3 Cultural Differences between Germany and the United States

1. Paying for Public Bathrooms

My dad and I drove from Colorado to Michigan and back during our recent travels. As we drove cross country, we stopped occasionally at the interstate Rest Areas. They were all free but not necessarily clean.

Contrast that to traveling the Autobahn in Germany! If you stop at an Autohof, you’d better have a Euro in your pocket to use the restroom. However, the facilities are probably better maintained. It’s a tradeoff but definitely one I’m glad I know about!

2. Ordering Food at Restaurants

On our recent travels, I found myself getting twitchy every time a waiter or waitress would stop to check on our table. I was tired from a day on the road, and it took me a bit to realize why. The restaurant experience can be really nice in Germany but it’s slower and the etiquette is different. Let me explain. 

You’re handed a menu and the waiter walks away. He’ll come back for drink orders and leave again. This seems on track for the same experience as what you’d find in the U.S.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll then pick your item on the menu and leave the menu open to reference when it comes time to order. Especially when the menu’s in German, sometimes it’s just easier to point at what you want. (Although I’m learning German, there are definitely times that I still have no clue what a word means!)

But then you wait…and wait…and wait…and…

Here’s the social cue that’s missing. You have to close to menu for the waiter to know you’re ready. Otherwise, he leaves you alone. And he doesn’t care how long it takes you to figure out what you want. 

This sort of thing continues throughout the meal. Once you have a table at a restaurant, it’s yours for as long as you want. (Reservations are huge because of this!) However, the waiter isn’t going to check on you every ten minutes. If you want more water, you flag him down. It’s not considered rude there, it’s expected. Or when you want to pay the bill, same thing. You flag him down. 

A meal out can easily take a couple of hours or more. I love it, but if you don’t know why the waiter’s ignoring you, it can feel really weird.

While back in the States, I’ve had to flip my thinking and not get twitchy when the waiter checks in a lot.  

3. Buying Groceries

The U.S. likes to bulk shop. We have Costco, Sams Clue, Super Walmart, and HEB. Buc-ee’s is getting wild too. But we also have the space for buying and storing in bulk.

Germans on the other hand, tend to have refrigerators half the size of Americans, if not smaller. And the pantry space might be a cupboard or two. 

So, instead of doing a monthly Sams run, they shop once or twice a week for their food. No backup storage, but it does help to keep fresher things in the fridge. It’s just a mental shift on how you shop. 

Now I just need a story about getting lost in a friend’s pantry or needing a bathroom without having money to pay. Or on the flip side, being startled that there’s no toilet seat on public toilets. (That’s a heads up if you visit France!) 

What kinds of cultural differences have you encountered in your life? What would you warn people about if they were visiting your home?

Blessing,

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I’ve never looked back with the idea of revisiting a post except if I rerun an adventure, so I decided to take a look at June from ten years ago. I found a post titled Time and Value.

I found it somewhat interesting, and so here’s what I posted then with updates from now. Maybe this is just for my own enjoyment, but here we go pulling from 2016 vault =)

2016: Clear warning, this post is a bit different. I don’t usually talk about myself in-depth but I always feel a bit guilty when I take time off and I thought I’d share a little about what’s happening in my little brain. There is a real person behind the adventures, I swear =)

2026: For a long time, all I’d post were adventures. Maybe I was nervous about talking about myself. Maybe it was just easier. Who knows. Now maybe I err on the side of personal posts too much and need to get back to adventures more. All of it’s writing and this is my home base, so I don’t mind the shift over time. 

2016: A little bit ago I turned thirty. Not even sure what to say about it. It just happened. Kinda snuck up on me and laughed in sadistic glee as it whizzed right by. Crazy things, time and age. I don’t feel thirty.

2026: Still don’t feel my age. Probably never will! 

