Author Archives: Chad Smith

You know, life moves fast and sometimes we don’t get around to doing things we wanted to do. One of those things, for me, was putting up a particular post on this blog last August. I had wanted to put up this post because August 5, 2014, marked the 1-year anniversary of the Ross Township shooting. [...]

Well, I’ve reached that 1-year mark. One year of living in Germany, of living in another country, far away from the mores and laws of the United States. I thought that this would be an appropriate time to reflect on some things that living in Germany has taught me. The individual is not always that [...]

My mom likes to travel. She’s been to South America, Europe — Greenland! Really, she’s been all over. Because she has seen so many things and been to all these locales, she sometimes winds up getting the names of places confused. Such was the case when I moved to Stroudsburg in 2010. For months, even [...]

One of the things that living in Germany has taught me is that we in the United States, especially the men, can be kind of strange sometimes with the things we do and gestures we make. For example, when I was in college in upstate New York, I would notice that a lot of the [...]

OK, well, I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but another person has died tragically in the U.S. due to guns. This time the victim was a German exchange student, a 17-year-old named Diren Dede. Coincidentally, Diren, who was doing an exchange year in Missoula, Montana, was from a district in Hamburg called Altona, which is [...]

“Born on a bike!” That was the taunt, or desperate retort, rather, that I hollered at my girlfriend a few hours ago when we were both on bikes, peddling up a steep hill near the Elbe River. She had been about 15 feet in front of me, clearly in the lead, under no visible stress, [...]

So I’m just sitting here at my kitchen table. It’s around 8:20 p.m., Central European Time, and I just thought I’d give you a little dispatch as I wait for my pizza to cook. Crazy day it was. About an hour ago, I was sitting at my living room table, where I often do work, [...]

Hey y’all, I feel like I’m always writing these treatises on this blog, so I thought I’d just keep it light with this post. Here are some “postcards” from my life in Germany. Enjoy.  

Let’s talk about sex. OK, now that I’ve got your attention, let’s actually talk about sex and how it is perceived in the U.S. and in Germany. In the U.S., sex is way more taboo than it should be. Sex will get you in serious trouble; sex will get you crucified. Not so in Germany. [...]

So today I want to talk about something that took me an incredibly long time to get used to: The way Germans interact with each other in public. It’s much, much different than how we treat one another in public in the U.S. What I mean is this: In the U.S., we mostly mind our [...]