Kultur 3

After reading these articles it reminded me a lot of my summer.  The article about the döner in particular reminded me of all the times that I went out to the bars with friends and ended up getting a döner or a kebap at 4 Uhr.  It is very interesting to note how much the Turkish community has been ingrained into German culture, to the point where all Germans constantly eat this.  They are actually quite delicious too.

Regarding beer, it is actually quite surprising how much they can drink.  Not only is their beer more alcoholic than American beer, they drink constantly during the day and there is no belligerence to the level that there is in the US.  That was a very interesting thing to see, when comparing between American, Puertorrican and German cultures.  Americans drink a lot just to get drunk because it is illegal.  Puertorricans drink fairly moderately but it's not illegal for college students, which really curbs belligerent drinking.  Finally, Germans drink a lot as well, but they do it because it brings them together and not because they want to get drunk.  It might be that this makes them a bit more cheery, which is really necessary after you have a bit of the German negativity, which can be a bit frustrating at times.

Germans can be very depressing sometimes.  It really clashed with my very optimistic and cheerful personality.  At first, I would try to cheer them up and figure out a way to make things better.  However, as time went on I just realized this was their way to be, so I just nodded and let them complain away.  It sounds a bit terrible, but they were really just complaining to everyone.  An interesting thing was that two of my best friends there were actually Greek-German and Polish-German.  While they had acquired some of the characteristics of this "German negativity" they still retained a good sense of not bringing everyone else down into a bad mood.