There’s one thing my coach never tired of saying to me: “Hau den Ball ins Tor hinein!” – best translated with: “Just slam it into the back of the net!” What did yours used to say to you? What about this one: “If we want to win the championship, we need to win away games!”? If you’ve ever played at the top of a league, then you’ve probably heard that one before.

Teams in the Bundesliga don’t appear see things that way, though. Neither record-holders Bayern München, nor the gutsy Schalke 04, nor even title contenders Bayer Leverkusen were able to win their away games on match day 27.

In comparison to America, Germany is a fairly small place.  “Germany,” I still remember my high school German teacher telling our class, “is about the size of Pennsylvania.”  Though it turns out Germany is actually more like four times the size of Pennsylvania, it is still a relatively small place in American standards, and for being so small, it’s a wonder what a range of regional culinary specialties exist here, tucked away in every corner.

In Rheinland-Pfälz, I’ve experienced Pfälzer Saumagen.  But in Hessen you need not be so daring to sample the local specialties, because in Hessen the standards are “apfelwein,” “grüne soße,” and “handkäs mit musik.”

Apfelwein

Moving to another country was the first culture shock.  Suddenly I was in Germany, surrounded by another culture and another language.  Then the career change: instead of sitting behind a desk, whether as a student or as a proofreader, I had become a nanny, then an English teacher, then a full-time freelance writer.  Then I blew all the other changes right out of the water and moved into a little wooden gypsy caravan on a piece of squatted land on the outskirts of one of Europe’s most metropolitan cities.

In town, bankers sipped 8-euro drinks and talked about their stock portfolios, while I lived with a bunch of adventurous nomadic types with brightly colored hair and wild dreadlocks, without electricity, carrying water 100-meters from the faucet to my little house or the community kitchen, chopping firewood to fire up the woodstove, reading by candlelight.

Almost four years after the fact, it hits me one day in the bathroom.  “I live in Germany.  I really live here!  What the hell?!”

Sure, it may sound obvious to you, but the scurrility of living in another country, in another language, on another continent takes some time to really absorb.  And here I am, facing another renewal of my visa, registered at a German address, with a German bank account, German friends, German books, a German gmail account.  How did it all happen?