Photo (c) Resident on Earth

Germans take their relaxation seriously, and the sauna is an important part of their culture. The sauna is more than sitting in the heat for 15 minutes and calling it a day; it’s an event that can take hours.

I confess I’m a total convert to the German sauna experience. I wish travelers would put this at the top of their list when visiting Germany, because I think it’s a way to gain insight into Germany’s culture as well as one’s own. If you open yourself to the experience, you may just find you learn about your own relationship to your body and what your culture says about your body. Plus, it’s a refreshing way to kick the jet lag after a long flight.

One thing newcomers have got to learn about Germany is the importance of regional identities: That’s why I posted on state elections in Germany just last week. Especially for Brits, the sheer variation between different parts of this country is astonishing; Germany is far more American than British inasmuch as the capital city is not the be-all-and-end-all of everything – and every city has its own identity markers of which it is exceptionally proud.

So just as each American city has a nickname (Chi-Town, the Big Apple, etc) and a baseball team, no German city would be complete without a major football team, a regular episode of the long-running who-dunnit legend Tatort, and a trademark item of baked goods. Germany is, after all, well known for its penchant for baking, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Our resident Bavarian with his first glass of the morning. Photo Nicolette Stewart.

Beer.  Pretzels.  Sausages dipped in sweet mustard and horseradish.  Sound like fun?  Probably.  Sound like breakfast?  Probably not.  But in Bavaria weissbier or weizenbier (both names for wheat beer), weisswurst (white sausages), and bretzeln (pretzels) are a long-standing brunch tradition.  And the name of the game is Frühschoppen.

Perhaps you remember the great cheap beer taste test of 2009.  Well it turns out one night, six people, and 15 of the cheapest beers that we could find wasn’t going far enough.  It was time to go advance to the next level in German beer connoisseur-ship and tackle wheat beer, with a side of sausage and pretzels.

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.

1. Animals here speak a different language.  That is, the noises they make are interpreted differently by the humans.  Some are similar to the English interpretations, though they are spelled quite differently: cows say “muh,” dogs go “wuf wuf,” and cats say “miau.”  But frogs go “quak” instead of “ribbet,” pigs go “grunz grunz” instead of “oink oink,” and when the rooster crows it says, accordingly to the Germans, “kikeriki” instead of cockledoodledo.”  I wonder what the animals themselves would have to say about all this…

"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.

What does “different” mean in terms of the little boys’/girls’ room, then? Well, for a start, it means that Germans don’t beat around the bush like I’m doing in calling a shovel a shovel and a toilet a boghole. When a German needs a toilet, he or she will ask for one, generally in somewhat undisguised terminology like “Toilette”, “WC” or “Klo”. This last word, for instance, is perfectly polite, friendly even, but comes directly from the word “Kloake”, or cesspool.