• a podcast about watching tv in another language

    We made a second episode of our dubbed Star Trek podcast!

    Good news! After an overwhelming audience response of “… wow, you really didn’t know much about Star Trek, huh?”, Emma and Ian are back with a brand new, very exciting episode where we struggle to understand the plot of an episode of television older than we are that’s been dubbed into a language we don’t speak! Admittedly, this episode is slightly more straightforward than the wonderfully mystifying Farpoint Station duology that we covered in the first episode … or maybe it’s that Emma’s German skills are improving! Will the crew cure the mysterious horny illness that’s going around? Will Emma’s German class pay off and will she laugh at a bunch of…

  • Berlins and Outs,  Close to Home

    What makes a new city feel like home?

    A couple of weeks ago, I said to E, “I don’t miss Boston, not exactly, but I do miss knowing a place well.” It was a weekend evening and we were trying to figure out what to do with ourselves. I ended up saying, “what I really want to do is go to Aeronaut.” Aeronaut is a brewery in Somerville, MA that was a 5-minute walk from our old apartment. Their beer is good, but that’s not what I was missing. What I was missing was knowing where to go. There are plenty of breweries in Berlin, but we don’t have “our place” yet. I had a level of familiarity…

  • Berlins and Outs

    Mundane Cultural Differences – Berlin vs. Boston (Part 1)

    Emma and I moved from Boston to Berlin almost exactly 4 months ago, and there have been a lot of huge changes. We’re far away from family and friends, I’ve started a software development job, Emma’s just finished the second draft of her book, we’re both working on learning a new language … it can be a bit overwhelming when we think about it all. That’s not what I’m going to talk about in this post, though. In this post, I want to talk about the strange minutia that we’re already starting to take for granted, the little things that make us pause and go, “Huh. I guess that’s not…

  • a podcast about watching tv in another language

    We watched Star Trek dubbed into German so you don’t have to

    E and I have wanted to start a podcast for over a year now. We have several ideas, but this was the one that finally inspired us to sit down and record: “What We Think Happened” is a show where we watch a piece of media in a language we don’t speak and then attempt to recap it. Hopefully, we’re funny about it. For our inaugural episode, we watched the pilot of Star Trek: The Next Generation dubbed into German, without subtitles. A month ago, we recorded an hour and a half of audio trying to make sense of this bizarre tv show. It’s taken us a while to finally…

  • Berlins and Outs

    Spring in Berlin: A Video and A Love Letter

    I try to take a couple seconds of video footage on my phone every day. I’ve been doing this on and off for a few years. My intention is always to compile the footage on the 1 Second Everyday app, but I don’t get around to it consistently. Last week though, I was feeling inspired to do something a little more complicated with all the snippets of life in Berlin that I’ve filmed since March. The result is this short video, which I hope will appeal to the visual learners among you. There are several shots in and around our apartment, but there are also snippets we filmed in other places…

  • Berlins and Outs

    Bikes, Beers, and Beautiful Sunsets

    We’ve been in Berlin for two months now, but I find myself unsure what to say about it to friends and family back home. There’s no news on our residence permits except I find it embarrassing that my husband’s boss wants me to get a job. I’m happier here than I was in Boston, but I think that’s more about me and less about Berlin. This city is not immediately beautiful. It is concrete and graffiti and parks filled with garbage after the weekend’s revelry. A lot of the graffiti is artfully done and what drew my attention to the garbage is the teams of people cleaning it up every…

  • Berlins and Outs

    Thoughts on One Month of Living Abroad

    When I backpacked Europe, almost six years ago now (yeesh), I wrote a post about my thoughts on one month of travel, so, when E and I realized we’d been in Berlin for a month, we decided to write this post as a bit of a callback. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly from one month of living abroad in Germany. Plus, if you scroll all the way down, a little video of what we’ve been up to. The Good The Weather: We arrived right at the tail end of winter and, while our friends and family back home suffered through April snowstorms, we enjoyed days in the…