2016: I somehow thought I’d be more comfortable in my own skin by this age. Now I’m realizing it’s human nature to find fault, especially as a woman, in myself. It’s human nature to wish for straight hair when the humidity turns my God-given locks to ringlets. To crave clear skin when I’ve got a healthy body that keeps up with my passions for climbing and hiking and snowboarding.

2026: Guess it just took ten more years but I’m far more comfortable in my skin than I used to be. At some point, I just stopped worrying as much about what others think. Not that I never think about it, but I’m far more likely to shrug things off than I used to. 

2016: The list of ‘have-nots’ is endless if I let it. It’s so, so easy to focus on the “have-nots” and completely forget the even longer, more uplifting list of “haves.” And I’m coming to realize focusing on the list of “haves” is not a comparison thing. I can’t compare myself to another woman or compare my good traits with my bad. That way lies grief and tears because, inevitably, it either leads to pride or the pit of “have-nots” again. The list of “haves” is simple fact. Something we each can own as who we are, beautiful, or handsome, in our own right.

I’m beautiful. Shut up internal dialogue that says otherwise.

2026: Yeesh! That was a convoluted paragraph. But it’s not wrong. It’s a constant practice to chose to be thankful. It’s easy to focus on the things I want and forget how blessed I am. I often reset, reminding myself of my blessings. It makes life more content and I love that. 

2016: I’m also successful despite the fact that I haven’t completely accomplished all my dreams and goals yet. Failure only drowns me if I stop trying, stop living for the things that God’s instilled in me to enjoy and have a passion for. But sometimes those passions, those values, conflict and it feels like failure to back away from one to accomplish another for a time.

2026: I think the Western culture teaches that we’re always striving to be better. This isn’t bad, but it can lead us to focus only on the things unfinished, which in turn makes us completely disregard the things we have accomplished. There’s something to be said for celebrating each and every milestone. 

2016: When I look in the mirror and focus on the things I have, I see the deep blue irises I inherited from my dad, the slightly wavy hair of both my parents and the shape of my mother’s graceful face. These are a legacy of a family I greatly value.

2026: I love this legacy all the more now!

2016: Here’s where the passions conflict right now.

Writing’s always a passion for me. There’s a drive in me that just won’t quite. To take time off feels like I’m failing myself and those who actually read my work. (Thank you to everyone reading this! I greatly appreciate you.) But time with family is precious beyond anything I can describe. Over the next month, my husband and I have the opportunity to spend time with family that we haven’t had in several years. So, it’s been placed on my heart to focus solely on them. To step back from the writing in order to appreciate the blessing that is family. Perhaps this is where the wisdom of thirty comes in. I considered trying to do both but, in all honesty, I doubt I’d do either justice if I did.

2026: I’ve done this many times over the last ten years. A break from writing to spend time with family has never failed to refresh and help me come back to writing stronger. I encourage this for any writer. Although the work is amazingly rewarding, there’s a balance where the special people in our lives deserve undivided time. 

2016: So, thank you to everyone in advance for understanding a month’s break from the adventure. (And thank you for being patient with my rambling today =)).

2026: Thank you to anyone reading this now for sticking with me through many years of writing and breaks! Every time I return to writing, I’m blessed by the people excited to see me return. 

2016: I encourage you over the next month, and beyond that, to focus on who you are individually (no comparisons) and find value in the things that make you uniquely you. You’re beautiful, handsome, and amazing simply because you are who you are and there’s not another person like you.

2026: Amen! I still encourage this!

Until next time, blessings,

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Since most writers work at home, their home life naturally mingles with their work life. And it’s incredibly hard sometimes to separate the two enough to get any reasonable amount of writing done. It’s not that others in the household don’t respect the work, it’s that they often don’t know if the writer’s working or, because the person’s right there, a quick question don’t seem like a huge deal. As I’ve navigated this, I’d found a few things that help and thought I’d share.

Encouraging Your Writer

• Communicate! 

