We were walking the streets of Berlin, surrounded by history and beauty, and yet I was looking for trash cans (and bears). Thankfully they aren’t all that hard to find given their bright orange color. I thought they were so entertaining that I started taking photos of them about halfway through our weekend there. Why should you love Berlin’s trash cans, too? Because they represent Berlin well. This one is fitting because there are 149 embassies in Berlin (not counting […]
The Liebster Award 2016 and Some of My Favorite Bloggers.
You could call the Liebster award the chain email award for bloggers, because each nominee passes it on to between five and 11 other bloggers. It’s also a bit enigmatic; I wasn’t able to figure out exactly who started it (it seems that the original blogger deleted their site), only that it likely began in 2011. But since the goal of the award is to share the love with fellow small bloggers, i.e. bloggers with 200 followers or less, I […]
Coming Home to Schweinfurt.
How long does it take for a new place to start feeling like home? Probably not long if you’ve only moved across town, but it took seven months for me after we moved across an ocean. I wasn’t sure that Schweinfurt would ever feel like home during the 13 months we planned to live here, but yet I started having unexpectedly warm fuzzy feelings about going home at the end of a long train ride back from Berlin. Perhaps the […]
“Why Would You Wear Lederhosen?” and Other Things We Don’t Say in Germany.
There’s no denying it; living in Germany has been hard. Unbelievably hard at times. But it comes with so many rewards that we don’t (or at least we try not to) spend too much time complaining about it. But sometimes homesickness will sneak up behind us and slap us in the face, and that can be very startling. This happened recently when Mr. Meena turned to me on a Sunday afternoon and said, “Let’s go to Wal-Mart.” I started bawling. […]
The Schweinfurt Volksfest and About Our Next Coaster Trip.
I’m not going to pretend like Schweinfurt’s Volksfest was impressive, because it wasn’t. At least not after we’d already been to the larger ones in Würzburg and Nürnberg. I was also a bit upset when I realized the people running the Schweinfurt Facebook page were using photos of the Volksfest from the previous year (without stating that they were doing so), which led me to believe there were different rides available than there actually were. But it’s not every day […]
10 Reflections on Having Family Visit Us Abroad.
We spent 226 days in Germany before we had our first visitor. And after the first one arrived we had a flood of them; our rotation of various Meena family members lasted for 29 out of 44 days from start to finish. After all this time by ourselves in a foreign country it was a bit startling to suddenly have family around again. There were all sorts of emotions to process as we prepared for the visits, spent time with […]
The Way of Reflection (Weg Der Besinnung) in Bad Kissingen.
Bad Kissingen is a small German town that’s only 20 minutes down the train tracks from our own. The Bad in the mean means ‘bath’ and it indicates that the town has natural hot spring (sorry, there’s no ‘Good Kissingen’ anywhere). Bad Kissingen has been known as a spa town for an impressive 500 years and (I’ve been told) it’s a magnet for seniors who like to wear matching pant suits. We had lovely spring afternoon to spare while my […]
More Photos of the Nuremberg Volksfest.
I’ve already shared about our experience at the Nuremberg Volksfest, but I had so many more photos of it to share. I mean, it had pretty much everything you could ever want… such as a mouse coaster. And musical rides. Plenty of Disney characters. A colorful place to sit and drink beer. A place to get turned around, literally. Cigarette vending machines… Because one in four Germans smoke, you know. They have these suckers about every few hundred feet (I mean, uh, […]
Trying to Pay My Bill in Germany.
Dealing with money is quite different in Germany, and trying to pay my bill in a restaurant is no exception. I have to access my money differently, I spend it differently, and I struggle to keep track of the cash flow. I’ve been able to use our US credit card in more places than expected, but frequently I only have the option of using our German debit card or cash. In the US we almost never used our debit card (since it […]
The Mental Strain of a Chronic Illness.
Recently I joined a small group called “Deutsche to go” in order to improve my German speaking skills. On the day before my first meeting, I found myself suffering from mental strain in the form of intense dread. I didn’t want to go. Not because I was lazy or too busy, but rather because I’d be trading more for that language session than 60 minutes and a cup of coffee. I went anyway. At the meeting, I suffered the mental strain […]