New Feature: Ask the Expat

I get a lot of email thanks to this blog, most of it asking me to share nuggets of wisdom about travel or life as an expat. I enjoy corresponding with readers, but I find that I often don’t have the time to respond thoroughly to all the inquiries I receive. There are also certain questions that I receive over and over again, so I’m starting to think it would make sense to post the answers here on the blog. Thus, I’m going to start answering questions in posts here, dear-abby-style. Because, you know, I’m so very much like Dear Abby.

If you’d like to submit a question, here are a few guidelines that will help me give you a better answer (and increase your likelihood of hearing from me):

• Check the archives first. You can use the search box at the top of the page to search this blog, or browse the category list on the left-hand sidebar. Perhaps I’ve already answered your question in a past post.

• Ask me something I’m likely to know about (or have an opinion about). OK, actually you can ask me anything you want, but you’re probably not going to get an answer if you ask me something I know nothing about. I’ve lived and worked in Italy (Milan and Bologna), Switzerland (Zurich), and Germany (Munich, Berlin, and Halle), and I’ve traveled extensively throughout these and other European countries. But I’m not an expert on much of anything – keep that in mind, too.

• Don’t ask me to do your research for you. If you can find the answer to your question using google, why are you asking me?

Have a question about European travel, expat life, or anything else that you’d like to ask me? You can submit questions by either 1) posting them in the comments section of this post or 2) emailing me. Either way, let me know what name you’d like me to use for you on the blog. I’ll answer questions in new posts, perhaps once a week or so. Maybe it will be a Friday thing. I reserve the right to edit, re-write, ignore, and/or ridicule all questions. Ask away!

Tags: ask the expat, thoughts

Now where was I?

Whew, that was fun! I feel like I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks. I think I managed to attend Oktoberfest 8 or 9 times – so at least half of the days. Impressive that I’m still standing, no?

The major thing I learned from my marathon of festing is this: if you don’t have a reservation, go during the week, and go early! There was a huge difference in crowd level between weekends (including Fridays) and weekdays. On a weekday one can get a seat in pretty much any tent for lunch and some afternoon drinking, without waiting in line or getting shoved around by too many drunken frat boys. The music is a little more low-key and traditional during the day, but it picks up in the early evening, which is about the same time that the dancing on the benches starts. Speaking of Oktoberfest music, how long until I get these songs out of my head? (The playlists at the tents are very repetitive, to say the least.)

Now I’ve got about four days of ‘normal life’ before visitors and travel descend upon me again. So, if I’ve owed you an email for the past month or so, expect to finally get a reply this week. Right after I hose down the apartment. And figure out what to do with 50 green tomatoes…

Tags: expat life, Munich, Oktoberfest, thoughts

Expat bloggers for change

Oh boy did we miss some, um, interesting political news coming out of the homeland during our vacation. Usually I take in all of my US news filtered through the brilliant brain of Jon Stewart in order to make it more palatable, but this time I had to learn about things the hard way: from CNN. At least it was CNN international, which is mildly more intelligent than the US version, but still, not good.

The addition of Sarah Palin into the election mix is too much for me to handle. It makes me so angry I could kick a puppy. I feel personally assaulted by this choice. How dare you take an idea so dear to me (a woman president) and twist it around into something so revolting, Mr. McCain? I feel like I’ve been put through some sort of Clockwork-Orange-style reconditioning.

Jon Stewart, can you make it all better?

Anyway, given my inability to handle such topics like an adult, you probably won’t find me blogging too much about US politics here (beyond encouraging you to register to vote if you’re a US citizen). But plenty of other expat bloggers are speaking up, and I’m happy to see them do it:

• Snooker tells us about her new toy, a Caribou Barbie.
• Astroyoga shows a lot more patience in describing what’s icky about Republicans than I ever could.
• Heza wants you to vote, too.
• from Yelli: Aboogaboogabooga! Watch out for those scary European ideals, Republicans. Affordable healthcare and usable public transportation, OH NO!
• Naechstehaltestelle is not such a fan of Ms. Palin, either.

Tags: thoughts, USA

The worst travel planner in the world

OK, there, my secret’s out. I am a horrible travel planner. Dreadful. Borderline incompetent. Obsessive, compulsive, indecisive, lazy, whiny, and just plain bad. Hard to believe, given how much traveling I actually do. I should be an old pro at this by now, right? Alas, no. While I love love love the actual traveling part, I’d rather stab my eyeballs out with a sharp object than actually do the planning.

My problem lies in the quest for the best trip possible. The perfect trip. Every little decision is an opportunity to optimize, and I will do it to an obsessive fault. The itinerary must give us the perfect amount of time in each location so that we have time to soak in the atmosphere, see the interesting sights, but not get bored or miss out on other fabulous opportunities elsewhere. The hotels must be quaint, charming, practical, clean, and in the perfect location. The transportation from place to place must be quick, comfortable, and efficient. And of course, every little bit must be the best bargain to be had anywhere. One of the many problems is this: having not been to these places before, I have no way of knowing, really knowing, how long I will want to spend where doing what, nor how much I want to pay for any particular bit.

