Discussing expat life in German-speaking Europe


Posts tagged Jane

Enjoy the Silence

Jul14
2011 Written by jjpark

It used to annoy me that I couldn’t do any shopping on Sundays and that our Saturdays were so hectic racing from one shop to the next when I first moved to Germany. Like anything in life, I got used to it. In fact, I started to like the fact that there was some time without the claws of commercialism … although that was never a major concern in southwest rural Germany.

The same goes for “Hausordnung.” Coming from the land of the free, it takes Americans some getting used to not only be able to run out to the grocery store or Walmart at 2 AM and run a load of laundry at a similarly unconventional hour. But, then I found that my mind and soul got used to having silence midday and roughly between 8 and 8.

When I came back to America, READ MORE »

Posted in Daily life, Expat issues, History and culture - Tagged ,

A German Sense of Order Restored

Jun14
2011 Written by jjpark

As I’ve recently blogged, I’ve been pregnant for the last nine months in America. It was a miserable pregnancy. While I was fortunate to not have any complications such as gestational diabetes or preeclampsia, I was debilitated by the discomforts of being so large and being stretched and pulled and swollen and from a significant decrease of energy. With two little ones who require a lot of attention, it was necessary for me to bring in some extra help in the way of assorted non-German babysitters and grandparents.

While I’ve been extremely grateful for the help and couldn’t have survived the pregnancy without it, it resulted in some new influences infiltrating our attempts at maintaining a sense of German order. READ MORE »

Posted in Daily life, Expat issues, Miscellaneous - Tagged , , ,

Made in America

May20
2011 Written by jjpark

My family and I went through yet another life changing experience four weeks ago with the birth of our third child here in San Diego, CA. Child #1 and Child #2 were born in southern Germany, both positive experiences, so it was with curiosity and trepidation that I embarked on this experience in a different country the third time around. I began chronicling this experience in a previous post. Here is the rest of the story. READ MORE »

Posted in Expat issues, Medical matters, Tips, advice, suggestions - Tagged , , , , ,

Living the German Way Part III

Mar22
2011 Written by jjpark

I was disappointed to read that my fellow blogger, Sarah Fürstenberger, was leaving our ranks as German Way Co-blogger for the time being. She and I had become friends through recording by blogging the same chapter in life as American wives of German husbands living in Germany. Coincidentally, she and I also left Germany at the same time this past summer.

Although I was sad to no longer be able to keep up with her American/German family’s new Irish life through her blog posts, I could also understand her sentiment that her heart wasn’t in blogging about the German Way anymore. Often, when my week rolled around to blog, I felt at a loss as to what to blog about. It’s been about eight months since we left Germany, and our lives have significantly changed: our daughters, though still bilingual, speak mostly English now, we start to shiver at 60 degrees F (16 degrees C), our consumption of paper products jumped exponentially when we became members of Costco, and we barely buy or eat cold cuts (Aufschnitt).

I realized though that despite the dilution of our German-ness, there were beliefs and pursuits of the German Way of Life that I was still committed to. First and foremost on that list has been finding a pediatrician that suited my parenting philosophy. How do I characterize that parenting philosophy? Well, to oversimplify for the sake of this blog post, it is pretty mainstream German for under six year olds, in other words, more kumbaya and fostering play-based learning. READ MORE »

Posted in Daily life, Expat issues, Medical matters, Miscellaneous, Tips, advice, suggestions - Tagged , , , , , , ,

“Kölle Alaaf” in San Diego!

Feb16
2011 Written by jjpark

It’s February. In our process of settling in as a Korean American German family here in San Diego, the next event on the calendar was Karneval. I mentioned the holiday to my daughter expecting her to recall some of it from her Kindi days in Aalen at least from pictures of her as a cowgirl jumping on a trampoline or going out the door as a butterfly. She didn’t. I presented it to her in a different way, “Remember Fasching, Vera?” That seemed to ring a bell for my Swabian girl.

For the first time, our daughters’ German preschool here in San Diego organized a special adult-only party on the first Saturday evening of this month at the German American Societies of San Diego. As my husband is from the Rhineland, Karneval country, I had left the costume planning to him. This task did not sit high on his list of priorities, so it was the Thursday before the party, that we found ourselves a bit panic stricken with figuring out what to wear. Going in “plain clothes” was not an option. If we were to go to a Karneval party, we would have to go all the way. We were further restricted by the fact that I am seven months pregnant, so even if there were any costumes left to buy at Party City, most would unlikely fit me. I finally had a solution, which my husband reluctantly went along with: sauna goers! We didn’t actually go in the buff, but we put our matching bathrobes to good use.

We were named the Sauna couple or "Sauna Paar" that evening.

We were named the Sauna couple or "Sauna Paar" that evening.

READ MORE »

Posted in Expat issues, History and culture - Tagged , , , , ,

An Adjusted Adventszeit

Jan10
2011 Written by jjpark

In the past week, I had to adjust to the fact that Christmas is OVER, a week earlier than I had become accustomed to. I was used to our southern German world being shut down not just from the week of Christmas to New Year’s but also through the first week of January thanks to Three Kings. (Note: During my time writing for the German Way blog, the most Wiki-ed or Google-ed things I’ve had to look up are Catholic holidays and food.) I missed my older daughter’s first gymnastics class last Wednesday. Back in Aalen, there wouldn’t have been Turnen or any Musik Schule or anything like that scheduled.