You’d think this one would be obvious, but we writers often just assume that, if I’m sitting at my desk, I’m obviously working. So we expect people to just know to give us space. But my husband knows I could be budgeting, reading the news, writing an email for my niece’s homework, or any number of other things that are not writing related. If I tell him that this specific time is reserved for writing, he respects that time and doesn’t interrupt, but I need to clearly tell him. 

Someone once said that we need to treat our writing like the business it is or others won’t. That stuck with me. It’s hard when it’s a job from home. So many distractions abound. But if we set aside time and ask others to help us with it, I’ve found it’s easier. 

• Bring Coffee! (Or any other form of favorite snack and beverage.)

We writers are like squirrels. Distractions abound. And one of the easiest procrastination distractions is going for a cup of coffee, that then leads into making a snack, that then leads to a ten-minute conversation because you’re standing there waiting for the popcorn to pop, that then…

You get the picture. Bringing a small snack if you think of it can be insanely helpful! 

• Ask Specifically About the Magic!

In last week’s post, I talked about how hollow it feels to tell someone, “I was writing,” when they ask what you did that day. It just doesn’t really explain the vibrancy of creating a world on paper. I encouraged other writers to talk about the magic, the fortress you infiltrated, the deep conversation you had with your characters, the reunion the father and son had in your story, whatever it may be. 

As the writer’s support people, these answers can be so much more if you ask deeper questions. Instead of, “How was the writing?” maybe ask what characters they were working with that day. Where were they at? What conflict were they navigating? Did they escape the dungeon? Did something explode in their face? 

This serves to help your writer not feel so crazy, for one, and opens the door for him or her to really dig into the excitement they probably feel for their story. It helps them feel more connected and share more instead of everything living inside their heads. 

I’m sure there’s more I could say and each writer has his or her own foibles, so if you’re truly interested in being a part of your writer’s work life, maybe ask what would specifically help. Maybe the answer is as simple as providing a bag of skittles, but you don’t know until you ask =)

Blessings,

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And second of all, what do I even say when being alone comes comfortably to me? I think the only time I’ve truly dreaded it was when I thought about coming home after my mom passed and having to face my grief while my husband was at work. That quickly passed, however. The quiet and time to cry alone were their own comfort.

But writing by nature requires a great deal of solitude. Our worlds and characters come alive for us, but no one else sees them while we’re creating them and that can be really hard. How do we share? Even being comfortable with the solitude doesn’t take away the inordinately hollow feeling when someone asks what you did all day and you say, “I was writing.” 

That doesn’t encompass…well, anything. It doesn’t share the excitement of Na’rina’s recent escape, or the jumble of emotion Icarus feels at seeing his family again after being cast out as a child. It doesn’t convey the smell of hibiscus blooming in the café while El spies on the Fae embassy. It’d be better to say, “I was creating magic,” than to say, “I was writing.”

I guess my take on the writing solitude is twofold.

The quiet, alone work is a necessity if you want to write. So become friends with your own thoughts. Sit on your patio in the early morning and drink some coffee. No music, no phone, nothing but the delicious smell of coffee, the song of early morning birds, and your own thoughts. Allow them to be familiar friends and not constant condemnation, or constant planning, or constant motion… Allow yourself boredom like it’s a luxury. Because for us writers, it is a luxury. It’s time to live in our worlds and let them breathe. 

Then look at your writing and share the bits of excitement that friends and family can understand. Often, we’re not surrounded by people who like to create worlds in their own heads. My husband definitely doesn’t. But if there’s a world mechanic I’m working on detailing out, he’s in the thick of it. And at those times, I share the joy of world building with him. 

Likewise, if a character’s motivation feels off, discussing with my sister often reveals alternatives. She’s not part of the whole process. No one is. But there are pieces built in brainstorming that would never develop in isolation. 

Don’t be afraid to talk about writing like the magic it is. When someone asks, “What did you do today?” share what you actually did. “I planned an infiltration of a frozen palace stronghold.” You may have to explain that some or people might think you’re crazy, but then you get to share! And some of the magic sneaks out of the solitude you spent writing into the time you have with others. 

