Kapitel 2

I love Statistics. I think it's incredible to be able to get a grasp of what's happening on a large scale just from analyzing some numbers. As an engineer, I feel compelled to agree with the article written by Prachi Kadam that 10 million people in a city is an unimaginable number. I think that more important than the sheer number of people living in a city or the physical size of that city is the population density, or the number of people per square kilometer (or meter, or foot, etc.). Although Long Island has 5042 people per square mile, the USA has no cities in the top 80 in the world in terms of population density. Berlin, Munich, Koln, Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Dusseldorf all have higher population densities than any city in the USA(Here
) Perhaps next time a German is swept off their feet by our huge cities, we should remind them that we tend to spread out our living spaces a little bit more.



Staring Down -
"It's really pretty innocuous albeit annoying. Perhaps German mothers don't do the "It's not polite to stare" routine with their kids. Or maybe the perpetrators have just never lived in New York, where prolonged eye contact can result in a messy homicide." (link)
- Perhaps this is the reason why Germans are so enthralled by the fact that Americans live in cities of more than 10m people; they're suprised that we're LIVING (not messily murdered) in a city of 10m people!

"Have You Gained Weight?"-
- I love the concept of having to discuss your actions and statements that would otherwise be glossed over in a more western setting. I think this kind of brutal honesty needs to be seen more in the States. The directness of the German cultures is really neat, and it's something I really loved when i was there travelling. It made it quite easy to know if someone liked me and wanted me to keep talking to them in my broken German or English or if I should just walk away. Luckily I didn't have to just walk away much.