Part of this obsession is that I have a really hard time making non-refundable bookings. I’m convinced that as soon as I click ‘purchase’, something better will come along: a better rate, a more central location, free internet, more local character. This is not a particularly useful attitude to have.

[Here I had an example of how I go about booking a single hotel, but it got so ridiculously long and ridiculous it had to be removed, in the interest of the sanity of anyone who's actually reading this post.]

You would think with all the agony that goes into trip planning for me, I would start doing it months if not years in advance. Not so. Just to make everything even more fun (or perhaps to prevent the planning pain from taking even more of my precious time), I procrastinate like a champion procrastinator at the Procrastination Olympics. I am the Michael Phelps of procrastination.

I have spent the past three days frantically researching and planning our big summer vacation, 10 days in Norway. The final itinerary involves delicately-orchestrated timing, daily changes of location, all the major cities*, a couple fjords, several islands, and a whole lot of fun. I hope. If we miss any single connection, the whole plan falls to pieces. If it all comes together, I might actually not be the worst travel planner in the world, after all. In fact, I just might be a travel-planning virtuoso.

I’ll let you know how it turns out. We leave tomorrow.

* if you can consider a population of 300,000 a ‘major city’

Tags: thoughts, travel, travel planning

Travel writers born, not made?

If ever you were in doubt that nepotism is alive and well, you’d need look no further than the travel writing industry to see that it is. Who knew guidebooks were the stuff of travel royalty?

Take Arthur Frommer’s daughter, Pauline, for example. She has her own line of guidebooks. Incidentally, I learned about her writing through Arthur Frommer’s delightfully insightful and curmudgeonly travel blog, of which I am an avid reader. With marketing like that, she’s bound to succeed.

And then there was the big scandal a while back about Max Gogarty, son of The Guardian‘s travel writer Paul Gogarty. Guardian readers were none too happy to hear that 18-year-old Max had scored a travel blog on the Guardian site to document his privileged international partying. Comments were so harsh that they seem to have actually prevented the blog from going past the first entry.

The latest edition to the travel writing offspring pack is Rick Steve’s daughter Jackie, who has a blog on her father’s website to document her summer romp around Europe. The reception she has received has been vastly different to poor Max’s, with most of her commenters sounding like concerned mothers, wringing their hands as they read about the 18-year-old’s encounters with Italian boys and red-light districts. I wonder if the comments are heavily moderated, or if ‘concerned mother’ types are just the kind of folks who read Rick Steves’s site. I suppose the latter is pretty plausible.

(As an aside, I am so insanely impressed with Rick Steve’s recent trip to Iran. I have never been a particular fan of his, but this self-funded adventure in cultural understanding has earned him huge amounts of respect from me. I really hope I get a chance to see the show that comes out of it.)

So my question is, why oh why couldn’t I have been born into travel-writing royalty?

Tags: thoughts, travel

Resolving

I feel like I’ve been down on Zurich for a while now. It started in the summer, with the ridiculously hot weather (and total lack of air conditioning), and just never quite recovered. I was looking forward to a cold, snowy winter to renew my love of this little country, but instead I’ve been given one of the warmest Decembers in history (but there’s no such thing as global warming).

I’m tired of living in a place where the food sucks and you’re overcharged for it. Where you’re overcharged for everything. I’m tired of our tiny apartment, and our freezer that’s the size of a shoebox. I’m tired of the fact that we would each have to learn not one but two foreign languages to begin to feel at home here. And I’m tired of being a foreigner among such a xenophobic people (seriously, the Swiss make the Germans look like the Ambassadors of Warm Fuzzy Acceptance of Foreigners).

BUT, there are plenty of positives about Switzerland, too. For example, it just legalized civil unions for gay couples (although these couples might run screaming in the other direction when they realize how ridiculously high the tax penalty is on dual-income families here). And have I mentioned how very clean and safe it is?

So for 2007 one of my resolutions is to spend more time reveling in the good things about this country – the extreme natural beauty, the efficient public transportation, the cleanliness and safety. I know we won’t be here forever, so I need to appreciate it while I can!

Tags: Switzerland, thoughts

blogger, expat, novelist…

I’m proud to announce that I am an official winner of NaNoWriMo 2006. That means that I wrote a 50,000 word novel entirely within the month of November. As a prize, I got this nifty ‘winner’ graphic, so of course I had to make a blog post to show it off.

Before this experience, I really never felt compelled to try my hand at novel-writing, despite my tireless dedication to dilettantism. But something about this project drew me in. Part of it was the appeal of trying a new creative activity. Part of it was the attainable but challenging short-term goal. But most of it was the method.

I’m a big fan of using the ‘quantity over quality’ method of breaking through artistic/creative blocks. When you have to finish a whole novel within a month, you don’t have time to stop and obsess over individual sentence structures or style nuances. You just have to keep writing. And inevitably, at least some of what you write turns out to be pretty good. And that’s exciting.

So I’m not saying I’ve written the next international best-seller or anything. In fact, I’m not even sure anyone else will ever read my novel. Hell, I’m not even sure I’ll ever read my novel. But if you happen to know a publisher looking for an exciting new ‘chick lit’ book to put out (about the adventures of two young American women in Italy), feel free to send her/him my way. I’ll be sure to invite you to the release party.

Tags: temporary insanity, thoughts