Home here and there

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?