I've written before about how I have been planning on becoming a mentor to a newly arrived refugee in my local community. The journey has been slow at getting started in terms of actually connecting with my mentee despite numerous thwarted efforts. Meanwhile I have...
Before Hyde sends me a message to “gently” remind me that my blog post is due today, I figured that I should get something up here. It isn’t my preferred style to just throw something up here, half-baked or half-thought through, but I realised that I'm on the "verge"...
I continue to navigate my way as a parent of bilingual children. We extol the joys and merits of having children grow up speaking two languages -- the cognitive agility, the tendency towards more open-mindedness, and the acquisition of the language itself. The nuts...
It's that time of year again. If you were in the United States right now, you wouldn't miss a beat in knowing what I was talking about. Thanksgiving is just around the corner. Although this great American tradition is not celebrated in Germany, expats and their...
Your child is a native English-speaker in the German school system. So now what? Many of us expats are raising our kids multilingually. In many of these cases, our children are native English-speakers. We've been told that this is a great thing to do, and I for one...
Accidents happen. Unfortunately one happened to a child of mine under the watch of an au pair whose redeeming characteristics became harder and harder to appreciate as the weeks of her time with us went by. Rima, the tourism and gastronomy student from Kyrgyzstan...
It's summer time and those of us in Germany have just emerged from an intense week of record breaking heat (40 degrees C/104.5 degrees F). What to do in this heat in an air condition-less country? Hit the water. While dipping your feet into that water might be all you...
NOTE: Updated for 2022. I've been meeting many more expats now that I am living in the heavily populated Rhineland/Ruhr region of Germany. These expats range from old timers/lifers to newbie/temporary assignees. As any expat can relate to, the newbies are grappling...
Facing an overseas move? If you are moving from North America to Europe or from Europe to North America, you will definitely face the question of what to do about your appliances. Because of the difference in voltage, every expat has to go through this process of...
No Tuition Fees at German Universities Updated for 2020 Get 'em while they're hot. If you're a German-related news junkie like we all are at the German Way, you might have seen your Facebook or Twitter feeds filled with headlines like these a few years ago: "Free...
I received a reminder in my inbox today from my co-blogger Hyde calling to my attention that I had missed my Monday deadline to post here on the German Way blog. This was another casualty of my most recent move. In case you haven't been keeping up with my personal...
A visiting friend from New York asked me for some tips on good gift ideas for her to take back home from their summer in Germany. I love this question as it's one that I have to think about and refresh each time I go back home. Here's my list which includes some...
What happens when an all American woman with a French-Italian name moves to Switzerland? American writer Chantal Panozzo tells all about it in her recently published book, Swiss Life: 30 Things I Wish I'd Known. With her trademark humor, she shares her evolution as...
Denglish: If you are an expat in a German-speaking country, you're probably pretty fluent at it. It's the combination of the two languages of Deutsch and English, and your fluency doesn't really depend on how good your German or English is. Or even how committed you...
Despite not being military or part of any diplomatic corps, my family and I move frequently. We moved in 2010, and then in 2012 - not counting the two additional moves within the same town from one temporary flat to another and then into the house we bought, and now...
It's unusual for me to find that it's my turn to blog and not have a topic or two that I'm bursting to write about. When that happens, I virtually leaf through Spiegel online and its English section, The Local and Deutsche Welle. My Facebook feed also sometimes...
Like Sarah did several years ago, I mentioned our foray in having an au pair. We had had one from South Korea last summer, a relationship which ended pretty miserably. Despite our efforts to have fair and adjusted expectations of a young woman, age 20, from a culture...
I feel like mothers are enslaved here in these provincial parts of southern Germany by what I call the "cult of the warmes Mittagessen" or the cult of the hot lunch. (I'm not even going to try to stretch the truth by saying parents instead of mothers. It's pretty...
In one my last posts, I mentioned that our family was preparing for my oldest child to start school this year. I know it is a big deal in most countries, but in Germany, I think it is an even bigger deal, partly because the first day is wonderfully ritualized by such...
I've experienced several "American expat in Germany" rites of passage since I first moved to Germany, which was eight years ago: having a German wedding, learning to drive stick in the Swabian Alps, figuring out what goes in the Gelber Sack, pregnancy, giving birth,...
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