Category: Reflections

I am so glad it’s the weekend. The week always goes by in a blur and on Saturday I feel like I can take a moment and finally breath. I am trying not to schedule anything on Saturdays since it’s mostly my catch-up day – catch up on house cleaning, grocery shopping, phone calls with the family in Germany, garden clean ups, laundry, you get the idea. And my plant babies are taken care of, too. Until we bought our house in 2018 I never got plants. Somehow, I was always hoping we would move back to Germany rather sooner than later and it was more thing to give away if we would. Leading up to the house purchase we had some serious conversations about the plans for our future and where that would be and well, ended up buying the house. That settled it (at least for now) and I started getting plants. I never had a green thumb but now most of them are thriving (and multiplying). They seem to like the weekly attention even though I don’t do anything special. Maybe I should not write this down not to jinx it? I can be a little superstitious sometimes.

Actually, I take it back that I never make plans on Saturday. Today I signed the kids up for an engineering class where they get to make a prosthetic hand out of cardboard and straws. It’s run by UC Berkeley students, and I hope they have fun. It’s not enough time to go home and come back so my plan is to sit somewhere in a café while I wait for them. Maybe read a little (I am inspired after reading all the book posts yesterday)? Or take a walk on campus? Berkeley has a beautiful campus. I will show you sometime.

And then next Saturday I am organizing a little early birthday gathering for my daughter with a couple of her friends. So there it goes, no Saturday off for me. But with Thanksgiving coming up and a week long school break it’s a special month.

The other plan for this weekend was to get family pictures taken. Usually, I have the kids pictures taken each year but I thought it would be nice to have the whole family for once. We do have family pictures here and there but it’s hard to catch a good one. And I so want a good one with all of us looking our best. We will see if it happens this weekend as there is rain in the forecast. It already got moved to Sunday instead of today. Do you ever have a professional take you family photos? It’s the first time we do it.

I also should take down the bats in our big front window and finally finish the t-shirt that I already cut out and that is waiting to be put together. Last weekend the dining room table was still filled with Halloween costume and art supplies but those are gone for now so there is space for a new mess. For us those things always happen at the dining room table. We have a little breakfast nook next to the kitchen that we use for our meals so no need to clean up every time.

And I want to read some more of the blogs I discovered this week through NaBloPoMo. The list got a little longer and you can find all participating blogs on San’s side the in between is mine who got everyone organized. Thank you for that again! I am glad I decided to go for it even it is overwhelming at times. It’s starting to become a little bit of a fun routine but I have a whole new appreciation for people who do this on a regular basis.

What are your plans for the weekend? Are you as excited about it as I?

The title is maybe a little misleading. When you look at the population (~117,000 in 2021) it sounds big but there are some parts that don’t feel like it at all.

I work at UC Berkeley and parking around campus is painful. The days I do take the car to work (because I need to pick up my son from school or aftercare right after work or because I have a doctor’s appointment or need to do grocery shopping or…) I park in a free parking zone where I can leave the car for the day. That leaves me with a 30 minute walk each way if I don’t want to take the bus what is totally fine with me. I always try to exercise more but most days lately seem not to have enough hours to make it to the gym or to go for a run. This is my little trick to get at least some more steps in. On days when I have some extra minutes, I may take a little detour and explore. Berkeley has some really nice areas especially up in the hills. Leading up to our house getting painted I was wandering around taking pictures of houses I liked, and I still do that sometimes always having the next house project in mind. Berkeley’s hillside is dotted with secret staircases that still surprise me. Just google it and you will see.

Yesterday was a beautiful morning and I decided to visit one of the rock parks to enjoy the view for a moment. I meant to walk to Grotto Rock Park but ended up at Cragmont Rock Park instead. They looked close enough on the map and I guess I did not really pay to close attention. I am so glad I didn’t though. Cragmont is a little higher up, so the way ended up longer than anticipated. It was a new to me park and the views were amazing. The pictures don’t really do them justice but maybe you get the idea? It was such a clear morning. During the day the view hazes over and in the evening we sometimes get the fog so this was perfect. We had the first real rain of the season on Tuesday and Wednesday (hopefully many more to come, we need it) and that means clear skies on the following days. I said for a long time California does not have a real fall, but that is not true. It’s just different. We even turned the heat on the other day and the evening light in the fall is just magic. Do you like fall or do you prefer another season?