This year, I missed the Adventszeit and the tradition of celebrating Christmas time for the whole month of December. And although Christmas decorations start being sold at Target the minute Halloween goes on clearance, that is not the same. I feel that Christmas is largely for consumerism here. Adventszeit is more oriented towards baking Weihnachtsplätzchen together (though I’ll concede that an American Christmas cookie exchange is an efficient and smart thing. I admire my friend Moni and my husband’s Tante Liane for baking at least 10 different kinds of cookies for their cookie bags/tins each year.) The point of a Christkindelmarkt in every town is not just to sell as many tschotchke to as many suckers as possible, but rather to provide a cozy space for people to drink their Glühwein together, for children to pet some farm animals and ride some rides and of course for us to find some sweet, handmade, wooden ornaments to share with our poor, plastic-invaded relatives back home. READ MORE »

Posted in Daily life, Expat issues, German vocabulary, History and culture - Tagged , ,

A Seventh Child Gets Lucky

Dec06
2010 Written by jjpark

Since we’ve left Germany, I try to keep up to date with some of Germany’s domestic news through such resources as Deutsche Welle. As my lucky number is seven, I was curious about an article entitled, “Unlucky number seven causes headache for German President.”

Apparently, thanks to a law made in 1949, German families may request that the German President act as godfather to their seventh child, in the event that one is born. President Christian Wulff was called upon to fulfill this role to a family in the northeastern federal state of Mecklenberg -Vorpommern or Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. What may seem at first glance as a run of the mill duty of a figure head became a loaded decision. Apparently, the family in question has close links to Germany’s far-right National Democratic Party or NPD which has included a close friendship to recently deceased party leader Jürgen Rieger. READ MORE »

Posted in Expat issues - Tagged , , , , ,

Pregnancy in a Post-DE World

Nov02
2010 Written by jjpark

One of the most challenging factors in my family’s relocation from Germany to San Diego this year has been doing all of this during the first trimester of a pregnancy. For anyone who has close experience with this 3-month (often longer) phase, it can make life extra challenging. As the newly pregnant woman, you are often depleted of energy, hit with exhaustion as suddenly as being run over by a Mack truck and tortured by the urge to puke at various, unexpected moments during the day.

While this is not my first pregnancy and is in fact my third, I often feel like a newbie at this as I learn how to navigate or re-navigate health care and motherhood here in America. My first two pregnancies and births took place in Germany, experiences which I was extremely satisfied with. The tendency towards natural and homeopathic care was in line with my own preferences. How much of these positive experiences could I replicate during my third journey into motherhood in the New World?

The first difference which occurred to me was when I needed to find a doctor in order to confirm why I was “late” and the reason for the sudden aversion to seafood and need to sleep an extra 10 hours a day. I realized that I had to work backwards. Although I had collected a few OB/GYN names recommended by my neighborhood dentist, I needed to decide now where I wanted to give birth. In America, unlike in Germany, your prenatal care provider delivers your baby and is affiliated with certain medical facilities. READ MORE »

Posted in Daily life, Expat issues, Medical matters - Tagged , , , ,

More German than the Germans

Oct11
2010 Written by jjpark

Slowly, we’ve found ourselves integrating into our non-German lives here in America. Instead of hearing the phantom ring of our default Siemens ring tone melody, I’ve gotten attuned to hearing our Uniden telephone gently playing the Star Spangled Banner. Something I cheekily programmed, lest the palm trees outside of our doors didn’t remind us enough of where we were.

Although we are getting more settled, there’s room for reflection at every turn still. What always struck me when I was living in Germany was how picking your career path, often at such an early age, was a real commitment. It wasn’t something that you waited till you were 21 or so to kind of start thinking about. On one hand, I found it a shame that a concept that could be so enriching as a liberal arts education wasn’t mainstream, and I also found it stifling and foolish that it would take years of retraining to switch careers. On the other hand, with every visit to America while I was still an expat, I appreciated the in depth knowledge of his goods which a German shopkeeper might have and understood why the bread tasted so good in Germany instead. On the other hand, it was exciting and motivating to think that there were all of these possibilities in America. If you wanted to become a preschool teacher, why not! You could! If you wanted to work in a bakery, come on in! READ MORE »

Posted in Expat issues, German language, History and culture, learning German, Miscellaneous - Tagged , ,

Living the German Way in San Diego Part 2

Sep13
2010 Written by jjpark

The sun is still shining here in San Diego. After 6.5 weeks of being homeless, living in hotels and staying with my parents in Pennsylvania, my family and I are finally installed in our own house, which we now call home in a neighbourhood called Kensington. We are gradually settling in to our new lives here.

We’re not in Kansas anymore
The Germans in my house, namely my husband and two daughters, are enamored with the ice maker in our refrigerator, insisting on having ice in all of their drinks. My older daughter stares enraptured at the microwave, witnessing cold rice going in and hot rice coming out. We didn’t have a microwave in Germany by choice, and I wouldn’t have bought one here except that they seem to be standard equipment in most houses.

We tried the Bavarian Rye bread, which had been recommended by the German members of the North County deutsche Spielgruppe, from Trader Joe’s. My husband said it wasn’t bad, but I couldn’t eat much of it. I begged him to make me some Kässpätzle this evening. It was a nice treat for someone else to cook, but even though he did an excellent job, the Spätzle just didn’t taste the same. It was because of the eggs. READ MORE »

Posted in Daily life, Expat issues, History and culture, Miscellaneous - Tagged , , ,
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