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The Instant Expat

by | Oct 19, 2009 | , , | 0 Comments

Because I have to go back to work earlier than anticipated thanks to the recession, we had to think about childcare for the little ones earlier than anticipated. With two kids under three, daycare (Kinderkrippe) was not an option due to the cost involved. Although an earlier attempt with an au pair didn’t work out very well, (too much partying and too little working) we decided to take the plunge and try again.

Our au pair arrived from Canada last week, and it was interesting to see what kinds of questions he asked and what he finds intriguing (yes, he is a guy) about Germany. He’s 18 and has been to Europe before, but not to Germany. I had sent him Hyde’s book before he arrived, so expected some things, but others were a surprise.

The second night he was here, I took him with me to my expat meetup group here in Heidelberg. I had to explain to him beforehand what an expat was. If you have never been one, you most likely haven’t encountered the word! The first person he talked to wasn’t technically an expat either. He asked her where she was from and she said “Bavaria”. He said, “Where’s that?” To him, it sounded like a country, but of course he had never heard of it. She made him feel silly for not knowing that it was a state in Germany. Of course, we’ve all heard the stereotypes about Bavarians being like Texans, wanting to secede from the Union and all. I still felt bad for him. Not very welcoming. read more…

Learning to Drive in Germany

by | Oct 12, 2009 | , , , | 0 Comments


I decided to depart my single, independent life years ago when I moved to Germany to marry my now husband. It involved making a lot of significant changes in my life all at once, including learning German, leaving a metropolis of the world (London) to move to the metropolis of the unheard of Ostalbkreis (Aalen), leaving gainful employment, and moving in with someone for the first time in my life. But what surprisingly overwhelmed me the most during this period in my life was learning how to drive in Germany. To clarify, I had already obtained my driver’s license at the age of seventeen, but as an American, I was only ever required to drive an automatic car. However, I had always wanted to learn how to drive stick shift, as we call it. In fact, it was among my top three goals while living in Germany (the other two being learning to speak German and becoming more comfortable riding a bike). I had always considered being able to drive a manual-shift car to be a good life skill to learn, so I was happy to have an impetus to finally do so.

Manual 5-speed gear shift knob

A typical 5-speed manual “stick shift” knob. Could you drive this car? PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

I didn’t think it would be so hard. My new husband found a driving instructor for me, and I figured that after a week’s worth of lessons, I would be driving myself to my daily German classes at the Goethe Institute in Schwäbisch Hall, a good hour’s drive away from Aalen, in no time.

I’ll cut to the chase now and say that this was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life. read more…

Closed Door Policy

by | Sep 20, 2009 | , , , , | 2 Comments

When I moved to Germany for the first time in 1992, I was 21 and was going to university in Freiburg. I had never worked in an American office for more than the time required to do a temp job over spring break and had spent summers working at McDonald’s. When I was 18, I lived near Geislingen for 8 weeks, staying with the family of an exchange student who had lived with us for six months when I was nine years old. This was my first encounter with a “real” German home and the accompanying culture rules this entails. It was not a very exciting summer for an 18-year-old woman who had just graduated high school and wanted some adventure. I read a lot of Michener (the fattest English novels I could find for the money), listened, but not spoke, a lot of Schwäbisch, and tried not to make any cultural faux pas. read more…

Zwetschgen and the end of summer in Germany

by | Sep 14, 2009 | , , , , | 1 Comment

Here in Baden-Württemberg the school year begins again this week. While my children are not yet school age, we’ve been enjoying rituals associated with this time of year: a last visit to the Freibad (outdoor public pool), buying closed toe shoes for autumn/winter and picking Zwetschgen (Italian plums) off of friends’ trees.

Before I moved to Germany, I had never seen a Zwetschge. Plums had always been round, more like smaller nectarines, with varying shades of yellow flesh and yellow or purple skins. In Germany, I first encountered these elegant, deep purple, slender ellipses hanging low on a tree on Jahnstrasse, the street of my first flat. It was August, my second month living here, when I would gingerly step around the squashed and whole pieces of fruit at my feet, wondering if they were edible. It took several late summer visits to the Bäckerei till I realized that the word Zwetschgen was synonymously used with the word Pflaumen (plum) and that the tree on my street was in fact a Zwetschgen tree.

Now that the Zwetschge has entered my life, I have been searching for ways to keep her there all year around.

read more…

An Oversimplified (Personal) History of Pilsner Beers

by | Sep 7, 2009 | , | 1 Comment

Like most Americans, my first exposure to German beer was to one of those mass produced brews designed for good shelf life and consistency… not necessarily for flavor or quality. Being lucky enough to have been living in San Francisco at the time, I was exposed to a variety of better beers than that.

Microbreweries were (and still are) everywhere. A world of bocks, porters and stouts was where I lived predominantly. From time to time, however, I ventured into the lighter side of things… pilsners.

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The dreaded “Materialliste”

by | Aug 25, 2009 | , , | 0 Comments

If you have children in school here in Germany, at some point, either at the end of one school year or the beginning of the next, your child will hand you a meager piece of paper called a Materialliste, which is exactly what it sounds like, a list of supplies for the coming school year. Now, if you are used to these sorts of lists from your childhood somewhere other than Germany, the list might look innocuous. C’mon, a few notebooks, a pen or two, a binder, right? Wrong!

Usually there is a list of Hefte, or notebooks that are more like the blue books we used to write our exams in college. There are any number of types. If your child is in first grade, they have some with lines with larger spaces in between so they can learn writing. They all have numbers and are called things like DIN A4 Heft, mit Rand, kariert, für die erste Klasse. The first time got this list, I ambitiously went to the writing supply store thinking I, a smart woman with a couple of degrees under my belt who indeed speaks fluent German, could figure it out. I was wrong! read more…

The Wall turns 48 – What was the Berlin Wall really like?

by | Aug 14, 2009 | , | 0 Comments


NOTE: This post from August 2009 has been updated for 2019.

August 13 marked the 48th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall (in 2009; the 58th anniversary in 2019). During the night of 12-13 August 1961, East German soldiers and other workers began stringing a barbed wire barrier along the intra-German border (innerdeutsche Grenze) in Berlin. As time went by, the barbed wire fences were replaced by concrete: the Berlin Wall (die Berliner Mauer). It was East Germany’s desperate attempt to stop a serious brain drain and what was known as “voting with your feet” (i.e., escaping to the West). Berlin was the most serious “leak” — one that had to be plugged if the East German dictatorship was to survive.

Berlin Checkpoint Charlie 1969

The Berlin Wall: Checkpoint Charlie in 1969. This was where Americans and other non-Germans could walk or drive into East Berlin – with the proper papers and payment of a fee. PHOTO © Hyde Flippo

I first experienced die Mauer personally in 1969, when it was still a crude, slapped-together, eight-year-old youngster, not the smoother, slicker version after 1975. By chance, I also experienced the last days of the notorious barrier in the summer of 1989, only a few months before the Berlin Wall fell. Both times I was traveling with American high school students, so I was also seeing the Wall through their eyes. read more…

Where a House is a Home

by | Aug 10, 2009 | , | 0 Comments

I’ve been living in Germany for about two years now. I knew things would be different here, but how things would be different was a big question mark. Although I had visited Germany a few times before, living here is a whole different ball game… as we Americans like to say.
read more…