I ended up getting to work later than planned but it was so worth it.

I still do a double take when I hear the phrase “Talk to you soon”. It really confused me quite a bit when I first moved to the US because sometimes, I would not talk to that person again for a week or even longer! It took me not too long to realize that it is just a way to end a conversation and does not necessarily implicate the plan to actually talk soon – it may happen, or it may not. Also confusing was the friendly “Hello, how are you?” when entering a store. I never knew how to reply to that and always felt awkward. Now I know that in those cases it’s just a form of greeting and it’s completely ok to just reply “Good” (even if that is not really the case).

I knew English from taking it in school for eight years before moving to the US. Coming here though took my understanding (or not understanding) to a whole new level. And I did not understand quite a bit – everyone was talking so fast and not everyone learned the same English I learned in school (I was convinced of that). The absolute highlight was when I was finally able to turn the subtitles on the TV off. Now I can hardly believe that was ever necessary. But it did prove the point that you need to use a language to become good at it. Maybe some people don’t need that but I certainly do.

Sometimes I still feel like some things are lost in translation and there may be certain nuances that I don’t catch. I am afraid that happens in both languages these days. After 17 years in the US my German is still ok (and I am happy to report my friends in Germany are still surprised when I talk without an American accent) but using it almost the whole day (except at home) sometimes the English word comes faster than the German one. This still happens the other way around, too. My husband is German as well and we speak it at home with each other and the kids, but we developed our own little Germanglish vocabulary what is kind of fun (even though I sometimes forget that it’s a made-up word and my German and/or American friends look at me confused).

Explaining something at work comes more natural in English for sure. From every once in a while we will have a German student in the lab but when I try to explain an experiment to them I always switch to English.

I am sorry to report I still have my German accent and mispronounce a word here and there to the amusement of my kids. I think I am one of those people who always will. But that’s ok. Living in the Bay Area and working at a university it does not really stick out that much as it is a very international crowd in general.

I was a little worried when the kids started school that they would have a hard time with English since we were speaking German at home and at least my daughter did not know much English at first since her preschool was in Japanese. I am happy to report they are doing just fine. It actually requires way more effort to keep up their German over time.

Have you learned another language in school, and did you get to use it at some point? Maybe on vacation or an extended stay in another country?

Since I have not written in long time, I thought I start from the beginning. You probably already know that I am originally from Germany. I grew up in a very small town (when I was born it just had shy of 2300 inhabitants) called Wietzen in Lower Saxony.

It has:

• a church that goes back to the 12^th century
• a preschool (I think by now it has two) where I went to for one year from ~9am till lunchtime
• an elementary school I went to
• a small museum that looks at life how it used to be run by volunteers (my dad being one of them)
• a cemetery that I visit each time I am there to say hi to my mom and my grandparents
• a swimming pool where I used to spend my summers
• a gym that is part of the school where also different clubs run programs (when I was little there was gymnastics, soccer, handball, judo, table tennis and jui-jutsu if I remember correctly)
• a soccer field and tennis courts (the tennis courts came later though)
• a fire station that is also run by volunteers
• a grocery store
• it used to have a bakery separate from the grocery store where we could get rolls fresh from the oven before getting on the bus to the upper schools, but that is closed now

When I finished school, I moved to Hanover for my education but still came back almost every weekend to spend time with my family and friends. I even moved to the next small town over for a brief time but just could not stomach the commute (taking the train to Hanover at 6am in the morning was something I never got used to). The visits became less frequent but every holiday and birthday I would be back. Since we moved to California I still visit every year because I love my family and dearly miss them and because I want my kids to know their relatives. It’s always going to be part of me no matter what. Would I move back? Likely not. Most of my friends moved to other parts of the country including my siblings so when we go back we spend some time in Wietzen but also elsewhere. It really bugs me that you need a car living there (well, I do need a car where we live now for certain things but if I tried hard, I could manage without). I like the idea of country life more then the reality of it. Also, I would always need to go to work in the next bigger city what would be Hanover or Bremen there and it would involve at least an hour of commute each way – too long for my taste and I tried that before. I work in research and I love that kind of work. That also means either biotech companies or a University. Not that we have currently any plans to move back.

