Navigating My New Life

So this is my first foray into blogging. I'm 42 years old and stumbling my way through a major transition: moving with my family from our home in Maryland to my husband's native country, Germany. I figure this is as good a time as any to start writing it all down: the stories I want to remember and pass on, the accounts of our current experiences, and the goals and dreams I want to keep in focus.

A little backgroud:
I was born and raised in suburban New York. When I was 16, I won a Congress-Bundestag Scholarship to live with a host family and go to school for one year in Germany. There, I landed on a small farm on the Baltic Sea. Didn't speak a single word of German. Knew nothing about milking cows. Was pretty sure I had fallen off the edge of civilization. But during the next 12 months, I became fairly fluent in the language and fell in love with everything about my new culture (as well as a certain blond boy ;) ).

Upon returning to the US, I entered Michigan State University, where I pursued first a Bachelor of Arts in Communication then Master's and Doctoral studies. In the summer of 1989 I was back in Germany working on an internship. That's when I dumped the blond boy (sorry, Ole) and began seeing the man I later married - the one who just brought me and our four children here to live, after he spent nearly 20 years with me in America.

So here we are, Karen, Sven, Marissa (16), Nadia (15), Anders (13), and Sergey (9), having arrived this past summer in what they call the "Ruhrpott" - a densely populated region of urban sprawl along the Rhine and Ruhr Rivers in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.  Join me as we navigate our new lives. If you have similar stories to share, questions or comments, I look forward to hearing from you!

First Christmas in our new home. Frohe Weihnachten!