There are a few things that those of us who’ve spent some years acquiring a language realise as we go along. For example, that it’s the everyday things that are usually more difficult to describe than complex political issues: after all, democracy in English gives you démocratie in French, democracia in Spanish and Demokratie in German. But just you try telling a plumber that the seal on the drainpipe below your sink needs changing, along with the washers. That’s when you learn that the German word for rubber seal or gasket is identical to the word for poetry (Dichtung) and that the translation of washer is literally “Mother slice” (Mutterscheibe).

“Only the Krauts!” is not an expression of surprise a British person should get into the habit using when confronted by examples of Teutonic eccentricity. After all, “Krauts”, derived from one of the many German words for cabbage, has long been a disrespectful way of referring to Germans. Today it smacks of the nasty kind of knee-jerk anti-German prejudice purveyed by the British gutter press.

Flickr: wstuppert

Globalization has started to blur many of the fine cultural differences between countries in the western world.  As EU standard after EU standard passes into law, standardization is becoming more and more common and acceptable.  But differences remain, despite the Euro and the spread of Starbucks and McDonalds.  The differences are in the details.  These are a few of my German favorites.

"Which way is it to the gents, please…?" (Flickr, 0zel)

It would be fair to say that the Germans have a slightly, ahem, different relationship to their… err, bathrooms than we British. Indeed, it’s quite different to the attitudes I’ve encountered in American friends, too. And in France. And Spain. And… well, alright: pretty much anywhere else in the Western World.

If there’s one thing almost everyone new to Germany soon learns, it’s that the Germans take their food very seriously. Anyone who then spends time in anything more than one part of Germany also learns that they take their regional food even more seriously.

Serious means: regions, cities and small villages with their own cookery books. Serious means: dishes that are not only unknown in other parts of the country, but frequently impossible to pronounce there, too. Serious means: don’t use the wrong word for bread-rolls in a bakery if you value non-spat-on wheat and rye products.