Last week you met Der Irische Berliner, one of this year’s Young Germany World Cup Bloggers.  This week we’ve got someone else to introduce to you: Fazal Adnan.

Fazal Adnan, newest member of the Young Germany World Cup blogging team

Fazal is a 27-year-old biotechnology student from Peshawar, Pakistan.  This past March he received a DAAD scholarship to complete his Ph.D. in Germany at the Graduate School of Life Sciences in Giessen starting in June.  As he settles into German student life, he’ll be blogging about his impressions of life in Germany and the 2010 World Cup on Young Germany.

A typical WG hallway - used for drying laundry and storing stolen neon-backlit beer advertisments

For many of us non-Germans in the 20-30 age bracket, one of the best things about living here is, well, how easy it is to live here. By that, I mean: how easy it is to find somewhere to live.

Even Germany’s most overcrowded cities like Munich and Stuttgart are a long way off from London and Paris when it comes to finding a flat, and some of Germany’s coolest cities – like Berlin – are also among its emptiest. A major part of this is the huge extent of flatsharing amongst young people, providing cheap rental space until they are ready to settle into their own flats.

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.

Once you’ve lived abroad for long enough, you stop noticing the little differences between your home and adopted cultures. Then one day an old friend arrives at the Frankfurt Airport, and you’re back looking at your adopted home through a newcomer’s eyes, through the eyes of the visitor who hasn’t spent the last four years living and breathing German culture.

You stretch and strain, trying to remember how it felt to be new here, to see through a lens of excitement (at all you find exotic), shock (at all that you find strange), and euphoria (at all you find even better than what you are used to at home).

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.