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 driving over the last year. It was a pretty big life change for us. So what was it like? The planning stage. The first step […]
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.
A Day in the Life: Expat in Small Town Germany.
Coming Home to Schweinfurt.
50 Things I Miss from Home.
Expat Living in Schweinfurt, Germany.
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:
Expat Frustration (Also Known As: Germany Makes Things Hard).
With only 24 days to USA, we’ve been dealing with various problems that tend to accompany an international move. However, one situation has been particularly difficult. Let me start at the beginning. One year ago we were brand new expats, being picked up by our relocation agent to go get German drivers licenses just a few days into our first week in Germany. I remember walking into the foreign waiting area and later being ushered into a surprisingly private office where we […]
Introducing One Year Without: A Blog Series.
This is the first post in the blog series One Year Without. See all of the posts here. Today marks one year since we arrived in Germany. It’s an appropriate time to reflect on something that has meant a lot to us over the past year and had an impact on shaping our future together, which is our desire to embrace a life of minimalism. In order to prepare for our move to Germany we put approximately 90% of our belongings into […]
50 Things I Miss from Home.
I furiously made this list about four months ago, when we had been living in Germany for a total of six months. I saved it and then it went into the depths of my “potential blog posts” folder because I was afraid of it. I knew I couldn’t open it and finish editing it without having a meltdown about missing home. It was a rough time. But I’ve gradually become more stable and happier in Germany – despite all the […]
A Day in the Life: Expat in Small Town Germany.
“A day in the life” posts have become really popular on Imgur (an online image sharing community); people all over the world have been taking photos throughout a normal day of their life and sharing them. The Imgur blog said the following about this idea: As we go about our daily routines, we rarely stop to consider how fascinating our lives may be to others. Our homes, the commute to work or school, what we have for dinner, and how we […]
Coming Home to Schweinfurt.
How long does it take for a new place to start feeling like home? Probably not long if you’ve only moved across town, but it took seven months for me after we moved across an ocean. I wasn’t sure that Schweinfurt would ever feel like home during the 13 months we planned to live here, but yet I started having unexpectedly warm fuzzy feelings about going home at the end of a long train ride back from Berlin. Perhaps the […]
10 Reflections on Having Family Visit Us Abroad.
We spent 226 days in Germany before we had our first visitor. And after the first one arrived we had a flood of them; our rotation of various Meena family members lasted for 29 out of 44 days from start to finish. After all this time by ourselves in a foreign country it was a bit startling to suddenly have family around again. There were all sorts of emotions to process as we prepared for the visits, spent time with […]
Trying to Pay My Bill in Germany.
Dealing with money is quite different in Germany, and trying to pay my bill in a restaurant is no exception. I have to access my money differently, I spend it differently, and I struggle to keep track of the cash flow. I’ve been able to use our US credit card in more places than expected, but frequently I only have the option of using our German debit card or cash. In the US we almost never used our debit card (since it […]
A Typical Day in Our Hotel.
Have you ever lived in a hotel? We’re seven months into our stay in one and it’s testing my sanity a little bit. This is how a typical weekday goes. 5:30am: Mr. Stomp Stomp, our upstairs neighbor, wakes up and begins stomping back and forth in his bedroom, directly above my side of the bed. I wonder what he is doing. 5:45am: Mr. Meena’s alarm goes off and he slowly wakes up (he is not a morning person at all). I […]
What America Means to Me as an American Abroad.
As an American living in Germany I’ve established a better understanding of how Germans (and Europeans) generally view Americans. The first thing that I learned was that some people don’t like it when you say you’re from America – which I can totally understand. They want you to be specific and say you’re from the USA and not just gloss over the fact that plenty of other countries are also technically ‘America’. This topic never comes up when you’re living […]