Kultur3, Sean Cope

After reading the article “Capping the Bottle” I have a whole new perspective on what it is like to live in Germany and the culture of drinking in which they allow. Before reading the article I just assumed that the open container laws were the same as here in the United States but I was wrong. I knew that in Germany they were allowed to drink at a younger age but I never knew how much more lenient they were about other aspects of drinking. I feel like although this provides much more freedom that it does have large negative consequences such as the crime they talked about in the article and therefore I would not want to adopt a similar policy here any time soon.

The second article that I read resonated a little bit with me because during my AMD Skype with a brother from my Fraternity who is currently studying abroad he talked about how the food there is a lot fresher and not as processed so this didn’t really strike me as to far off from what I expected. I would not want an organic trend to hit America with the force that it is sweeping Germany, artificial ingredients make food look and taste better, it is a sweet science.

I’m glad the person who wrote the article about German fast food doesn’t have a job writing menus for restaurants, he made every dish sound repulsive and worse than fast food already sounds. Why would German fast food restaurants charge for condiments? This seems over the top to charge for when it could be a common courtesy to provide it. One food that was listed was Spatzel, my dad makes home made chicken noodle soup with spatzle style noodles and they are amazing. So I feel like that would be good to have it served for real in Germany.

            Wow, the optimists are idiots article is really quite insulting. It is amazing that any of the great minds of the world like Einstein ever came out of a culture that shuts people and their ideas down with such ease. I feel like a culture that doesn’t embrace new ideas or change is one that will be stuck and keep from evolving into a new age technological superpower and it will eventually be passed up, and slip from the world ranking that it has today.

            One of the worrrstttt ways to get a humorous point across in my opinion is to be sarcastic (see what I did there).  I feel like as long as they find themselves funny and have cultural humor it shouldn’t matter if foreigners and Americans don’t recognize it in the same form of humor. The Berliner style of humor would probably make me laugh the hardest if directed toward someone else, but sting really hard should a straight-faced German say it to me. I know they are only warming up to Nazi jokes, but I hope they can take one soon (that’s what she said).