Whitlock

=Melanie Whitlock.=

Podcast
media type="custom" key="12081305"

BIOGRAPHICAL/GEOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Biographical Note: My immigrant, Melanie Whitlock, was born on May 23, 1981. In her childhood she lived in an urban environment, both near suburban and urban, but she often went on family vacations to the countryside and saw ruins of once great castles. She grew up with her mother, father, and her sister as family. She went to school, and in school, learned English because it is taught in most German schools. In February 2005, she immigrated to America. Then, in March of 2005, she got married to her husband Travis. A little bit later, in May 2005 she applied for her green card. A few months later, August, 2005 she went on her honeymoon to New Orleans shortly before Hurricane Katrina hit.

Geographical Note: She lived in Germany on the continent of Europe. It is not one of the big countries in the world, as it is only slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Montana. The population is 81,471,834. Germany has a temperate and marine climate. In addition, Germany has a variety of terrains, from lowlands in the north and highlands in the center to the Alps in south. The number of cell phones in Germany is 105 million. About 65 million people use the Internet. Like all other countries, Germany has a few environmental issues, such as greenhouse gasses being emitted, Baltic Sea pollution, and hazardous waste disposal.

=Creative Writing=

====I walk through the fields around Neuchwanstien. I like the grass. It cushions between my toes. The ants walk over my feet and all between my toes. //That tickles!// I say silently to the ants. //Time for lunch//, Dad calls. I run over to the red and white checkered blanket, the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches already out. He starts gets out the cake and juice boxes.==== ====As our faces get painted with the purple stickiness of the jelly, Mom starts talking. //Look at the castle//, she says. //Look at it. It is beautiful isn’t it? Still powerful and majestic.// I look at it. It is overgrown with vines and crumbling down the sides with weathering and time. It doesn’t look that powerful or majestic to me.==== ====But I decide to take a second look, to look at it in a different light. Looking at it again, I see the power and majesty. It is still atop that hill, looking down on all of us, showing power. The plant-life shows the majesty of the natural world, which is quite beautiful. I guess time does not weather beauty, because it is always inside.====

====I am a nanny in New York City. I nanny a bunch of kids that live in the Chinatown district. They are wonderful kids, but they are on the opposite side of town from where I live right now. There is a good side to that, though. I get to drive through the bulk of the city and see the side of New York that not many people are blessed to see. I look through the graffiti and the homicides and see the hidden beauty within.==== ====The multiple cultures are like markers. The city, the paper. The artists, the influential people of the cultures. They set up the shops and the restaurants to show their cultures to the rest of New York City. All the markers of different colors and artists come together to make a beautiful collage and picture. I can see the colors, the still gray of the skyscrapers, the live red of the Chinese dresses in their shops. The paper is full and overflowing onto the table of the U.S.====

====My husband, Travis, and I drive into New Orleans for our honeymoon. A city by the sea, it is full of different cultures, alive, individual. We stop by a Cajun restaurant, jolly and festive. We talk about the commitment we just made and the bright lights of the city. We get back in the car. The clock on the dash says 10 P.M. We drive to the hotel and immediately go to sleep in our room.==== ====When we wake up, we eat a Mexican breakfast, the waiter with a French accent. We then are on our way, to see the eccentric festivals, the sea, and other restaurants. The time flies by so fast that, by the time it is time to go, I feel like I have not done enough. “I am going to miss this place,” I say. “Yeah,” Travis replies.==== ====When we get back home, we find on the news that Hurricane Katrina had just ravaged New Orleans. The storm has ravaged the city, destroying the buildings, shops, and restaurants. But though many would say it is ugly and destroyed, I see the hidden beauty through the debris.==== ====The city’s paper is overflowing with the ethnic colors, and it definitely shows. Though the storm and debris have destroyed and covered up the picture, their traces, like the ink bleeding onto the back of the paper, are still there, showing how this city contributed to the ever-growing, ever-beautiful, ever-evolving culture of this country.====

INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Ricker: Name please.

