We would like to tell you our tips and story to help you with the things to prepare before going on a 6 months trip: to answer the question, how to plan a 6 months sabbatical from Germany, as good as possible :)
1. Motivation. Be eager to spend a long time with the person travelling, without working and discovering the world
2. Ask your employers whether a sabbatical is an option in the company. In Germany, some of the big companies offer this! So luckily enough we could do it :) I would like to thanks again our employers for letting us enjoy this opportunity!
3. Plan the places to discover. Planning the places you want to visit, the things you want to discover in each land, the things you want to learn before the sabbatical and during the sabbatical, or even the trip itself will allow you to be motivated for the sabbatical, have anticipation for the trip months before it arrives and in a way even live the trip before it happens. Moreover, planing the trip itself will allow you to do massive savings of about 60% on the total travel as you can see in this post of budget traveling.
4. Immerse in cultures: once you’ve planned enough you can do fun stuff before the trip to already start knowing how the cultures are. Learn how to cook different Asiatic dishes, learn a language from abroad, etc. We’ve prepared this post to learn a language from abroad since now there are thousands of tools to do it. You can of course use Duolingo, which is the most popular way of learning languages in 2023. But you can even get private lessons from mother tongue speakers with an application called italki (Èric used it to improve his German and learn Japanese for the trip).
5. Start packing early to optimize what you will take for the trip for ultralight packing and if you can take advantage of the hot weather of some countries by sending a suitcase to the countries where the weather might be a bit cooler. Sending a suitcase to Japan is a bit challenging so we have created a dedicated post for this.
6. Plan your move out ahead of time. The best way to go on sabbatical while not spending a lot of money is to rent your apartment. Either by subletting it during the 6 months, as we did, or by subletting your appartment for a longer period of time if you’re the owner.
7. Prepare all the documents that you will need. e.g. international driving license, Japanese translation of the license, visas for each country, certificates of vaccination, international health insurance, travel insurances.
8. Read about the regulations of each country. Especially, when driving a drone, you should be aware of the regulations of each country specifically. For example, in Indonesia or the Philipines they’re very relaxed about drone flying but in Thailand or Japan you need to fill out several documents and pay some fees. The regulations are still difficult described and we tried our best to describe them in this coming post.
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