My eyes get to have all the fun!!

Wow, I am seeing such cool things here, I love this country!!!

Hello hello again, how are you all doing?? It is hard to believe, but I already only have a week and a half left here!! I SO wish you all could be here to see what I see, this world is incredible and so rich with history, it really does plug some respect into you.

And who'da thunk you could have a hard time respecting a thing or a place instead of a person?

There are a few more 'little things' I have observed here that I wanted to share with you guys. One, is that the citizens here take their pets everywhere with them. And no one ever chastizes them for it.

They walk their dogs (I've seen a plethora that use leashes, and an equal plethora that do not, they just have really well-trained dogs) in the train station, into the bank, into a shopping store here called "Kaufhoff," which is like an equivalent to Sears...along the sidewalks, and even on the trams and subways.

I was riding the tram with Jeni, Sara, Zach, and Dan yesterday, and a woman got on the tram with a Huskie!!! Yeah!! It had piercing pastel blue eyes, and it was such a sweetheart. It obediently laid down on the floor in front of her feet.

I motioned to the woman to pet her gorgeous dog, and she spoke English and permitted me to pet it. She told me the Huskie was a female named "Foxie," and I told her I had a miniature one like her at home!! It made me miss my Keesha-Keesha-Girl so much, I wanted to cuddle with someone right then and there on that jam-packed, musty smellin' tram. Eep!

Observation #2: there are no obese people in Germany. Sure, I've heard from studies and news reports that Europeans have better self-discipline with their diets, and their trick is all about proportion...but man!! I have only seen one middle-aged woman with a bubble butt, and she was ASKING to be seen, since she was wearing hot-pink PINK leggings and sitting on a bench, letting all of her body just...roll out.......ew.

Ohhh, 80s fashion.

Observation #3: German drivers are very, very safe drivers. Since I've been over here, I've not once witnessed an automobile accident, nor have I seen any cars with scratches, dents, or fender-benders that never got fixed. (Unlike Milwaukee, when you can tell immediately if a driver is an out-of-towner if his vehicle has all four hubcaps, a full bumper, and no cracked license plate frame and dead headlights.) It is interesting, because they drive like rockstars here. Even Pappa Meetz (my host father) takes off from a stop light in his early-90s Mercedes Benz land yacht sedan, pushing 5,000 RPMs. It is crazy!!

Observation #4: My English grammar is worsening. I am having to speak in simpler and simpler sentences over here, so that the Germans that do speak English, can easily understand me. My host parents don't speak it well at all, and when they get frustrated or can't understand a word I keep trying to use, they throw their hands up in the air and say, "I do not speak English," and only speak in German to me for the rest of the day. I would like to think that this blog is helping me stay fine-tuned, but I am missing the English language, being fully-immersed in all of the phlegm-covered German words. :)

Observation #5: You have to pay to use the public restrooms. In about 80% of all public restrooms in Deutschland, you cannot enter the bathroom to the stalls, unless you slip coins into a slot in a box on the wall, that powers a turnstile right in front of you. You step forward with the turnstile and it brushes you over to the other side of the bathroom, where you are free to use the bathroom for as long as you need to. I've seen bathrooms that are free of charge, like at the university, and others that charge as much as 70 Euro cents at the Munich train station!!! That is nearly offensive to me, to have to pay for being human and needing to take care of myself and my personal hygiene. Grrr.

Observation #6: None of the caps to the plastic soda bottles twist off all the way. You know how you might buy a plastic bottle of Coke in the States? And you have to initially twist the cap off to break the seal? And you're then left with this skinny plastic that sits as a ring around the neck of your bottle? Yeah, in Germany, you can never twist that ring fully off of the sealed cap. The perforated teeth do not run fully around the circumference of the cap. You can twist all you want, but short of shearing the cap off of the ring, you are left with a tail on your cap. It is annoying, but I found out why they manufacture the caps to keep the rings attached: they reuse the bottles.

You can re-sell your empty glass bottles (because all of the sodas over here are bottled in glass cans instead of skooshy plastic), and get paid like 1 Euro for it. The cafeteria sends your bottles to a company who then presumably disinfects your bottle, cleans 'er up, puts a new label on it, and uses that attached tail-ring-thing to re-seal the bottle. They fuse the plastic back together or something. And they take it seriously over here: they won't accept your used glass bottle at all if you don't have that plastic ring still hanging out as part of your cap! You can tell if you buy a bottle that has been previously used, too, because it will be all scuffed up on the extruded parts of the bottle's design, like on the base of the bottle, or on the fattest, widest part of the bottle before the glass starts to bottleneck to form the part where you put your lips up to it to sip out of it.


I suppose this is just one of the few subtle, funky ways Germany recycles and keeps itself atop the conservative, environmentally-friendly list. The waste output this country has is minimal; I am half marveled by it, and half driven up the wall by it, waiting to get back to the U.S. where I can just use stuff, if that makes sense??

:)