Home Living

I've been musing about this blog post for a while, but once it becomes timely it's always hard to figure out how to start it. Wait, look--it's already started! What a relief.

Spending a month living with a German family gave me a really unique look into how Germans live. Not only did I have my family to teach me, but I also talked frequently with my friends about our respective families and their behavior. Every day I learned at least one little thing about a German habit or tendency that I don't think I would have noticed if I was living on my own from the start. I’ll start with this example: milk. I haven't seen milk sold in a container bigger than a liter yet, but that's not what's remarkable. In addition to regular milk they sell "haltbar" milk, which mean it's milk that's been extra pasteurized and heated (if I understood the label correctly) so that it doesn't need to be refrigerated until you open it. You can store it for months in a pantry as long as you don't open it. That is certainly something I wouldn't have realized if I hadn't lived in a house with liters of milk in the cabinet.

Trying to cook in a German kitchen was pretty tricky at first, because I had to get used to using a scale to measure my ingredients in grams, but I became a lot better at it by the end. It's always trickier to cook in someone else's kitchen, because you don't know where everything is, and it's even trickier to ask where things are when you aren't positive you know what they're called, but it worked out and I even learned a few things from the experience.

Living with my host family definitely did wonders for my language skills. I learned by speaking to them, by listening to them talk to each other and to me, and from their gentle corrections. They didn’t correct my every mistake, which was good too because too many corrections would probably have made me afraid to talk. It was perfect. And now it’s astounding for me to look at my relationship with them, and what I know about their lives, and realize that it’s entirely built on things I said or heard in German. We had conversations about everything from day to day life to differences between our countries to politics. Through this month my family taught me that although it might not be pretty all the time, I am capable of expressing myself in German, and that’s an incredible gift.

Finally, I noticed something interesting about the way I’m reacting to the lifestyle differences I’m encountering. Things that would normally seem inconvenient or old-fashioned to me at home now seem smart and selbstverständlich (obvious and logical, so much so that it goes without saying). For example, my host family doesn’t have a dryer. Of my seven closest friends here, only one of them stayed in a house with a dryer. At home I use the dryer all the time, without questioning anything. But here, not having a dryer suddenly seems economical and ecological! I think to myself, Going without a dryer is no problem, why it’s even the ideal choice! Interesting how a change in context can really change my tune. Next I'll be saying too much indoor heating isn't necessary--at which point you should worry about me.

PS: Mom, not only do I know I really like tea in the mornings now but I even remembered to turn out the lights.

I'll end with some pictures for those who prefer not to read, or who just like pictures:

A corner of my new room. Notice the plant on my desk--my host mom gave it to me and it makes my room smell so good!

My very boring looking building

Hilary, Leah and Hilary's mom at dinner tonight

The other side of the table: me, Emma and Maria