Blogroll…(Paying it forward)

These are the blogs/websites I like and try to follow regularly. They are *not affiliated links:

Art (Fashion, Photography, Writing, Music, etc)

Cooking (because who doesn’t need ideas in the kitchen)

Expat Life/Living in Germany

  • Blog Expat – This is a good resource to find blogs about places you want to visit or move to.
  • Expat Almanac – Is written by a couple who travel the world and write about their experiences.
  • The following sites all offer variations on the same thing – helping you to become or being an expat.
    • Expats Blog – No matter where you are in the world, this blog aims to help you feel connected to the local life and others across the world that are in a similar boat to you.
    • Expat-Blog – This site aims to help with all aspects of expat life.
    • Expat Focus – This website aims to help folks move anywhere in the world.
    • Expat Intellegence – Aims to be a one-stop shop on everything expaty.
    • Expatica: Germany – Offers country specific information on living, working, studying, visiting and everything in between.
  • The following sites are about living, working, studying, and loving in Germany when you aren’t from there.
    • EURES (European job portal site)
    • Working in Germany – This site is provided by the German government to help foreigners work, study, and live in Germany.
    • How to Germany– How To Germany tells you just about everything you need to know about living and working in Germany as a foreigner. I have used it often.
    • Multicoolty – While this site hasn’t been updated for some time, it can still shed light on what life is like in Germany from the very people who have moved here from abroad.
    • Oh God My Wife Is German – While this blog hasn’t been updated since 2017, it is still hilariously entertaining and educational
    • Germerica – While Courtney, the creator of this blog, may not post as often as she used to, her insight into the German culture is still light-hearted, fun, and educational.
    • The German Way – This is a one stop shop for anything you want to know about the German speaking world.
    • Toytown Germany – Is an English language community website for people who live and work or want to live and work in the German speaking world who are not used to the culture and all its intricacies.

Health & Fitness

  • I use YouTube a lot if I can’t go to the gym, these are some of my favorite resources:
    • Yoga with Adriene Her channel gives me life. She creates videos of various lengths for beginners to experienced yogis.
    • FitnessBlender   – offers a variety of HIIT workouts for everyone, created by a husband and wife who do the workouts with you.
    • The Body Coach TV    – Joe the Body Coach has been around for a while, but really came into his own during the first lockdown of 2020, offering HIIT workouts for kids and adults of all abilities.
    • Redefining Strength – Cori, the owner and main creator at Redefining Strength, has a great approach no matter what she is teaching her audience about. She helps make informative videos about fitness, health, and exercise that all of us can learn from, whether we are gym rats or not.

Humor

Intercultural awareness:

  • The London School Intercultural Competency Quiz – With this interactive quiz of 20 questions, the user should take away a better understanding of how culturally competent they are.
  • Trompenaars Hampden-Turner Overall Cultural Orientation Questionnaire – This is a shorter version, or ‘taster’ of their InterCultural Assessment Profiler. It consists of seven questions which helps you “obtain an approximate first level assessment of your overall orientation”. As they state on their website, there are no wrong answers. The goal with the questionnaire is to help you begin to understand your personal ‘cultural preference’.
  • Hofstede Insights Country Comparison Tool– This resource allows users to examine one culture or compare country cultures based on social psychologist Geert Hofstede’s pioneering research and six-point framework for measuring cultural dimensions in a global perspective. (Tool is at the bottom of the main page)
    Additionally interesting may be Geerthofstede’s personal website as it is also full of resources for additional IC learning.
  • The Intercultural Development Inventory – This assessment tool has been developed to help individuals and organizations better understand, for a fee, where they land on the Intercultural development continuum. This is important because it can then help individuals and organizations to focus their attention and learning to improving their place on the continuum, thus improving their capacity to shift perspectives and adapt behavior to cultural differences and commonalities – thus improving communication and relationships across cultures. If you would like to take the IDI, you will be matched with a coach who will explain your results to you and next steps you could take in your intercultural awareness journey.
  • SIETAR (Society for Intercultural Education, Training, and Research – This is a worldwide professional organization that seeks to promote and facilitate intercultural education, training and research through professional interchange.
  • True North Intercultural – Created and run by Tara Harvey, Ph.D. this website and training organizations aims to help educators navigate cultural differences and facilitate intercultural learning.
  • European Institute for Intercultural Development – Offers training programs for people from all walks of life that want to increase their ability for personal growth, mutual understanding, and international and intercultural cooperation.