It does have a couple of other things, too, but it’s a pretty small town and mostly everyone knows everyone. I spend a lot of time with the youth program from the church growing up (I am not part of any church anymore now, but that is a different story) and I had a lot of fun during that time. My grandparents from my dad’s side lived with us and we had a big garden with apple and plum trees. I still remember harvesting potatoes, strawberries, currants, beans, peas and all kinds of other veggies and fruits and watching (and sometimes helping) my grandma and mom making jams and canning. There are two huge oak trees in front of the house. The leaves in the fall are still driving my dad crazy but we loved collecting the acorns and doing craft projects with them. When I was little there were two houses in our street and the street was still paved with bricks instead of smooth. It made for a painful experience learning how to bike and roller skate, but we did it anyway with pleasure. We spend our early years roaming the town and the garden with the neighborhood kids. Sounds idyllic, right? And looking back it really was. I still sometimes get asked by friends of my dad’s, when we are moving back. We likely never will.

Fun fact: the distance from my hometown in a straight line is 5530.14 miles or 8899.90 kilometers.

What about you? Do you live close to where you grew up or would you move back given the chance?

November is here and its National Block Posting Month (short: NaBloPoMo). This means 30 posts and 30 days and I have been going back and forth if I should give it a try. I came across it again through San and her blog ‘the in between is mine‘. She wrote about the history behind it on her blog post today so go check it out if you want to know more. Or even give it a try yourself?

To be honest, I am a little scared. I love the idea of writing a blog. When it comes to pulling through though and posting with consistency I fail. Same is true for writing letters these days or longer e-mails or keeping a diary. There never seems to be enough time in the day and if you are putting it out there in the world, I feel the pressure of making it meaningful.

When I was in school (so many years ago now – sigh), I really loved writing. I spend hours writing long letters to my friends. I even had a book with my best friend that we passed back and forth writing down what happened in our day when we started going to different schools. Was that interesting to anyone other than ourselves? Likely not, but at least I had a lot of fun doing it and it gave me some peace of mind putting words down on paper. Maybe this trying to post something every day will not give me peace of mind again but hopefully give me back a little of the joy of putting things down on paper (or the screen in this case).

If you are joining in what is your motivation? What does it mean to you writing a blog?

This picture pretty much is one of the reasons why I decided at the beginning of the year to commute by public transport and bike instead of taking the car. This construction site used to be the parking lot I frequented most but UC Berkeley decided to build yet another new building (and of course did not provide additional parking options that were in a reasonable distance). If I need to walk 20 minutes to get from parking to work after driving to work for 20 minutes I might as well take the bike (or BART) for 30 minutes. And I am doing something good for me and the environment along the way! The University actually has some incentives for people who want to switch to public transport like discounted ticket prices for BART and the bus system (AC transit). You can also sign up for a program that guaranties you a free ride home in an emergency by taxi or rental car (Guaranteed Ride Home). Since I have school aged kids that sometimes need to be picked up short notice I thought  this was pretty clever. Luckily I did not have to use it yet.
It has all been really good actually. I already rode a little over 1000 miles by bike this year. One of the stereotypes that always comes up when talking about the US is certainly not true in the Bay Area: Everyone takes the car everywhere and nobody walks or takes their bikes. So not true! If you drive somewhere on the weekends in the hills around here you always have to watch out for bikes and the cities are pretty walk-able. Public transport might not quite compare with German standards but you can’t have everything. A couple of years ago there were so many people using the BART system that they actually were discussing to raise the ticket prices so less people were going to use it. What a ridiculous idea to maybe have more trains running.
How do you get to work or around in the US, Europe or other places?