Whitlock: Melanie. Do you need a last name, too?

Ricker: Yeah.

Whitlock: Melanie Whitlock.

Ricker: Alright, so you immigrated from Germany?

Whitlock: Yes.

Ricker: Alright, so when did you immigrate?

Whitlock: 2005. So that was like 5 years ago…[laughs]

Ricker: Alright, so, what was life like before 2005?

Whitlock: My life in Germany, what it was like? I was a student studying early childhood education which was a typical student life, which I thinks is the same as it is here. Before I went to school, it wasn’t that much different from the life in America which isn’t that different lifestyle from student to adult lifestyle and going to work now, but I think there is a difference.

Ricker: What was your favorite food from back in Germany? What was your favorite?

Whitlock: My favorite food, was essentially a German food my grandma makes, it’s called bratkartoffen (kartoffen), and what it is, is tomato soup with like a potato, with like pancake, with like shredded apples in it.

Ricker: Sounds good.

Whitlock: Yeah.

Ricker: What major religions were in Germany and did they really get along?

Whitlock: The major religions are the Christians and the Germans separate them into Protestant and Catholic. And they pretty much get along. The only difference you could get between a Protestant and Catholic is which church they went to and the religion which they teach in school and the catholic kids would go to Catholic lessons and the Protestant kids would go to Protestant lessons. But in America there, what is the word I’m looking for [umms], in America there is more branches than that, like Baptist, Methodist and things like that, and it wouldn’t be that big of a difference, like Protestant and Catholic. And then another big one would be Islam, because there is a lot of Turkish immigrants there but I would say they get along these days, kids that weren’t baptized, weren’t Christian, they went to school they, would go to lessons for, philosophy I guess, like philosophy would be taught a lot, they would, they would, learn other religions, but they would more learn about how to be polite, so, I would say they got along.

Ricker: What was, what was, I don’t know, when you were kids, the games you would play, like in your backyard?

Whitlock: Well, let’s see, outside in the backyard, well we, [becomes silent for a second], oh wow, that was such a long time ago [short chuckle], well we played ball, tetherball, like badminton, like sometimes in the summer we would go to the public swimming pool, in the winter we would go ice skating, when I was little the winters were really cold, like, when I was 13 or so, it was really cold so we had ponds and certain fields that would actually freeze over so we would go ice skating on the ponds and we would go inline skating, and inside, when I was younger we would play with all sorts of cars and Legos, and when I was older when it was warm I would have friend, talk and listen to music, also go to the movies, yeah. [a few seconds of silence], yeah.

Ricker: In the winter, was it really, really cold or was it just the ponds freezing over?

Whitlock: I would say, it’s not much different from Ohio, [umms], Ohio gets a little bit more snow later in the year like February - March, it doesn’t really snow February – March over in Germany, its more December – January, but when it snows, when it snows, it gets really icy, it’s not so much cold, it’s about the same here, I’d say actually Ohio gets colder, about 10 degrees or so, unlike up in Germany, but it rains a lot, when I was a kid there was way more rain and way more snow and ice, but as I got older it rained more and got hotter.

Ricker: America doesn’t sound that much different than Germany, just a few cultural differences. What attracted you, what prompted you to come to America?

Whitlock: Actually, my husband. [laughs] cause I met Travis here, here in Ohio, we started dating, but the thing that didn’t attract me right away was the cost of college, so I actually went back to college in Germany because it is way cheaper then moved back after I was done, so, it was really Travis that was the reason I moved here and Ohio. Now Virginia. [laughs].

Ricker: Are there, is there any family that is still back in Germany?

Whitlock: Yes. All my family. My parents are divorced so, I got one set of parents living there and one set of parents also living there so they’re all in Germany, my sister with her husband and they’re expecting a baby any minute now. I mean really everyone, my cousins, my grandma, got a couple more brothers that are younger than me, I don’t have any family living here, they’re all in Germany.

Ricker: Is there any different in the hospitals, because you brought up your sister is expecting a baby so is there a difference in the hospitals baby carriages?

