Kultur3 - Joe Oliver

I picked the zwei articles about alkohol in Deutschland und the article about organic food for meine Kultur Hausaufgaben this Woche.

First, ich found viele similarities between die Deutsche people und meine Familie. Mein Vater is very interested in Biers und the different types of Bier. Ich bin used to just hearing Bier vocabulary words thrown around in Bier commercials in Amerika. Germans really seem to know all about it and be somewhat snobbish about was ist in their Bier, or how it was made, much like mein Vater.

The pessimism part definitely auch reminded me of meine Familie. A certain relative of mine likes to cut the rest of us down any time we are happy about something, much like the article says people do in Deutschland. Also, meine Mutter is sehr skeptical of anything modern und new, such as genetically modified food, und auch intelligent Handi.

I found it sehr interessant to see how the attitudes of food are similar/different in other countries. For example, wir always say that "Breakfast IS the most important meal of the day," whereas the Kultur on Seite neunzig says that "SOME Germans think it is." That struck me because something ich have always accepted as fact without really thinking about it is now clearly more of an opinion.  But we also have the trend towards organic food in Deutschland, much like we see in Amerika in places like Ann Arbor.

The last thing that was sehr interessant to me was the article about banning Alkohol in public. (Yet another example of a different social attitude about food (oder drinks) in Deutschland. It's considered normal to drink in public and to drink much more than wir consider normal in Amerika.) Anyway, there was a quote towards the end where Schulz said "Prohibition is not a lasting and peaceful solution. It requires too many police officers. Anyway, drinkers are citizens too, with the same rights we all have." It reminds me of an argument against the large war on drugs in Amerika; namely that so viel Geld, so viele lives und so viel effort are spent prohibiting drugs. Ich watched a documentary about this once, (ich might fit in in Deutschland after all), and viele people said that the cost of the war in people's lives, in manpower, und in money is more than the damage it would do if there was no prohibition. It seems to be the more popular opinion in Deutschland that prohibiting a drug (i.e. Alkohol) that sometimes leads to violence is not worth it. It seems like sie haben a more laissez-faire attitude about what people do to themselves and in their spare Zeit in that case. Ich am curious about how other hot political issues in America translate to German, und how their general opinion differs from ours.