What exchange program is this? Two weeks is incredibly short. I find it hard to imagine what meaningful experience an exchange student can have in that short of a time period. All of the programs I’m aware of are at least a couple of months in length, and we had our exchange student for nearly an entire school year.
Same here. It varied a little bit depending on where in Europe you were, but Germans were especially disciplined when it came to lane usage. And if you did nod off in the left lane, you’d quickly have a car on your tail flashing his high beams to remind you to move over to the right. I did not construe this as an aggressive gesture (as it is generally regarded here in the US), but more of a gentle reminder to scoot over.
As for the water thing, I don’t remember Germany specifically, but in Hungary, sparkling mineral water was definitely much more usual than still mineral water or tap water when eating out. (Or even eating at home. Almost everyone had bottles of sparkling mineral water for drinking as a beverage.) It wasn’t like in the US where a visit to a restaurant almost always come with tap water at the table. If you asked for a water, you’d either get sparkling mineral water, or get asked whether you want sparkling or still mineral water. You wouldn’t even be offered the option of tap water (although you can ask for it specifically.)
No, it’s because in most of the world including Germany, traffic lights for cars are colored circles and arrows, and the ones for pedestrians are pictograms: a red man standing up, a green man walking. The STOP sign says STOP in most countries, but in general, American traffic signals tend to have much more text and less pictograms than in other countries.
I’ve only seen them in movies and in Costa Rica, despite having lived in the US for five years (it was in urban areas, though).
This is experience from 20 years ago with my grandparents, but I was surprised to see the mid-day meal be the largest meal, with a smaller meal (usually meat or cheese on bread in an open-faced sandwich) in the evening. This would be after “coffee”, which was coffee or tea with a slice or two of what an American calls coffee cake. This tended to be a yeast base with fruit, which was much less sweet than American cakes.
German visitors tend to love our steaks and hate our soft, sweet, white sliced bread.
I believe it’s the Ambassadors in Sneakers program, or something like that.
Ours also have pictures,not words. She was still perplexed.
I was going to say–pictograms for walk/don’t walk are pretty normal around here, too. The typical icon being a red/orange hand for “stop” and a white walking man for “go.” I feel like it’s been about 15-20 years or so since I’ve seen “DON’T WALK/WALK” signs (although I’m sure there must still be some around–the major intersections around here have pictograms). Even so, I would have thought the color coding on those would have made it pretty clear which was which.
Agree, one week is barely enough to get out of jet lag.
One thing that struck me in German grocery stores was that they usually have an entire aisle, both sides, devoted to chocolate bars. The variety and number of brands was incredible. Granted, that was in the early 90s so things may have changed.
I understand that many Europeans consider US-made chocolate far more sugary than what they get at home. This sounds like a good research project for your kid.
As I recall, riding one’s bicycle on the sidewalk is prohibited in Germany. Also, public transit police are everywhere and they will ask for your [del]papers[/del] ticket and will fine you if you don’t have it. For driving, like most of Europe, the person coming from your right has the right of way, regardless of whether they are emerging from a major road or from a narrow alleyway. If there is no stop sign, they’re coming.
German high schoolers (which I assume is the age group we’re talking about here?) are a lot more casual about drinking than Americans are. You hear few stories in Germany about wild kegger parties; it’s more about having a few beers at a club or some wine. Your kid will probably be offered some alcohol.
Germans are generally a lot more open about nudity than Americans, though I think this is starting to change somewhat. Still, if your kid is shy about communal changing areas or showers, now would be a good time to get over it.
Germans walk and take public transportation a lot more often than Americans do.
From the other side of the spectrum, many Germans I’ve found take offense at Americans asking “How are you?” - or, rather, take offense that the only acceptable answer 99% of the time is “fine” or “okay.” They tend to take this as a sign of the shallowness of Americans, and don’t understand that “How are you?” is really just a way of saying “hello,” and is seldom a real question. We have other ways of asking how a person is feeling.
I was in an Austrian classroom once (okay, not German, but close enough) and listened as the teacher told her students that so many Americans were illiterate that all pre-packaged food products in the US had to have a picture of the contents on the label so that us dumb Americans would know what we were buying.
ETA: Also, many Germans - and most Europeans and Canadians, for that matter - feel very comfortable being quite negative/rude about the US to Americans. They will freely tell you with very little prompting exactly what they dislike about your country, which can feel very impolite to an American. I think it has to do with the comfort level they get from growing up with so many American cultural imports. Still, your kid should maybe be prepared for this. On the other side, many Germans in the US and UK find all the Nazi/WWII references they get exhausting and demoralizing.
It’s the same in Chicago if you’re 12 years or older, but it’s not a state-wide law.
My mother is Polish, and is the exact. same. way. about the “Heyhowareya” type of greeting. In fact, a great deal of this thread applies to her (and her sisters, my Polish ciocias) so it may be more of a Euro thing than strictly German.
I saw one poor fool in Frankfurt who rode up on the sidewalk behind a couple of foot cops and dinged his bell for them to get out of the way. :eek: They took him down like he was a terrorist.
Why not the Swiss? They wave more flags than even the Americans.
You said she was perplexed by the “walk/don’t walk”, not by “traffic lights”.
And I woulf find those surprising. I did describe “red man/green man”, didn’t I? Checks Yes, I did.
If batsto’s traffic lights aren’t “red man/green man”, they are not something she will have seen before.
snicker
I joke that the difference between grocery shopping in Germany vs the US - in the US you have 12 flavors of soup from 100 companies, and in Germany you have 100 flavors of soup from 12 companies. Honestly, the food in the grocery stores is way better than in the US. Or I should amend a bit - in ‘small town’ US we tend to have very limited grocery shopping available - in general at best we would have a small IGA until we head for a larger town with a Super Walmart and whatever the local large box grocery is [here it would be Stop and Shop, in Rochester it would be Wegmans, in Fresno it would be something like Vons.] The small town I hung out in for a month about 10 years back was 2 train stops down from a Real and itself had a butchers, a greengrocers, a small grocery and a ‘drugstore’ [not for drugs, but for stuff like soaps, shampoos, tampons and the like.] So even if one didn’t feel like going 15 minutes on a train, you could still get a fairly good selection of foods.
I traveled to Germany with a coworker this past June. We arrived in Hamburg and were waiting for our train near a little strip mall in the airport with a small Walgreens-like store. It was surprisingly busy but, hey, it’s an airport. Then, I noticed a guy in very casual street clothes alone and without any luggage carrying a bag of charcoal out of the store. I pointed him out to my companion and wondered aloud what circumstances would call for a traveler to grab a heavy, bulky, possibly dusty, handle-less bag of charcoal at an airport. An American at a nearby table overheard and chuckled and told us how almost everything is closed on Sundays in Germany and people come from miles around for ordinary items. Sure enough, you’d see people walk in and walk out a few minutes later with shampoo, soft drinks, moisturizer…regular convenience store items at a horribly inconvenience location.
We also went to Zurich and took quite a few of the trains and trams. We were NEVER asked for a ticket and I started to wonder how these things were enforced. No turnstiles, no gate agents, no paybox by the driver. I hatched a plan to skip buying them and, if confronted, play the clueless American tourist. I chickened out.
Yes, but I construed your post as saying that the reason for the confusion was text vs pictograms, not what the specific pictograms are. Come on, it would perplex you what a big red hand vs a white walking man means in the context of a pedestrian signal? I had never seen the Euro-style pedestrian signals until I lived there, but it didn’t take any figuring out.