Maybe there’s a third facet to this.

For the actual writing, we need solitude, but our lives with others often feed our ideas. The magic goes both ways. The palace visited with my parents last year becomes the basis for my Fae palace. The cruise we took a few years ago created the idea for the Sedanza Islands in Theos Rising. The aspen groves I played in as a child with my sisters built Na’rina’s grove. 

So, write in solitude. But talk about your work with the excitement of the story, not just the mundane of “I was writing.” And live constantly aware that everything presents possibilities, and often, the people around you are excited to share and help in whatever way they can. 

Okay, maybe I had more to say than I realized. Thanks again, Lucia, for the post idea!

Blessings,

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That doesn’t mean I don’t try to outline every time I write a novel. It just means I don’t have a system yet that truly works for me. 

Last year I started writing the third book in the Hidden Mythics Series. As always, I didn’t have a clear structure for the story, but I did have random scenes that persisted in my mind. Usually that’s a good sign that the story’s ready to be written, so I wrote the scenes down. They don’t follow a timeline, and they’re not connected to each other. I just needed to get them on the page. 

And then I hit a snag. I had 40K words and had no idea where I was going. Then the beginning of this year happened, and writing fell off my iceberg altogether. 

Now that I’m back at it, I really want a structure to follow. So, I did some searching and found the Snowflake method by Randy Ingermanson. And for once, I have a synopsis written before I even write the book. Since I’m indie-published, I’ve never had to write a synopsis to sell the manuscript to an agent or editor, so it’s never been a high priority to write something that most in the industry consider snore worthy. 

And on top of that, I have a scene list. Huh. That’s never happened before. 

I can’t say that the story won’t immediately dive into the grass as soon as I start the actual writing, but so far, it seems to be working. I’ll update you as I progress. Maybe I’ve finally found an outline that kinda, sorta, works for me. 

Blessings,

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You’d think, as the writer of the story, that all of this would be firmly planted in my memory, like the sharp smell of pine from childhood. Yet, if the time’s long enough, even something so simple yet powerful can escape me. 

Human memory is interesting like that. We forget even the important things. Knowing this, my husband and I keep what we call an Ebenezer Jar. We got the idea from my parents who in turn got it from 1 Samual 7:12 and Joshua 4:1-24 from the Bible. Both of these stories have someone setting up stones as a memory marker for something God did.

For me, I then tape the Ebenezer into my journal and recall what events surrounded it. Who was visiting, what occasion we were celebrating, the inside joke behind the story. It’s too easy to remember only the negative. This regularly recalls the beautiful, joy filled moments. What do you do to remember good things?

Blessings,

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The Soul of a Place

I stand out on my patio as the dawn starts to turn the world from pitch black into a muted gray. The trees are bare, their skeletal limbs covered in thick green moss and rough lichen. A few crows send eerie caws into the otherwise still morning. It’s like a scene from the Grimm’s fairy tales. I can imagine the birds being spies for an evil queen or the woods listening for human footsteps so they can trap unwary travelers. 

No one ever claimed the Grimm’s tales were bright or uplifting. 

It’s been exactly a year since my husband and I moved to Germany. On January 15^th, 2025 we left Dallas and landed at Frankfurt the morning of the 16^th. I was terrified, excited, exhausted, and eager to understand this new world we’d stepped into. 

We’d stepped into the old world. 

I’ve heard and read that term. It always carried a feeling of mystery and weight. A man’s from the old world. He must understand deep things and carry a sense of complexity like the years have hidden within him all their secrets. 

It sounds silly, yet here I stand on my patio taking in the very feel that the term implies. 

I’ve wondered before if a place carries the residue of its history. As we’ve moved around over the years, there’s always a texture to a place, a feel that’s as much part of its identity as the name it goes by. Colorado, for instance, was a majestic, if harsh at times, resilience. Or South Carolina a grieving widow full of past hauntings and future hope. A fission of painful memories that cling too tightly and the fight to loosen their fingers.