Whitlock: Well, I couldn’t tell you about having a baby there because my son was born in America and because we only have one son, and so I really don’t have a comparison to what it is to have a baby in Germany. It’s pretty much the same, I know there is more ultrasound with the baby part of the hospital side, but everything else, the last time I spent time in a hospital was when I was 10 and from what I can see it’s about the same. Most people have the, what’s it called state insurance, social insurance, not the private insurance, well basically the insurance, because Germany has a social system they all have the social insurance, I’m not sure what it’s called, but everyone is insured by the state and there is way less private insurance, they don’t have private insurance so everyone gets pretty much the same care but people with private insurance have more money on insurance and get better care like you get a single room at the hotel, hospital you wouldn’t have to share the hospital room with other people and at the doctor’s people would be treated quicker or they would, actually when Travis and I lived in Germany for two years together we had private insurance because we basically paid for it out of pocket and we tried to get it back from our American Insurance but they treated us like privately insured, we would be able to wait in the doctor’s office instead of the waiting room with everyone else, we would come in and then everyone in line, because most doctors practice and what’s it called, [talks softly and inaudibly], the general practitioner doesn’t set up an appointment, just walks in, it’s first come first serve, it doesn’t matter how many people wait, if you come in as private insured you get to be the head of the line, just because the doctor is going to make more money off you so they treat you a little better. I don’t know exactly how it is in America but I think most people make appointments here. Yeah, I’d say, I’d say they’re the difference, that is all the difference about how you’re insured in Germany, itself, so you can’t really speak generally about how it is.

Ricker: So, did you live in the countryside or any urban communities or suburban?

Whitlock: Well, until I was nine I actually lived in Frankfurt downtown so that was pretty much urban, and then we moved out about 10-15 miles out, it was still pretty urban but you’d actually see houses not just apartments, apartment complexes. We had a back yard, so really I grew up with urban yet having everything close by, we could walk to the grocery store, so we could walk any where we wanted to, we didn’t need a car. We had one but we didn’t need a car.

Ricker: Is there any, there any difference in chocolate with German and American because I know German is better and I’ve been to Germany too. I know that German tastes really good and better than American. What’s your opinion on that?

Whitlock: I totally agree. I think that the German chocolate is much, much better than the American chocolate, but I’m also a, I love chocolate so [laughs] yes. We actually buy very little American chocolate here in America. I usually have my parents send me a package every couple of weeks to get me chocolate or I actually pay the overpriced prices for the Rittersport and everything else you get here even though it tastes different from the actual German chocolate it’s still very much like it so, [becomes silent]. I actually spend more money to get German chocolate, we actually live in Virginia so we live near the sea and it’s so many immigrants from all over the world where we live so you get German chocolate whenever you want you just pay a little bit more for it, but I definitely think German chocolate is better.

Ricker: What do you remember most about Germany?

Whitlock: What I remember most about Germany? [uhs] Well Germany is still pretty much a part of my life because we talk, with my Mom I talk probably two or three times a week on Skype for at least an hour, same thing with my sister and [umms], so really it’s, it’s for me it’s not, Germany it’s so far away, and then we’re here, it’s like an everyday life I know what’s going on almost every minute of the day, it is important to me because of them and we’ve never really seen his grandparents and we try to come back every couple of years, well, once or twice a year, but what I remember most is my grandma’s cooking I would say, but really the food is what I remember most, which I would love to have here, just the German kind of cooking, the German food.

Ricker: Did you, did you like go out in the countryside, visit castles, the ruins of castles and such?

Whitlock: I did when I was a kid, because my parents, we would do one big vacation every year which was usually skiing in Switzerland, and then in the summer time we would go camping which was in German and they have lots of castles there, and actually the town that my parents live in, there’s actually a castle down the road, just 10 minutes to it, but we did a lot of sightseeing in Germany instead of moving or traveling out of country, so it feels like I’ve seen every German castle there is some more, but I sure there is, because where we lived, there were a lot of them around like in Hanau there’s one and in Neuschwanstein there’s one of them we saw, actually we never went in it because in the summer time it’s really really busy, I think the line was so long that I think we would have had to wait three hours to get into the castle so we saw it on the outside and all of them are so close to Frankfurt, all the castles so I saw them, like every single one of them.

