Permanent Stranger: Paul Hughes on Finding Home Everywhere and Nowhere
Episode #0041
You know that moment when a story catches you off guard and not because it’s grand or groundbreaking, but because it’s familiar? That’s what happens when Paul Hughes, a Brit who swapped Swindon for Amsterdam and then Germany, starts talking about his life abroad. He doesn’t glamorize it. He unwraps it, piece by piece, letting the little contradictions and unexpected laughs breathe.
From Swindon Dreams to Amsterdam Sirens
Paul’s story starts in Swindon, England “the town everyone drives past but never stops in.” Behind his childhood home stretched a park, and beyond that, more parks his first boundaries to push. He always wondered what lay past that next fence. Turns out, the answer was love. Or, as he admits with a grin, “It was a girl.”
That “girl” was German, working for Tesla when it was still this mysterious, world-changing company. When the job moved to Amsterdam, Paul followed. No job, no plan just a feeling that the story needed turning.
He remembers lying awake that first night, sirens echoing through the city, whispering, “You’re not in Swindon anymore.” That mix of fear and excitement hit differently, the way only big leaps do. But then came the discovery: how open strangers could be, how work appeared right when the bills piled up, how cities even foreign ones somehow soften when you start calling them home.
The Rolling Stone Phase
One year in Amsterdam led to Frankfurt, then Wiesbaden, Stuttgart, and Mainz. Each move had a job behind it or maybe a restlessness. He laughs that Frankfurt felt like “a US city without the perks.” But Wiesbaden? That one touched something deep. Cobblestone streets, quiet wealth, and a small sense of belonging. “It felt classy,” he says. “It felt right.”
When he and his wife returned years later to celebrate his fortieth birthday, it all came flooding back: the easy chatter, familiar faces, a local restaurateur refusing payment out of sheer kindness. “It was the first time I’d felt truly at home since leaving England,” he recalls. That moment reshaped his compass not towards a place, but a feeling.
Learning (and Laughing Through) the Rules
Some expat stories obsess over bureaucracy. Paul treats it like background noise the rhythm of life in Germany. There’s humor in his struggles: learning “supermarket German,” being scolded by strangers on bike paths, or realizing that “complaining is basically a religion here.” And yet he finds poetry in those moments too. The order, the noise curfews, the Sundays when everything stops “It’s not about inconvenience,” he says. “It’s about respect.”
Even language, his old nemesis, comes with a silver lining. He has what he calls “restaurant Deutsch.” Enough to order a schnitzel, not enough to impress his father-in-law. But he’s fine with that. “I listen to understand, not to correct,” he says a quiet metaphor, maybe, for how he engages with life now.
Between Integration and Isolation
There’s a melancholy in his words, gently disguised by humor. He talks about being a “permanent stranger.” In England, he’s changed too much. In Germany, he’ll never fully fit in. “Home,” he says, “is wherever my wife is.” But maybe that strangeness the knowing you belong partly everywhere and nowhere is its own kind of freedom.
He plays baseball in Mainz, drinks wine made ten kilometers away, grumbles about Autobahn drivers, and admits that happiness, for him, “looks like comfort and survival.” Yet between those lines, there’s magic the quiet kind. The kind you only find when you’ve let go of what “home” is supposed to mean.
The Ordinary Magic of Staying Curious
Paul’s takeaway isn’t about bravery or reinvention. It’s about curiosity the same one that pushed him past the fences back in Swindon. “Every city looks the same,” he laughs, “but what makes them different is the feel.” That’s his compass now: to chase the feel, not the facade.
He’s written a book “There’s Nothing Wrong with Germany, but Here’s 50 Things You’ll Notice” a love letter wrapped in lighthearted gripes. When he talks about it, you can hear something else too: gratitude. For the mispronounced words, for screw-top wine bottles, for the feeling of being a little lost and still choosing to stay.
Maybe that’s the real magic of Paul Hughes’ tale not that he found something extraordinary abroad, but that he learned to see the ordinary differently. To notice. To laugh. To live somewhere between cultures with a beer in hand and a story always unfolding.