Kids (abroad)

  • Multicultural Kids – This blog is all about having multicultural kids, to inspire and support families, caregivers, educators, and community members raising the next generation of global citizens, by creating educational and parenting content.
  • Expat Child – Makes moving abroad with children easier for all the family with practical, useful and sensible information and advice about all stages of expat life.

Life & love:

  • Bucket List Publications – While the creators of this page have moved back to the USA, they have a plethora of stories about their varied travel life.
  • Craves Adventure – This blog is a fun stop for inspiration to get outside and look for adventure everywhere.
  • Cristian Mihai – Why do I like this blog? I think because he has been around a long time, writes about life, and he isn’t afraid to lay it all out there and be honest with his readers. I respect the game he’s playing.
  • Making the Most of Marriage – You know what, I am married and reading about other people’s experience on this crazy topic makes me feel less alone when things seem weird and wacky.
  • Powered By Tofu – Olivia, the creator of this blog writes about a place I miss terribly and love dearly, along with travels, goals, DIYs and other great random stuff. I like to imagine that we might be friends if I lived in Oregon.

Portland

  • Willamette Weekly – This is Portland’s main weekly newspaper. It was one I read every week to know what was really going on in the city regarding politics and mainstream life.
  • Blogtown: the Portland Mercury Blog – This was Portland’s alternative weekly paper twenty years ago. I can’t say it is still ‘alternative’ necessarily, but the snark and attitude hasn’t changed.
  • Food Cart Portland (Also could be in food/cooking/art) – Food carts were always especially unique to Portland because our city had blocks dedicated to them. It was a culinary heaven for those of us who were lucky enough to enjoy this plethora of flavor decadence at its peak. The food cart scene in PDX has been in flux for years because those blocks that were dedicated to the trucks are slowly being sold off and redeveloped as parking lots, high rises, and other money making endeavours. This blog still tracks the trucks that are left, new ones that enter the scene, and all the news about the politics that has sprung up around the culture.

Teaching/Education (General Teaching, English,  American Culture, Civics, etc)

  • EFL 2.0 – Teacher Talk – This resources aims to be a one stop shop for EFL/ESL teachers
  • NYT: Education – I love this page of the New York Times. It has stories relating to education from all over the US and helps readers understand the complexity of the subject of education in the USA.

About American culture (websites, blogs, podcasts)

  • National Public Radio is like America’s version of the British Broadcasting Corp (BBC), I love it (and the BBC)
    • NPR: All Songs Considered – Covers both domestic and international new music, it has been a lifeline while abroad.
    • This American Life – The podcast tells stories of real Americans by Americans, usually from their own mouths. It is cultural, anthropological, historical.
    • NPR: Pop Culture – This podcast is all about high and low culture in America, what’s new and emerging.
    • NPR: Code Switch  – This podcast attempts to address America’s complex racial identity within its colonial past and present. The “multi-racial, multi-generational team of journalists fascinated by the overlapping themes of race, ethnicity and culture, how they play out in our lives and communities, and how all of this is shifting.” (from the Code Switch about us page) The title is based off the idea of “language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation”(wikipedia).
  • WTF with Marc Maron – This is an interview podcast. It is interesting.
  • Coverville with Brian Ibbott – This podcast is a collection of covers based around themes or famous birthdays. Ibbott is great at finding different and unusual covers of songs you love by artists you love too.
  • Dan Carlon’s Hard Core History – Carlon does an excellent job of researching and then telling the extended stories of history, many of which do not fit into a single , short episode of a traditional podcast. He takes listeners on a ride, so buckle up.
  • KEXP – This is Seattle’s community radio station. It is another lifeline for us here. It is eclectic and wide-reaching in what it covers and I always find new gems whenever I listen to any of the programs.

*Coming soon, hopefully*

**If you own one of the blogs listed above and think I have mislabeled it, please let me know and I will kindly move it to another column. **

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