Ricker: I think we got in, took a few pictures, it’s a cool castle.

Whitlock: I’m sorry, say that again please?

Ricker: What? Oh, we’ve been to Neuschwanstein, we got in, it’s a cool castle. I actually don’t remember much of it because I don’t remember much of anything.

Whitlock: Yeah, I’ve heard it’s beautiful in there. Travis never saw it though.

Ricker: How many fast food restaurants are in Germany, like McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s and such?

Whitlock: Well, growing up there was really only McDonald’s, we had a lot of McDonald’s I would say, about as much as we have here, what’s here in America, but then eventually, when I was about ten, Burger King started up. They tried Wendy’s for a while, but they never made it. Germany, even though we have the McDonald’s and the Burger Kings and the Pizza Huts, those are the ones that are really big, thought they are starting Chipotle and Starbucks up now, but that was just in the past ten years though. What Germany is about is they’re not big on those chain restaurants like Applebee’s, Olive Garden, but they’re more on Mom and Pop shops like one owner owns one restaurant and that’s it, but then you have lots of German restaurants, lots of Italian restaurants, but it’s usually one person owns it they don’t run more restaurants, that’s more like what Germany is.

Ricker: So there is a variety of German restaurants because there are different people owing each one?

Whitlock: Correct.

Ricker: So you could go to one place and get this, Wiener schnitzel done one way and you could go to a different restaurant and get it done another way?

==== Whitlock: Yes, like for example, I’ll give you a good example because I didn’t even know until a few years ago that you could prepare it a different way, but, for example, my favorite food, besides my grandma’s cooking is schnitzel, well, it’s called Wiener schnitzel, but it’s a schnitzel, like breaded pork, actually the actual schnitzel is veal, but because it is so expensive people use pork and they fry it, and it comes with a mushroom cream sauce, that’s the Jäger-Schnitzel, I guess it’s called, but it comes with mushroom cream sauce, most ==== ==== restaurants cook it exactly that, fry the schnitzel and put the mushroom cream sauce, but the mushroom cream sauce can totally vary, like good restaurants use real cream while the other ones use a package, like a powder packet, you just add water, I think they have stuff like that in the states, and then I went to a different part of Germany because, really one part of Germany is very different food than, makes very different food than the north or the east, though they all call it the same thing, it can appear very differently. So I went down in the area and ordered the same schnitzel, the Jäger-Schnitzel, and they didn’t bread it, so it had different tastes on it and I didn’t like it much because I like my schnitzel fried and breaded, but that’s where you can tell in like Olive Garden you always get the pasta or the soup, and it would always be the same no matter where you are in the country, that wouldn’t happen in Germany. I mean the McDonald’s will do that, the American chain restaurants will just do that, not the Germans. Oh yeah we have Subway in Germany too now. ====

====Whitlock: I came here on a 90-day Visa. Then we got married in those 90 days and then I applied for the Green Card. The way it was seven years ago you had a fiancé visa before you entered the states and then you had a certain amount of time to get married. Then your Green Card won’t take as long because you the fiancé visa first. The other way we did because I didn’t know I needed the fiancé visa because I was already in the state. We were planning on getting married. We called immigration office and they told me that I only the 90 days on the visitor’s visa and file for my Green Card. We got married in March 2005 and filed in May because there was a lot of paperwork. Then it took nine months to get the Green Card because of interviews and everything else.====

