August 30th, 2010
Recently I enjoyed reading Julia Child’s My Life in France (with Alex Prud’homme). It’s a great book (and the first one I ever read as a Kindle edition on my iPhone). Anyone who has lived abroad or spent only a brief time in the French capital will appreciate it even more. Julia’s husband Paul worked for the United States Information Service (USIS) in Paris from 1948 to 1954. A remark he made about language learning somehow struck me as profound:
“It’s easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don’t bring you oysters.”
- Paul Child, quoted in My Life in France*
Julia goes on to say: “At least he could communicate. The longer I was in Paris, the worse my French seemed to get. I had gotten over my initial astonishment that anyone could understand what I said at all. But I loathed my gauche accent, my impoverished phraseology, my inability to communicate in any but the most rudimentary way. (more…)
Categories: Daily life, Expat issues, German language, learning German |
Tags: ACTFL, German language, Hyde, ILR, language proficiency, learning German | No Comments
August 23rd, 2010
Being a foreigner once again here in Ireland, after finally not feeling very foreign in Germany, is a new adventure. I finally learned the little cultural tricks in Germany, like not putting my hand out for change at the bakery, but waiting for them to place it on the little tray on the counter, and even the big ones, like closing doors out of habit in every room in the house. And now it all begins again…
Warning: This blog may be a bit rambly; I’ve spent all day delving through moving boxes, directing people and lugging furniture.
I’ve managed the driving bit, at least as far as the smaller roads around our little country town are concerned, but I think I will never be able to employ my excellent Autobahn passing skills in this country. First of all, people just don’t drive that fast. Second, I would be (more…)
Categories: Expat issues, History and culture, Miscellaneous |
Tags: Aldi, Du and Sie, expat, foreign, formal, Germany, Ireland, LIdl, Sarah | No Comments
August 16th, 2010
I admit that I was probably a bit whingey in my last message. I’ve had some time to get over my homesickness for Germany and Europe and embrace San Diego. It’s nothing like Deutschland, but the living is so easy and the weather is as perfect (always in the 20s C/70s F and no humidity) as they say. The people are also extremely friendly and positive. So positive, that it rose my quasi Teutonic suspicions at first.
Instead of sulking back and looking for things to complain about since the weather wasn’t going to hold anymore, I decided to smile back and enjoy the sun! Meanwhile, our relocation agent asked me what was the one thing I missed most since being in San Diego. My answer was my friends and being able to speak German.
I knew that we would encounter more German speaking families once our kids started at Die Rasselbande, the German preschool we found in San Diego. But it would be another six weeks before our older daughter would start there.
(more…)
Categories: Daily life, Expat issues, German vocabulary, History and culture |
Tags: Fizzz, German culture in America, Germans in San Diego, Jane, relocating, restaurant review, San Diego | 1 Comment
August 9th, 2010
Weakness is often, to mangle a perfectly good cliche, in the eye of a beholder.
People move to Germany for lots of reasons. Following a loved one who has had a transfer, caring for family, learning experience, new adventures and so on. It can be a dream come true. Eventually, though, most of us have to get back to that reality of making a living. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that because your German skills and knowledge of German business culture is not fully up to speed that you are at a disadvantage.
(more…)
Categories: Daily life, Expat issues, Work and employment matters |
Tags: Geoff, jobs | No Comments
August 2nd, 2010
I was recently reminded of how much vacation time Germans get. I sent an email to a gentleman at a German publishing house with whom I had been corresponding, only to get a reply from his secretary that read: “Danke für Ihr Mail an Herrn K. Hier nur ein Zwischenbescheid: Herr K ist zur Zeit im Urlaub.” (”Thanks for your email to Herr K. Here just an interim notice: Herr K is on vacation.”)
What was I thinking? Trying to contact a German business person in mid-July or August? The whole country goes on vacation in the summer. (That’s in addition to the week or two they spent in Greece, Spain or Turkey during the winter.) Northern Europeans live to see the sun in the summer that they never saw all winter! Germans can fly to the US for a four-week summer vacation, with all of that time being paid annual leave. (more…)
Categories: Daily life, Expat issues, Work and employment matters |
Tags: EU, Germany, holidays, Hyde, paid leave, vacation | No Comments
July 26th, 2010
Like Jane and her husband, we are also on our way out of Germany. Unlike them though, we are becoming expats once again, this time in Ireland. There are so many things I love about living in Germany. This move happened quickly, and it was a choice for us, but it is scary and I can only imagine what I will miss about Germany, even while I look with excitement toward the new experiences that await me and my family in our new country (mit einem lachenden und einem weinenden Augen).
