expenses insurance – Rechtsschutzversicherung (Maren + Alissa: ~24€/month #teaminsured) occupational disability insurance – Berufsunfähigkeitsversicherung (Alissa: ~60€/month) equipment insurance – Equipmentversicherung (Alissa: ~18€/month)

This episode is about us, Maren Katharina + Alissa Katharina, and our idea of living in several cities all over Europe as digital nomads. We recently graduated from design universities in Germany and finance ourselves through graphic design while traveling. Warm hearted people, big cups of coffee and good design make our hearts beat faster. This sentence pretty much nails it but if you want to know more, listen to this episode and you’ll hear where we come from, how we met and all the similarities we share or differences which drive us even further.