====Whitlock: I didn’t become a citizen. I am a Green Card holder only. The reason why I have not become a citizen is because you have to be a Green Card holder for three years being married to a citizen. You are on probation for two years. If you get divorced or commit a crime you lose the Green Card. After two years you get to be a permanent resident. Then you only have to renew your Green Card every 10 years. One year after permanent resident you can choose to become a citizen. So far I have not chosen to become a citizen because up now it was not possible to keep the dual citizenship and I did not want to give up my German citizenship for the American citizenship. Because the only thing I was not allowed to do here was vote. Actually I think I can vote in minor things offices, I think. But I cannot vote for large elections. There was not reason enough for me to give up my German citizenship. Because once I give up my German citizenship I become a visitor in that country and would not be able to live there for a long amount of time. I would have to apply for permit to stay there and I did not want to do that. I also wanted my son to have dual citizenship. With two parents with different citizenship he was allowed to do that. Recently I have found that you can do dual citizenship even if you were not born in the United States. Germany used to not allow you to hold dual citizenship. United States would allow you but Germany wouldn’t. But now I guess now you can. Travis and I are now looking at me becoming American citizen and a German citizen at the same time. Because we were looking at, if we wanted to move to Germany it would be much harder for two Americans trying to live in then if I am a German then I could sponsor him in Germany. It is very expensive to become a citizen. It was very expensive to become a resident. We really haven’t had the extra money and time so we really haven’t looked into what it takes to become a citizen.====

====Whitlock: Let’s see, the better things are that I believe and feel, and I thing that lots of Germans do are: Americans are very friendly people. They are much nicer and more open. They are more out going toward people and strangers. Like going to a grocery store people talk to you. People look at you at the cash register. In Germany most of the time they will stay 20 and old out the hand and look the other way until you are done. I think they are very friendly people. I like the variety of things. There are is a lot of variety. The restaurants are lots cheaper to live here. Especially now that we live in Virginia you get anything you want and it is really close and you don’t have to drive very far. If you live in out in the country in Germany you have to drive farther to get something. What I like better is Germany is that I have always had problems making American friends. I have heard from many other Germans the same thing that even though Americans are outgoing, friendly, and open. They are also very open, friendly and everything else on the surface. So if you try to get into a real friendship with American girls, American women, or Americans in general it is very hard to do so. They are very friendly but if you want to go out to dinner or something it is a very loose thing and it is never going to happen. If you tell a German let’s go out to dinner the German will say, “When, tomorrow at 7”. So they are not so afraid to make friends with people they have just met. I think I like the food better in Germany. To be honest, because over here it is good but it is very fatty, it is a lot of food, it is a lot of waste. I like the way the Germans recycle and not waste the way American do. Germans take care of the environment better than Americans do. Over here yes there is recycle and trash but in Germany they recycle they glass, paper, and plastic more and separate it more in Germany. What I do not like about America is they are wasteful. Everything comes in plastic package or the bags. Even though it has been changing the past couple of year. They use plastic bags for everything when you pack your groceries. I like that in Germany either you don’t have bags and you put everything in your trunk or they have re-useable bags with them. So I think that is about it.====

====Whitlock: Yes, I started when I was 10 in fifth grade. German schools go until 13th grade so I had eight years of English. But I was always a really bad student in English. I didn’t like English. I also took French and I was great at French and I was much better at French. I was always a D student and pretty close to failing. When I first decided to move to the states in 2000 and I was an au pair in Ohio. I had a three, five and 10 year old kids. Those kids are the ones that within a year had taught me how to speak English pretty well. Everything I would say wrong they would say, “No, no Melanie that is not how you say it, you say it like this.” So I was able to speak and understand. The German schools teach you British English so there where a lot of words that I did not learn because the British English doesn’t use it. We didn’t say trunk for example. But I don’t remember what the British word trunk is. But there were a lot of different words. I did know how to speak English but not very well.====

====Whitlock: My favorite memory. There are so many. I think my favorite memory is probably that I will never forget which was our honeymoon. We were supposed to go to Germany but the military flights didn’t work out so what we did in short notice was go to New Orleans. Travis really liked it and I had never been there and I had always wanted to go. So, we went there and had a car accident on the way, we were fine but the car wasn’t. We stayed in downtown New Orleans instead of 20 miles out. We were able to walk everywhere and see everything. We were there four days before Katrina hit and so it was a really nice time. This may not be my favorite memory but it is one that I will never forget. Usually honeymoons are really nice and this was different.====

