I often wander around my local German supermarkets struggling to remember what the German words are for the foods I need. I stand in the aisles trying to use my translator app on words that don’t always translate and usually end up confused. But every once in a while I’ll see a food with “American” splattered across the packaging and I’ve just got to try it. Not only do I miss American food items that we can’t find in Germany, […]
Category: Expat Life
Returning home and reverse culture shock:
Are These Really My People?
Repatriation: Our First Week Back in the USA.
Our Reintegration into the USA.
100 Days Back Home.
50 Things I Miss from Germany.
Living in a foreign country:
Meeting Our New Home in Schweinfurt, Germany.
Our First Week as Expats in Germany.
American Food According to Germany.
10 Reflections on Having Family Visit Us Abroad.
A Day in the Life: Expat in Small Town Germany.
Coming Home to Schweinfurt.
50 Things I Miss from Home.
Expat Living in Schweinfurt, Germany.
The difficulties of expat life:
A Typical Day in Our Schweinfurt Hotel.
Foreign Words and Currency: Trying to Pay My Bill in Germany.
Expat Frustration (Also Known As: Germany Makes Things Hard).
One Year Without – a blog series about living with less as expats:
Introduction.
One Year Without a Vehicle.
One Year Without Community.
One Year Without All the Small Stuff.
What We Couldn’t Do Without During Our Year of Living with Less.
One Year Without: What We Gained by Owning Less Stuff.
Blog roll:
An American Goes to the Doctor in Germany.
I’ve had excruciating back pain for over a year now that manifests whenever I sit or stand for more than 30 minutes. It’s a pinpoint type of pain that radiates from my eighth vertebrae. I do okay if I’m walking quickly or lying down but that’s about it. As you can imagine, it puts quite a damper on our travels around Germany. We saw several doctors and I had so many tests done in America it would make your head […]
My Love Hate Relationship with the Cleaning Ladies.
Mr. Meena and I are living in an extended stay hotel for a year… and it’s a lesson in patience. The cleaning ladies come and do a (scheduled) thorough cleaning once a week, but they often show up when I’m not expecting them. Like when they walked in on me sleeping, woke Mr. Meena and I up last Saturday for new towels, and yesterday they walked in on me in the shower. These are my feelings about the situation. […]
My Bare Necessities (What We Shipped to Germany).
Our stuff is here! It arrived last week! It was like Christmas in October. We were fortunate that Mr. Meena’s company paid to ship up to 200 lbs. of our possessions in addition to paying for storage for what we left behind. We shipped five boxes and they arrived almost exactly one month after we did. We were excited about it mostly because of our warm clothes (coats and socks, especially). But there are a few other things that I […]
An Expat and a Housewife: My Dilemma.
The cleaning ladies have arrived and done their job quickly and quietly. I’m quite relieved that it wasn’t the same woman from last week because I’m still not over that embarrassment. As I was watching them clean, which is always awkward for me, I was reflecting on how that is one less thing that I have to do. For an entire year I don’t have to do the regular and routine cleaning for my living space. I’ll just have to […]
Our First Week as Expats in Germany.
Yesterday marked one week since our arrival in Germany. It doesn’t feel like that long because my body refused to function properly until the third day. At first it was very surreal to be here in Deutschland, yet it never takes long for a new place to feel like home. In my last post I talked about how stressful it was to pack up our things and prepare to move here. It was amazing how all that stress dissipated once […]
Our First Souvenir.
I slept for nearly the entire first day that Mr. Meena and I visited Schweinfurt (I had been awake for almost 30 hours because I can’t really sleep on planes) but he was determined to explore the city immediately. Aside from getting to have his first döner, Mr. Meena happened to find a stuffed animal that bears a very close resemblance to our Koopa. I greatly miss my little buddy whenever we are away, so when Mr. Meena woke me up with […]
Meeting Our New Home in Schweinfurt, Germany.
Mr. Meena and I spent four short days in Schweinfurt, Germany, to prepare for our move there in less than a month. It was encouraging and a bit terrifying at the same time. A lot of people at Mr. Meena’s company have told us that most Germans speak English and are happy to practice it whenever they get a chance. This was not what we experienced. I understand a bit better now what foreigners that visit America for the first […]