E and I forgot something really important when we went on vacation recently. It was worse than the time I arrived at London Heathrow Airport without a return flight booked. The UK doesn’t like to let people in without knowing when you’re leaving and the only thing that kept me from being detained was white privilege. Our recent mistake was even worse than the time I ate questionable samosas in India and got violently ill on an overnight train. Okay… that one was pretty bad. I should have known better and I suffered the consequences. But the most recent mistake E and I made was practically unforgivable for a couple…
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We owe one another our attention
Today is the eight year anniversary of my dad’s death. I’m happy(?) to report: it doesn’t hurt the way it used to. The last couple years, I’ve been struck less by how much I miss him and more by how much he has missed. I notice big things he missed, like my wedding, and smaller things, like books he would have enjoyed. Since his death, I’ve traveled on five continents, my brother and I both moved abroad (in opposite directions), and my mother retired. I also spent several years in Boston working at the Museum of Science, and my dad would have thought that was the absolute coolest job. I…
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Getting to Know Schöneberg
The temperature reached 94 degrees (Fahrenheit, obvi) yesterday, so it seems safe to say summer has arrived in Berlin. Temperatures that high are actually kind of an unpleasant anomaly, but, in general, it’s warm and sunny here, and we’ve been spending more time outside as a result. We’ve started jogging in the evenings after work. There’s a bike path that runs alongside the train tracks, and we can follow it to a nearby grocery store. On Friday night, it was warm and humid and just starting to rain when we finished our run and went into the grocery store. The air had that amazing wet asphalt/ozone scent. We picked up…
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This is a post about Paris and the things fire takes from us
I wrote most of this post last week, and our news cycle moves so fast that it almost doesn’t feel relevant to post it this week. It feels wrong to keep talking about Notre-Dame when more than 320 people were killed on Easter Sunday in Sri Lanka. Tragedies, great and small ones, happen every day. Miracles, great and small ones, do too. I’m sharing this not because I think it’s the most important topic to talk about at the moment. But because I want it to be okay for us to pause and acknowledge the things we’re thinking about even if they aren’t the day’s most pressing issues. Paris was…
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One Year in Berlin
One year ago today, we landed in Berlin with 4 suitcases, 2 backpacks, 1 visa, and nowhere to live. Our first night in the city, we got dinner at a beer hall down the street from our hotel. We ordered half liters of beer, pretzels, a cheese plate, and Weißwurst (white sausage). I later learned that Weißwurst is a typical Bavarian breakfast food — no wonder the server gave me a weird look for ordering it at 8pm. What’s changed in the last year? Well, we don’t make as many faux pas when eating German food. As our friend, Ramona, puts it: going to a Bavarian restaurant on your first…
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We Went to Kenya! Kenya in Africa!
Our landlord texted us earlier this month. She wanted to see how we were doing and ask us to look into something at the apartment. E messaged back that we would do that when we got home and added, “Just returning on the S-Bahn from the airport, back from a trip to Kenya.” Her response was quick: Kenya?? Kenya in Africa? We told her yes, and sent a couple photos. We like our landlord a lot. Her reaction was amusing, but, when I think about, not so surprising. It’s kind of a big trip to drop casually into conversation. We travel pretty often, and we really only keep our immediate…
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“Maybe We’ll Spend Christmas in Berlin”
Before E was even offered the job that brought us to Berlin, my mom and I started daydreaming about it. 2018 had just begun and I was experiencing some new year’s melancholy, and my mom commented, “maybe next year we’ll spend Christmas in Berlin!” It was a nice daydream, and I told her not to jinx it. She didn’t. Obviously. But it still felt kind of amazing when the holidays rolled around and we were actually here in Berlin. My mom came to visit for three weeks — starting in mid-December and staying through the New Year. And my brother and his partner arrived two days after Christmas and stayed…
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Podcast Recommendations for the Holidays and Beyond
If you’re doing any traveling this holiday season and looking for something to listen to on planes, trains, and automobiles, boy, have I got some podcast recommendations for you. As you probably know, E and I have dabbled in making our own podcast. So, it should come as no surprise that we also listen to quite a few podcasts. I give podcast recommendations to my friends and family pretty regularly, and I decided it was time to collect them all in one place. The Best and Only Holiday Podcast You Need: Hark! I can’t make a podcast list without a little nepotism. Especially this time of year. Hark! is the…
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An Ode to Peanut Butter
At first I thought it was just one badly-branded jar of peanut butter. It was rife with US stereotypes. The Statue of Liberty, an anthropomorphized peanut wearing a cowboy hat, and a color scheme reminiscent of the American flag covered all but a few inches of space. Most damningly, the brand name was “McEnnedy.” I thought it was such a bizarre mash-up of American-sounding name conventions. It reminded me of “Häagen Dazs,” the ice cream brand whose nonsense name is meant to sound Danish, but is a decidedly American invention. Of course, E and I bought a jar of McEnnedy brand peanut butter and ate it all. It tasted… fine.…
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To Make “Local” Friends or “Expat” Friends, That is the Question
People tend to want to make local friends when they live abroad. Spending time only with people you could have met at home creates this bizarre sense of failure. I remember it from when I studied abroad in Barcelona – I hung out mostly with the other Americans in my program, but it was a point of pride for me when I spent Halloween teaching a couple of Catalan women how to play Kings. That was my go-to I-hung-out-with-the-locals anecdote. It was a fun evening and it makes a pretty good soundbite. But “I want to hang out with locals” is kind of an odd, potentially tokenizing way to look…
