Adventures of an Expat in Deutschland

Hallo und willkommen zurück! Hello and welcome back! I had a busy week all the way through last night, thus the delayed post. The last thing I wanted to do when I got here was just sit around the apartment. We were both sick the previous week and went nowhere and did nothing, so we made up for it this week. On Monday we had the pleasure of attending a performance of "The Hunchback Variations" at The English Theater with our friend David. This absurdist play was an absolute delight. After the show, the two actors came on stage to discuss the play and answer questions from the audience. One of the things they noted was that the play resonates differently with British and German audiences (ours was a mix of both, along with a lot of Americans). The Brits/Americans tend to enjoy the absurd humor, while the Germans tend to read a lot more into the dialog and the existential questions posed by the characters. The English Theater  was founded in 1976 by two Americans, and is the old...

Hallo Freunde! Hello friends! It's been a month since I arrived in Hamburg, and what a month it's been! It feels like I've been here longer due to all the things we've crammed into these last 30 days. I've taken my first 4-week intensive German course. I learned how to navigate the grocery stores, how to recycle properly (the German way), how to order take-out, how to ride the trains by myself (I only got lost once for a brief moment), and how to properly eat a sandwich (open face, of course). 😁 Of course, this past month has also been spent reuniting with Clarke and helping to set up our apartment. It took over three weeks to finally receive the four boxes I shipped from Baltimore, after many frustrating conversations with German Customs. Once I was able to unpack those, it started to feel more like home as we were able to surround ourselves with some familiar keepsakes (and my winter coats, which I've already used multiple times). It is quite a change downsiz...

Grüße, Freunde! Greetings, Friends! I have now been in Hamburg for three and a half weeks. It's been a whirlwind since I got here. The first couple of days were spent recovering from the flight over here from Baltimore. After that, Clarke began showing me around our neighborhood. We visited all of the stores he had been shopping at prior to my arrival so I could become familiar with them and start to learn how shopping in Germany works. One of the differences that I appreciate here is that the grocery stores sell alcohol, something unheard of in Baltimore. Even when we lived in Houston, we could only buy beer and wine at the grocery stores. For anything else, we had to go to a liquor store. One of the differences here which I'm still getting used to is that there are drug stores ( Drogerien ), and there are pharmacies ( Apotheken ). You can't buy drugs at the drug store - those are only sold at an Apotheka. The "drug" stores are more like variety stores (think of ...

Ein herzliches Willkommen aus Hamburg, Deutschland! A warm welcome from Hamburg, Germany! These are the chronicles of my adventures as an expat in Germany. Please join me on this amazing journey! A little background: in 2022, my husband Clarke and I were living in the suburbs of Houston, Texas. At that time, the United States Supreme Court had just overturned the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade. We saw the writing on the wall and knew that it would only be a matter of time before they started revisiting other cases, such as the one which made our marriage legal (Obergefell v. Hodges). Knowing that Texas still had laws on the books that could be enforced if the Court overturned Obergefell, we felt it was necessary to look for a new, safe place to live. We had kicked around the idea of living abroad prior to this, and decided we would start researching our options. We landed on Uruguay for a number of reasons: climate, constitutional protection of our marriage, economy, etc. However, we...