Adventures of an Expat in Deutschland

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...