And now Germany. It was hard to touch on the identities of the states above and yet, their history is but a drop of water compared to Germany. It’s hard to explain but I believe it has to do with the spiritual side of things. I know this sounds crazy, or too far-fetched, but there are things in life we can’t always quantify, and this is one of them. 

Germany, and Europe as far as I’ve experienced, exudes a residue so rich in beauty and grief that even short pauses here make one wonder what stories are hidden on the air. I find myself wanting to sit and listen to the breeze, the bird chatter, and the various languages drifting past with passersby because there’s something more to these things than what I’ll catch if I rush along. 

In a world that feels likes it’s constantly shouting lately; this is what Germany’s teaching me. Don’t rush. Accept the quiet call to sit longer, to listen more, to become acquainted with this land like I would a new, but very old friend. 

I think I felt these things early on in the bells and the bakeries. The simple joys that made the initial rush of moving less painful. Now, the longer I let these things soak in, the more I’m coming to value them. 

Blessings,

Jennifer

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My months long absence wasn’t planned. Such absences never are unless it’s my holiday exodus I take each year in December. I always intend to post consistently but life rarely plays out the way I envision. 

I planned posts for January, when it’d been a year after we moved to Germany. Talked about the soul of a place and how it speaks in the very fabric of the air. It was a good post. I fully intended to post it. 

I wrote a few posts for February too, planning to schedule them ahead of time and give myself a buffer to keep writing. January was off to a good start for 2026. 

Then it came to a full stop. It wasn’t a trickle as I got distracted or a spurt of creativity that disappeared for a bit and then came back. It was a shot to my foundation that rocked everything and has left me reeling for months. 

There are no words to quite explain why I haven’t posted. There are facts. But no true words for the internal upheaval. 

You see, we all have this internal image of who we are, what our lives look like, and what the future may hold. And deep in that image lies the people in our lives. The ones that are always there. The ones who have shaped us profoundly. Family, good friends, spouses. Those people. 

When one of those people suddenly disappears, that entire internal image cracks. For those who have experienced such loss, you know what I’m talking about. 

Let me give you the bare facts I spoke of earlier. In late January, my mother suffered a severe heart attack. For three weeks, she vacillated between recovery, surgery, set back, small steps forward, delirium, recovery again, and then on February 17th, she went home to heaven. It shocked the doctors, the nurses, and especially my family.  

Everything about normal life dropped for me at the end of January. Within eighteen hours of her heart attack, I was on a plane back to Colorado. For the next five and a half weeks, it was hospital, emotional roller coaster, and then memorial service before somehow, attempting to return to normal life back in Germany. 

Except, what is normal now? 

I see her in the way I cook. In the walks I take almost daily because she was out there walking with me at the end of December. I smell her perfume and can almost feel her hug. Hear her, “Good morning, Sweetness,” each morning and desperately don’t want to lose the sound of her voice in my memory. 

When I sit down to write, I can feel her pride in my stories. Remember how she could barely contain herself when she heard someone liked to read and wanted to tell them about my books. I even gave a lunch lady a business card while we were in the hospital because she had to share when the woman said she liked fantasy. But conversely, I sit down now, wanting to make her proud, and stare at an empty page because no amount of writing will bring her back to share with others. There are no new stories I get to share with her. But I know she’d want me to keep writing and so I push through. It’s messy. My heart feels like a rock in my throat and everything else is dull. 

I hate grief yet I know the only way out is through. So, I allow myself to feel. To cry, use a full box of tissues, and then get up and cook chicken soup like she would because that’s how she lives on in my life. 

And my deepest solace lies in something she lived day in and day out. As the pastor said at her service, she didn’t complicate her faith. She loved Jesus. She chose to love others every day even when it was hard. It was as simple as that. 

