You Can Go Home Again… For a Price

You Can Go Home Again… For a Price

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
“There are things you just can't do in life. You can't beat the phone company, you can't make a waiter see you until he's ready to see you, and you can't go home again.” -Bill Bryson "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." -Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again "America is my country and Paris is my hometown." -Gertrude Stein ◊ There is something that happens to someone when they live abroad. It doesn't matter where they live, or for how long; spending an extended period of time living in a country that is not your own will affect anyone who tries it. If you've...
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Leaving for Paris

Leaving for Paris

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
Four years ago, I was in the midst of disassembling my life in Colorado. This is the only way to build a new one. There in my apartment, which was rapidly becoming a large empty space, I stared at the packed boxes. There were more and more of them every day.There were times when the packing and planning was exhausting. It was easier to chain smoke in the dark with several pints of Guinness and a blank page while listening to Rufus Wainwright. Of course, one song that I played over and over again was "Leaving for Paris."httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djpWPhv1tPU&feature=PlayList&p=6FD35315AB3D3572&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1It seemed so appropriate since that is exactly what I was doing. It had occurred to me that I might actually be out of my goddamn mind. Then again, this thought has crossed my mind several times throughout my life and has never really been a point of major concern. But, packing up my life to move to another country to marry a man who I...
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Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

Annoying Americans, Volume 4 – Expat Bloggers

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
American expat bloggers... well, yeah - it's true that with my little blue passport, Wordpress account & carte de séjour, I meet all of the criteria.  But, just wait... hold back your fist-pumping, cries of "hypocrite!" for just a moment.  I might get around to making a point... eventually. Before I moved to France, I spent a great deal of time scouring the internet for information on the place that was to be my new home.  It was a big move, going from Loveland, Colorado to Paris, France.  I was planning to get married to a French man soon after my arrival - I was nervous, excited, stressed-out & elated.  I was doing this alone, with only my faithful feline sidekick.Even though I had already been to France a couple of times already, I wanted to find as much information as I could, so that I could get a clearer picture of what in the hell I was getting myself into. Some...
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Coffee Cups & Campgrounds: The Road Back to France

Coffee Cups & Campgrounds: The Road Back to France

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
"'Mid pleasures and palaces through we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like Home." -J. Howard Payne"A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it." -George Moore "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons." -T.S. Eliot* * * I stared out the window, watching Germany roll by as we made our way to Freiburg. "You know," I said to Olivier. "I can't recall the last time that I had a decent cup of coffee." He pulled on his beard as he steered our little Renault up the highway, recalling all of the cups of coffee we'd drunk over the past days.Then he said, "We haven't had a decent cup of coffee since we left France." It was true. I had some drip coffee from a bakery with my kanelgiffel in Copenhagen. We made some nasty instant sludge while camping in Sweden and had some watered-down American style joe with our Frühstück in...
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Bavaria: Fairy Tales Set to the Sounds of Sausage

Bavaria: Fairy Tales Set to the Sounds of Sausage

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
After we had left ever-changing Berlin behind us and the gray nightmares of the concentration camp, Olivier and I headed south, where everything had slowly changed from gray to green and the sharp, hard edges of barracks and cities had smoothed, turning into the rolling hills of Bavaria and the Black Forest of Germany. Since we had entered a new region, I began fidgeting around with the buttons on the radio, to see what it sounded like here. Immediately, I was reminded of this: httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAUP1wsmqUU Indeed, that's what Bavaria sounds like. What Bavaria looks like is probably just as one might imagine. As cliché as it sounds, the scenery and architecture of the homes did remind me very much of those Grimm's Fairy Tales that I read when I was just a wee little Razzy. "People here don't greet one another with 'Guten Tag'," Olivier told me. "People in this region greet one another with 'Grüß Gott'." "Uh-huh", I said. "So, what does that mean? What's the difference?" "Grüß...
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Copenhagen, Part 1: Entering the Gene Pool

Copenhagen, Part 1: Entering the Gene Pool

by Rasmenia Comment Closed
It didn't take long for Olivier and I to make the drive from Hamburg to Copenhagen. That's one thing that I still get a kick out of when it comes to living in Europe - just drive for a couple of hours and instead of crossing state lines, you cross borders into another country, where the language changes and the road signs become meaningless, crazy looking words.In France, Olivier and I both understand the road signs. In Germany, I could make out a few while Olivier could make out the rest of them.In Denmark, we were both lost.Luckily, everyone there speaks such perfect English, that it doesn't really matter.Score: 1 for Denmark.We arrived at the place where we would be staying. We had made a reservation while we were still in France. We walked up to the front door and found a note with Olivier's name on it telling us to go inside.Then we found a path to our room...
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