There are things I know I will miss and there are things that I know I won’t miss. For all my moaning about Germany, I know I have it good over here. This becomes especially apparent when friends from the US come to visit. I’ll start with the things I will miss: (more…)
Categories: Expat issues, History and culture, Miscellaneous |
Tags: food, Germany, Ireland, leaving Germany, parking, Sarah, schools | 1 Comment
July 19th, 2010
We’re a long way away from our Swabian village. Here in sunny California, the roads are wide, parking is plentiful and you throw everything away in one place. Welcome to the land of plenty. We’ve been here for one week, and my mind has been in a big jumble sorting out major decisions such as where to live and what cars to buy.
The differences abound and the culture shock is subtly creeping in: translating 2nd floor to 1st, writing dates with the month first, converting ounces and pounds to grams, and bad driving. Here’s a running list of things I’m adjusting to:
- Buying organic. As Sarah once wrote, bio is pretty mainstream in German and much more affordable. I almost cursed in front of my children when I read how much frozen organic peas were at Vons: more than double the price of half the size we usually got in Deutschland.
- Turning right on red. We love this one! Unlike in Germany, you are permitted to make right turns at red traffic lights here in California! (more…)
Categories: Expat issues, Miscellaneous |
Tags: Jane, moving, relocation, repatriating, San Diego | No Comments
July 14th, 2010
Lots of ruckus has been made over the past few months, including here on this blog, about Europe’s reaction to Facebook, Google Streetview and the like. It finally took a self-promotional e-mail from a professional acquaintance to get my ire up enough to actually write about it.
The ire inducing part didn’t have much to do with my acquaintance directly. It was that the “people who you might know” section along the bottom which is designed to get us connected was eerily accurate. All but one were, in fact, people I knew.
(more…)
Categories: History and culture, Miscellaneous, Tips, advice, suggestions |
Tags: Facebook, Geoff, Google, privacy | No Comments
July 5th, 2010
I’m an avid reader, and always have been. But as an expat in Germany, it wasn’t always easy to feed my fervent need for reading material. When I was a kid, I sat between my brother and sister in the back of the car for every vacation with a pile of books at my feet. Or, this being the seventies, I sat on the floor of the car with the books on the seat. My brother, who was dyslexic, couldn’t be bothered with much more than Tintin, but I went to the library and grabbed a stack of books that were beyond my age and reading level, but kept me happy.
When I first moved to Freiburg in the early 90s, I quickly noticed the gaping hole that came from having no access to the library, and no money to buy books myself. Sure, there were English books in the German bookstores, but you really had to depend on someone else’s taste and hope that one of the ten books available appealed to your taste. The UB had books too, but these also tended towards the classics, and there is only so much of that sort of the thing that a person can consume without being hungry for something lighter. Magazines at the train station were 10 - 12 DM a hit, and when you read as fast as I do, it quickly becomes a very bad Preisleistungsverhältnis (price-performance ratio).
I remember the sheer desperation of the situation hitting me when I had to plunder a shopping cart of castoff books that someone left in the hall of the dorm, reading anything I could find that was in English, even dark mysteries and very bad true crime stories, which normally aren’t my thing. This approach did open new literary doors, as it were. At that point in my German career, I could read German, but not well. I managed to drag myself through Rosamund Pilcher, but couldn’t be bothered with much else. Nowadays, I can read German almost as well as I can English. But with the stress of my life, job and everything else, I still prefer English. (more…)
Categories: Expat issues, Miscellaneous, Tips, advice, suggestions |
Tags: amazon, books, English books in Germany, expat life, Germany, reading, Sarah | No Comments
June 30th, 2010
You’ve probably heard of the 1930s and ’40s screen star Hedy Lamarr, but you may not know about her fascinating contribution to science. If you’ve never heard of Konrad Zuse, that’s understandable, but it’s way past time you learned about him!
Google paid tribute to Zuse with this odd logo on June 22, 2010, the 100th anniversary of the German inventor's birth.
The German engineer Konrad Zuse was born in Germany in 1910. Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, Austria in 1913. They were European contemporaries, but their lives took very different paths. Zuse lived all of his very productive life in Germany. Lamarr left Austria in 1937 to become a Hollywood movie star at MGM. (more…)
Categories: History and culture |
Tags: computers, Hedy Lamarr, Hyde, Konrad Zuse | No Comments