And because she loved Jesus, I can hope. 

Corrie Ten Boom talked of death like falling asleep in her father’s arms one day when they were walking home and waking up safe and warm in bed later. She didn’t remember arriving home, but she knew upon waking that she was safe in her father’s house. This is how I chose to see death. 

Mom woke up in her father’s house. And some day, I’ll wake up there too. She’s not gone. She’s home. 

The day my mother passed, this was my sister’s devotional scripture: 

“I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will award to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have loved his appearing.” (2 Timothy 4:7-8 ESV)

I don’t believe in coincidences. I believe this was God’s assurance and although I keep this blog focused mostly on writing and this adventure called life, I’ll ask the following question because when everything’s gone and it’s just us and reality in the mirror, I think we need to be able to answer this question. What’s your assurance beyond this life? Will you wake up in your Father’s house? 

Blessings,

Jennifer

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In many ways, 2025 challenged me. There’s nothing like moving to a different country to upend what a person thinks she knows. Everything from doing laundry to driving or ordering food became both a struggle and an opportunity to learn and experience. In such times, perspective is everything. I wish I could say I kept a great attitude like the bunny from Zootopia, and sometimes I did, but often I found myself just tired and surly. My poor husband. He was going through the same life upheaval, and I wasn’t much help. 

It’s in hindsight that I see the good that I was just too overwhelmed to appreciate or notice at the time. 

Germany is a beautiful country. As I sit here writing, I’m looking out over the walking path and the thick trees behind my house. If you know anything about me, you know how much I love the forest. And Germany has a lot of forest. 

The fall colors have been vibrant and various. Deep ruby shows in the vines growing up the house at the end of the street. Bright yellow covers the hillsides, broken by the occasional orange or red and still lots of green. When we follow the walking path, some of the leaves are small splotches of color. Others are bigger than my hand. 

And that’s just talking about this fall. It doesn’t touch the deep, rolling green of summer or the flowers in the spring. Or the winter. I’ll talk about the Christmas Markets next year after I’ve had a chance to fully experience them, but when entire villages decorate and celebrate for weeks, I have to say, the Germans know how to keep the winter blues away. 

I could ramble about castles, museums, tunnels, and towers. I could rave about the slower pace of life and the gentle encouragement to be social. This could be a very long post. 

But there’s one thing that really stands out from this last year above the beauty of Germany and the adventure it is to live here. 

It’s a subtle thing, seen in the dance my husband and I do in the one-person kitchen while we’re cooking. Felt in the regular conversations we have about work, doctor appointments, and whatever weird thing the Writing Sidekick’s doing now. A thread woven through the small gestures. Prepping his lunch before he leaves for work or cooking my breakfast for me because the Sidekick’s sleeping on my lap. These are the everyday details that are easy to overlook, to take for granted and treat as normal. But they’re reflections of something deeper. 

And it’s always in hindsight that I see it. When we’re challenged. When we’re stretched and it’s hard to be kind. When I want to cry because somehow, my husband and I can’t seem to communicate. In the midst of it all, I know from experience that God’s working, but I can’t see it. Only afterwards can I look back and see the golden thread keeping us going and teaching us. God’s gentle hand carrying us through and, through the struggle, making us stronger. 

This isn’t the first trial my husband and I have faced, and it definitely won’t be the last. I sometimes dread them. But I also know, such trials are where we grow the most. Where our marriage becomes stronger. Because we keep trying, keep praying and trusting, we come out the other side even closer. 

I hope this is an encouragement. Struggles happen in relationships. Especially in marriages. Trust that those struggles in the end will form in you and your spouse something precious beyond description.

That’s what I’m thankful for this year. That’s how I’m blessed. And now, stronger and still growing, my husband and I can explore together and navigate the unknowns with just a tiny bit more grace.

Blessings,

P.S. December is a hiatus month for me. A time for family and reflection. May you have a wonderful Holiday Season, and I’ll see you in 2026.

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