====Whitlock: I don’t think that the jobs are really different but there may be more jobs because there are more people. I would say it is about the same. The unemployment rate is very high in Germany. Just like a lot of immigrants come to live and get jobs in America. Lots of immigrants come to Germany to live and make a better life and make money. Really I think it is about the same. I really didn’t work in Germany. I came to the states right after I was done with college. So I really didn’t get to know a work or adult life in Germany so I couldn’t really tell you the difference. But I think it is about the same. People move to Germany for the same reason why they move to America. You just have different ethnics because it is a different part of the world. The wars in the early 1990s brought a lot immigrants to Germany.====

====Whitlock: Yes, lots of them. Gesundheit and Kindergarten and two I have heard recently is spiel and kaput and they mean the same in German. Those four words are words when I hear them make me think of German. Even though kindergarten is not like the real kindergarten in Germany.====

====Whitlock: Kindergarten is the preschool in Germany. Germans don’t go to school until they are in first grade when they are 6. They go to preschool from 3-6 years. So German Kindergarten is like American Preschool.====

====Whitlock: It was New York. Every Au Pair goes through a workshop and that workshop was in New York. The World Trade Centers will still there then and the statue of Liberty from far away. The Empire State building, I saw the everything in New York that are typical tourist stops. Then after that week in New York I was in Marrow, Ohio which is very far out in the country.====

====Whitlock: I think they are working on it to make it better. I don’t know for sure but I believe yes because there are less cars because there are less people. Germany has a great public transportation system. They have the trains and busses. Because everything is closer everybody walk more. They walk more to the store the get a bag of flour, for example. What they have been doing in the last few years in the big cities like; Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, Cologne, what they actually did they started giving stickers out to cars with the number 1-4. A one would be a car that would be an old car that would have higher emissions. The big cities would say that you can only drive in the city if you had a number 4 on your car. So all the newer cars would have it and the electric cars would have it. That way they would not allow all the older cars that put out a lot of nasty stuff in the air out of the city. If you wanted to go in the big cities and you get caught by the cops without a number four you would pay a very high fee. Or if you wanted to get into town you have to drive to the out skirts of town and take public transportation into the city. I think they are working hard at working to make the air better. It had been getting bad over the years. I am not a professional, I have no idea how bad the air really is.====

====Whitlock: I don’t know right now. One of the things I am noticing over the past years is I can get way more German things over the years. When I was an Au Pair they didn’t have Fanta. You can see Fanta everywhere now. The advent calendars where always a German thing and all of a sudden the advent calendars are in every store, it seems. Food wise I see a very big change. I have been coming here since 2000 there has been a big change food wise over the past 10 years. One big difference is the German Chocolate cake. There is no such thing as German Chocolate cake the way Americans know it in Germany. I had never heard of it before. When my husband told me wanted a German Chocolate cake for his birthday I made him a dark chocolate cake. Food items are what remind me of Germany.====

I believe, by comparing my interview to what we learned in class, that immigration has changed over the years. My immigrant came to America to get citizenship, opportunities and get married to her husband. But, as time went by, she noticed that getting citizenship would be a bad thing, because in Germany, it is hard to become a resident there. Since people can't hold dual citizenship (“it was not possible to keep the dual citizenship”), to plan for the future she held her German citizenship just in case they ever have to move to Germany. “I would have to apply for permit to stay there and I did not want to do that,” she says. We learned in class that in old times, it wasn't really like that. Most immigrants, like young Chinese men, would come to the U.S. looking for opportunity and jobs. Many never really meant to stay, they just wanted to get a good amount of money then come back. Then they would find out how good America was and then stay and gain citizenship. My interviewee and the old immigrants have their reasons for coming to America and what happened when they came to America opposite, showing how immigration has changed over the years.