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Online Lifelines

by | Apr 9, 2012 | , , , | 0 Comments

Remember that time not long ago when long-distance phone calls were reserved for special occasions? Your uncle on the other side of the country would get a nice three minute phone call on his birthday, and your grandmother across the ocean could expect a quick “Merry Christmas” once a year.  Oh how far we have come.  Now with new cable and internet technologies, long distance communication is no longer the family-gathered-’round-the-phone occasion it once was.

Yesterday, as my mother walked me through how to prepare the perfect Easter ham from her respective kitchen miles and miles away via Skype, I considered what it must have been like for expats living so far from their family and friends, just a couple decades ago, before the internet, email, and social media.

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Dealing with Differences in a Multi-Culti Family

by | Apr 2, 2012 | , , , | 0 Comments

Not long ago, a German friend gave me a stern warning that I was in danger of teaching my children that all things German are bad. I was perplexed at this perspective, for it certainly doesn’t reflect how I feel.

“If you tell them negative things about Germany, you will eventually build a mindset in them which is negative to their own culture,” she explained.

My only response was to laugh, because not two weeks prior to this conversation, my mother had accused me of having an anti-American household.

“I feel as though you are rejecting your culture, and your family along with it,” she had said.

Almost the entirety of my adulthood has been spent abroad. It may well be that I have rejected parts of my own, American, culture and it may also well be that I am occasionally critical of my host culture. In fact, I’m sure both of those are the case. How is a bi-cultural, bilingual family expected to deal with cultural differences? With humor! read more…

Foods that are hard to find in Germany

by | Mar 19, 2012 | , , | 7 Comments

I’m inviting readers (Americans especially) to help me compile a list. It’s a list that grows shorter by the year, but is still fairly lengthy: Foods that are hard to find in Germany.

Toppas

This Kellogg’s cereal is available in Germany, but others aren’t. PHOTO: Kellogg’s

It really wasn’t that long ago that an American living in Germany had difficulty finding familiar food items such as peanut butter. Today it’s easy to find peanut butter in German grocery stores and supermarkets. (But the selection is still much more limited than in a US grocery store!) Today you can even find Mexican food in a German supermarket (although it is often a bit too Germanized for Norte Americanos). Sometimes food products are available in Germany, but are difficult to find. On the other side of the coin, Americans who used to bring jars of Nutella home from Germany can now find it on the shelves of most grocery stores in the US.

Smart American expats learn to adapt and get to like German/European fare, but every once in a while we yearn for something that is difficult or impossible to find in Germany. I spent almost a year living in Berlin and never found a box of Cheerios – and believe me, I searched! Now some of the items that Americans miss aren’t exactly health foods, but that doesn’t keep you from missing them. I quickly came up with these: Cheerios, A&W Root Beer, 7up, Canada Dry, Doritos (and other types of chips), macaroni and cheese, Quaker Instant Grits/Oatmeal, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (Hershey). Then I hit a wall. Can you help?

A while back Ruth wrote about German grocery store culture. Last week Jessica wrote about her struggle to find baking powder in Switzerland. (I think Switzerland presents some challenges not found in Germany.) She also mentioned the differences in flour and the problems that can create for home baking. Since I don’t bake, that wasn’t something I was really aware of. So Ruth and Jessica inspired me to make a food list. And that’s why I’m now asking for your help. read more…

Where the heck is the baking powder?

by | Mar 12, 2012 | , , | 3 Comments

I cannot imagine how difficult it must be for expat moms who need to bake cupcake after cupcake, cookie after cookie, required by their children for school fundraisers, soccer practices, birthday parties etc. Baking in German-speaking Europe is hard!

When I first moved over here and started hanging out with other hockey wives, nearly all of whom were mothers, I would normally start hearing a dull buzz whenever they would start complaining about baking. I would catch random snippets about all the brown sugar they had to pack in their luggage, or all the Betty Crocker stuff they were having their cousin bring over at Christmas. I was 24, in a new relationship, no kids, living it up in Germany; my need for molasses and baking powder was pretty low on the priority list. Cut to five years later and a here I am in a supermarket in Switzerland, printed recipe in hand, staring at an aisle of cake mixes, none of which are the kind I need to make homemade Twinkies for my husband’s birthday. I see lemon cake, spiced cake, chocolate cake, some kind of brown speckled cake . . . what happened to just good old yellow cake? read more…

Getting in with the In Crowd

by | Mar 6, 2012 | , , | 3 Comments

Recently some fellow Americans moved in down the street. We figured this out before we talked to them, as there were some telltale expat signs around the house. One day I stopped the new neighbor while he was out walking his dog and we had a brief chat, marveling at how small the world is and how connected our distant lives actually are. After this chat, I had every reason to swing by and welcome them properly to the neighborhood – isn’t that what we Americans do for our new neighbors? And yet, I hesitated. You don’t just drop in on people in Germany. There is no such thing as a welcome wagon. Don’t bother the neighbors… everyone is packed in tightly enough here without having to socialize on top of it.

Eventually I reasoned that I have simply lived here far too long, and if I remember back to being new myself, I would have greatly appreciated others reaching out to welcome me. Shortly after our initial meeting, I stopped by my new neighbors’ house unannounced, and brought food, and I think they even appreciated it. read more…

Losing Language

by | Feb 27, 2012 | , , | 0 Comments

It was inevitable. Our German was bound to get worse upon departure. The first year, mine seemed to remain intact. I was still feeling pretty German, and I spoke German almost daily with our German preschool teachers, with other German-speaking parents, and with our German babysitter. Sometimes even with my German husband. We’re in the second year though, and after spending the Christmas holidays with my non-German speaking family, I finally felt that the Yanks had won. Throw on top of that, a struggle to integrate a third language (Korean), and the quality of Deutsch in this house has worsened. read more…

Are German Parents as Superior as French Parents?

by | Feb 20, 2012 | , , | 7 Comments

The Wall Street Journal published another provocative piece on one certain “ethnic” parenting style superior than the American one. I put ethnic in quotes as I refer first to the Tiger parenting style written and described by Amy Chua early last year. Chua talked about the hardline, rather Spartan style which Chinese parents in particular use to raise their children in her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. She ceded that other ethnicities may adopt this same style, but in Chua’s essay for the Wall Street Journal, she uses the term Chinese mothers to describe the implementers of this take-no-prisoner approach.

Chua posits that the soft approach of Western parents is for wusses. But this month, Pamela Druckerman maintains in this Wall Street Journal excerpt from her book, “Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting” that French parents can also take a firm stance, and it’s the Americans who are getting run over by their kids.

Druckerman refers to a few anecdotes that seemed familiar to me. And as her comparisons continued between French and American parenting styles, some of the themes and observations were ones that I have made during my own recent repatriation from Germany to the US. read more…

The Naked Truth

by | Feb 13, 2012 | , , | 4 Comments

There was one very significant event that I happened to omit from my last blog, regarding my recent trip to Davos.  In truth, I just wasn’t quite ready to talk about it yet. The incident was somewhat traumatizing, or at least severely uncomfortable, and it left me feeling as though all of the acclimatizing and adapting I had accomplished over the last five years in Europe, was for nothing. Deep breath: I will now go ahead and tell you the tale of three young Canadian women who attempted to spend an afternoon . . . at a Swiss wellness center!

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