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A Seventh Child Gets Lucky

by | Dec 6, 2010 | , | 1 Comment

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.”

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…

German Residence Permit Day – A true story

by | Dec 1, 2010 | , , | 0 Comments

Or how not to get your Aufenthaltstitel

The big day started at 6:30 a.m. when I suddenly woke up and realized that it was was the day and date of my appointment at the Berlin Ausländerbehörde (Foreigners Authority, now known as the Landesamt für Einwanderung, the Berlin Immigration Office) to apply for my long-term residence permit (Aufenthaltstitel, not to be confused with an entry visa). I had made a reservation online and then received a confirmation email for an 8:00 a.m. appointment. That part of this experience had gone smoothly.

Unbelievably, the night before I had gone to bed without even setting my alarm clock! After returning from a trip to France to visit my son and his fiancée, it had just plain slipped my mind. Totally weird how I just woke up and – bang! – realized it was visa day.

Aufenthaltstitel card - eAT

In the past, the Aufenthaltstitel was attached to your passport in the visa pages section, hence the old “visa” name. Today it is usually a separate biometric plastic card called an eAT, but the procedure for obtaining one is still the same. PHOTO: bamf.de

OK, even at 6:30 I was cutting it short. It takes an average 45 minutes on public transport from my apartment to the Immigration Office (30 if all goes well, all connections connect). I jump out of bed and try to find my required German health insurance forms. I had put everything together before I left for France, so that was the only thing missing. Where the hell is it? – Turns out I wasted 10 minutes looking for it, since it was already there, hidden among other documents. read more…

Losing my German

by | Nov 23, 2010 | , , , | 0 Comments

We have been in Ireland for about three months now, and every time I speak to my closest German friend, I notice words slipping away. I was “home” this weekend, so I am feeling better about that again, but it is amazing how quickly it happens.

When we arrived in Ireland in August, our youngest, who was almost two, spoke mostly German. He had started in German Krippe in February of that year and was speaking it all day. His dad speaks German with him as well, so his only English tended to come from me, and sometimes from his older sisters, who mixed languages with the best of them, but were more likely to come out with English than German after seven years in Heidelberg. He did have some English, and understood everything I said, but his first tendency was almost always German.

read more…

U vs Ü

by | Nov 8, 2010 | , , , , | 0 Comments

Driving in the car with my family the other day, I overheard my four-year old son say to his younger brother: “I am so frustrating! No! I am so frustrating! Stop doing that!”

I had difficulty suppressing my laughter, tickled at the irony of his statement. Yes, I thought, I sometimes find you frustrating too. Of course, he wanted to tell his brother that he was frustrated. I’m sure the tone of his voice communicated exactly what he meant, and his brother doesn’t really talk yet so the message most likely came across as intended.

Living in Germany and learning to speak the language as an adult has often left me feeling a bit like a four-year old at times, or even younger. My ability to articulate is painfully stunted, and my vocabulary limited, even after 10 years in the country. My frustrating (frustrated) son reminded me of one of my own blunders in learning German. read more…

Pregnancy in a Post-DE World

by | Nov 2, 2010 | , , | 0 Comments

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…

Feiertage: What are we celebrating today?

by | Oct 25, 2010 | , , | 0 Comments


With Halloween drawing close, I’ve been thinking about holidays for expats. Which holidays are observed and how they are celebrated varies a lot around the world.

In the English-speaking countries alone there are great variations. (Canada’s Thanksgiving is the second Monday in October, while the US version is in November.) But as soon as you look at non-English-speaking lands, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland, there are even more differences. Even within Germany itself there are many regional differences as well, partly depending on whether a region is Protestant or Catholic. (For a country where few people attend church, Germany has an amazing amount of religious holidays.)

It just so happens that Halloween also falls on what is another holiday (Feiertag) in the Protestant (Lutheran) parts of Germany: Reformationstag (Reformation Day, which in Switzerland is the first Sunday in November). According to a recent US survey, most Americans do not know that it was the German Martin Luther (1483-1546) who “reformed” the Catholic Church and created Protestantism. Thanks to Luther, the 31st day of October is an official holiday in the Bundesländer that used to be part of East Germany (but not in Berlin). It’s a bit ironic, considering that East Germany discouraged religion. But on the other hand, it was also home to the Lutherstadt (Luther city) of Wittenberg.

I suspect that few Germans could explain what Reformationstag is all about, but surely they would outnumber the Americans who could do the same. The fact is that for most Germans, the day is now more identified with Halloween, a holiday they have increasingly adopted over the last decade or so. read more…

More Things I Miss About Germany: Punctuality and Public Transport

by | Oct 19, 2010 | , , | 0 Comments

Being in Ireland for the past couple of months has of course given me a new perspective about Germany and its many benefits. Every expat in Germany has some painful dealings with bureaucracy and at least one or two stories to tell that make others cringe and nod in mutual consternation. We lament the amount of stamps required and the lack of opening times. But I may have moved backward in time when I moved to Ireland. Bureaucracy is live and well, but things are most definitely not as efficient.

Like in Germany, I have gone to various offices looking for various stamps and certifications and bits of paper here in Ireland. But several times I have turned up at these offices during what should be opening times and found a piece of paper on the door proclaiming the office to be closed. I was used to being able to look up opening hours and train times and all in the Internet. The Deutsche Bahn, the regional tram schedules, the opening hours of my town’s Rathaus. Here I am lucky to find a PDF bus schedule from 2009 in the Internet, and the buses run twice a day to the town that is still 5 miles away from where I actually live! In Germany you can get a bus to just about anywhere, no matter how small. There are no guarantees that the buses will run past 10pm on a weeknight, or that they run more than once an hour on Sundays, but they DO exist! read more…

More German than the Germans

by | Oct 11, 2010 | , , , , | 0 Comments

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…