I never thought I’d be so deeply dissatisfied after returning home. I thought that transitioning from expat to repat would be difficult but overwhelmingly positive. I was wrong. Mr. Meena and I were gone from the United States for 13 continuous months. As we neared the end of our time in Germany I was rather desperate to be […]
Category: Expat Life
Returning home and reverse culture shock:
Are These Really My People?
Repatriation: Our First Week Back in the USA.
Our Reintegration into the USA.
100 Days Back Home.
50 Things I Miss from Germany.
Living in a foreign country:
Meeting Our New Home in Schweinfurt, Germany.
Our First Week as Expats in Germany.
American Food According to Germany.
10 Reflections on Having Family Visit Us Abroad.
Coming Home to Schweinfurt.
50 Things I Miss from Home.
The difficulties of expat life:
A Typical Day in Our Schweinfurt Hotel.
Foreign Words and Currency: Trying to Pay My Bill in Germany.
Expat Frustration (Also Known As: Germany Makes Things Hard).
One Year Without – a blog series about living with less as expats:
Introduction.
One Year Without a Vehicle.
One Year Without Community.
One Year Without All the Small Stuff.
What We Couldn’t Do Without During Our Year of Living with Less.
One Year Without: What We Gained by Owning Less Stuff.
Blog roll:
One Year Without: What We Gained by Owning Less Stuff.
This is the final post in the blog series One Year Without. See all of the posts here. This blog series has been about what we lived without as expats. We gave up our vehicles, our community, and plenty of the smaller comforts of home when we moved to Germany. Owning less stuff pushed the boundaries of […]
What We Couldn’t Do Without During Our Year of Living with Less.
This is the fifth post in the blog series One Year Without. See all of the posts here. On the last post in this series I focused on which items were the hardest to give up during our year of living with less. Now I’m going one step further and listing the items that we purchased […]
Our Reintegration into the USA.
We’ve had a wildly successful but mind-numbingly exhausting first week of reintegration. Coming home has been a lot like riding a bike again after many years; we remember how to do it but there are still many unfamiliar sensations and a strong likelihood of falling down before we get things right again. Here are some […]
Repatriation: Our First Week Back in the USA.
This week is going to be a whirlwind. We left Germany last Saturday around noon in one time zone and arrived in the USA in the afternoon (although it felt much later to us, of course). We made the long, slow trek though the airport customs line with our bird, Koopa, who passed his USDA […]
One Year Without All the Small Stuff.
This is the fourth post in the blog series One Year Without. See all of the posts here. Moving abroad, giving up our cars, going without community – those were all huge life changes. But what about all the small stuff that we went without? All the smaller comforts of home that we left behind had a […]
Are These Really My People?
“Yeah, the fool bought himself a big ol’ king size bed that don’t even fit in his bedroom.” My ears were drawn like a magnet to the English language. I listened to the group walking being me as they spoke loudly with strong southern drawls. There were Americans in Schweinfurt – I had inadvertently found […]
Blog Series: One Year Without.
A blog series about living abroad, embracing minimalism, and what we learned by going without. 1| Introducing One Year Without: A Blog Series. 2| One Year Without a Vehicle. 3| One Year Without Community. 4| One Year Without All the Small Stuff. 5| What We Couldn’t Do Without During Our Year Abroad. 6| What We Gained by Owning Less Stuff. […]
One Year Without Community.
This is the third post in the blog series One Year Without. See all of the posts here. Over the past few years we’ve been slowly sliding downhill, shifting further away from friends and family, until we finally hit bottom when we moved abroad. At least, that is what it felt like. Mr. Meena and I both […]
One Year Without a Vehicle.
This is the second post in the blog series One Year Without. See all of the posts here. We gave up our habit of driving daily when we moved to Germany without a vehicle. For the past year we’ve either walked, used public transport, or used a rental car. In fact, we only spent 19 days […]
