When I found out about the Frühjahrsmesse & Frühjahrsvolksfest (Spring Fair & Festival) happening in Würzburg I knew we couldn’t miss it. It’s been a long winter without much to do nearby, and we hadn’t visited Würzburg since the Christmas Markets were in town. The fair starts three weeks before Easter and is the first big fair in Bavaria. According to the Würzburg city website, the amusement park has some 50 attractions and plenty of food and drink options (including […]
6 Thoughts I Had at the Schweinfurt Fish Market.
1. Is this just an excuse to have another festival? Probably. 2. Wait a minute, this might be an excuse to sit outside and drink lots of beer. That’s more likely. 3. Why is there a giant pirate ship? I don’t know. But they serve beer. 4. Is that Linkin Park that I hear blasting? Yes, and it’s coming from the merri-go-round… 5. Can I ride this?? YES!!! I can and I did and it was awesome. Mr. Meena might […]
A Typical Day in Our Hotel.
Have you ever lived in a hotel? We’re seven months into our stay in one and it’s testing my sanity a little bit. This is how a typical weekday goes. 5:30am: Mr. Stomp Stomp, our upstairs neighbor, wakes up and begins stomping back and forth in his bedroom, directly above my side of the bed. I wonder what he is doing. 5:45am: Mr. Meena’s alarm goes off and he slowly wakes up (he is not a morning person at all). I […]
12 Differences I Experienced While Going to the Movies in Germany.
We’re really not big movie goers in general. We like using Netflix and usually we have enough patience to wait until a movie is released on Google Play so we can rent it for just a couple bucks. We used to have a great setup for watching movies at home before we sent all our stuff into storage and moved to Germany. Even when we did go see one it was usually in the afternoon (matinee prices!) and a week […]
The Schweinfurt Pigs.
I started learning about the Schweinfurt pigs the day that we got the offer to move there. There isn’t a lot of information about Schweinfurt available online (you can read most of it in about an hour) and the pigs were the only thing that was interesting to me at the time. It was my one fun fact to share when I told people about the small German town that we were moving to (because 99.9% of people had no idea […]
What America Means to Me as an American Abroad.
As an American living in Germany I’ve established a better understanding of how Germans (and Europeans) generally view Americans. The first thing that I learned was that some people don’t like it when you say you’re from America – which I can totally understand. They want you to be specific and say you’re from the USA and not just gloss over the fact that plenty of other countries are also technically ‘America’. This topic never comes up when you’re living […]
Me vs. Medication.
I hate taking medication. I always have, even when I was just a child with a cold (that syrup was nasty). Yet, as someone who has (so far) accumulated two chronic illnesses, taking medication isn’t really optional at this point. (Update: now I have three.) I’ve been on so many different medications already: anti-inflammatories, corticosteroids, anti-malarials, anti-depressants, opiates, muscle relaxers – the list goes on. My biggest issue with medication is that it never gives me something without taking something […]
You might live in Germany if…
We’ve learned so much about Germany over the past seven months and we’ve picked up a few strange habits along the way. Here are some things that we’ve observed to be true about life in Germany. You might live in Germany if: You know that the autobahn is not as much fun as most foreigners think it is. You have lots of insurance policies. You have very little patience. Maybe none at all. You’re a boss at conserving electricity. And […]
Street Art / Graffiti in Germany.
I expected to see strange things during our life in Germany, but I can’t say that prolific graffiti was one of them. At first it was startling to see street art and/or graffiti on nearly every surface. The paint isn’t just on the buildings and walls, it’s on the streetlights, the electrical boxes, even the commuter trains. According to the The German Way, the issue of graffiti in Berlin alone causes 35-50 million euros of property damage annually. Some cities actually provide […]
Our Impromptu Trip to Gemünden am Main.
We woke up early on Sunday morning excited about our plans to visit Erlangen. The Deutsche Bahn had other plans for us, however; plans that included taking a train to Bamberg, boarding a bus for an hour or so to another train stop, and then taking a train to Erlangen. This train-bus-train thing didn’t really float our boat so we decided to try again next week since the issue probably won’t last long (we think that the train tracks were […]