DEUTSCHLAND parte deux. Some obvious differences, interesting similarities, and unexpected variations between German and American culture. Or: If M.C. Escher and Josef Stalin were locked in a room and told to design the perfect jungle gym.

So I don’t really feel like taking the simple way out and chronologically going through my adventure in Germany.  Instead I’m just going to highlight some specific stuff that I saw and interesting things that happened.  Today I’m going to talk about some random and some not-so-random comparisons of German and American culture. I’d like to start with the less obvious random option.

On Wednesday and Thursday of our time in Germany, we stayed in Wittenberg, a city in eastern Germany where Martin Luther studied, taught, and preached for many years.  I am incredibly inept at judging the size of a city, but Wikipedia says it has a population of 50,000…so, yeah.  That’s how big it is.  We were in the city center, which was a beautiful area of streets with shops, restaurants and random canal-like things.  There was also a lot of green area around it and numerous Martin Luther monuments.  There was a river/drainage ditch in one part of the green area, and it was gross.  It smelled slightly of sewage, and looked pretty bad.  Whenever it went underground there was a cool stone entrance where it drained down, and it had beer bottles and trash all over it.  In case you didn’t catch it, this is similar to America, and it also has very little to do with culture. (Or maybe it does.  I don’t know.)  

The most awesome thing in this area that I’ve been attempting to get around to, however, was the playground.  It was totally unlike any conventional playground I’ve seen in America, and I’m so sorry that I have no pictures of it.  I will attempt to find somewhat vaguely similar pictures on Google images, use them, and pray that they are not copyrighted. (Aborted, there are none that will not give a false impression.)

It was a very hilly green area, and the playground was basically built on two hills and the lower valley around them. (haha, “valley”)  The hill in the center of the playground had a layered terrace-y thing around half of it, making it possible to climb up it?  Its purpose was unclear.  At the top of this hill was a bridge to the main playground structure.  It was a ridiculously long bridge and it was one of those bridges that is obviously safe, but manages to be unbelievably rickety.  Scariest experience of my life on a playground structure.   (Nevermind; scratch that, I still have nightmares about the slide in 1^st grade; that girl was vicious, and she knew how to use that windbreaker like a brutal weapon.)

*Tremble*    The "real" reason I hate the cold: memories...

The bridge connected to what appeared to be a conventionally shaped wooden playground.  Connected to this, however, was a long series of rectangular wooden poles, plastic ropes connecting them, and oddly shaped wooden blocks providing a small amount of space to walk on.  No firefighter poles, no tic-tac-toe game, no swings, no animal shapes anywhere; Just a rickety bridge and a lot of extremely dangerous, oddly spaced, and seemingly aimless and unorganized climbing equipment.  (And one lone slide on the other hill, completely separate from the rest of the playground.)  It was unclear for a while whether we were on a playground or had simply wandered into an abandoned, poorly-thought-out obstacle course.  (The architect must have written half the plan, scribbled over the entire blueprint, then gave it to the builders and insisted that they do it exactly as written.)  We were able to climb all over it, but this was only because we had longer, adultish legs, and we still only narrowly escaped death.  The obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that German children are raised from infancy to be agile, ruthless, and easily-entertained guerilla fighters.

Next week I’ll discuss more differences. :D

(Bonus: My favorite part of that day was when a friend and I raced down the slide and ran off, much to the obvious exasperation of an older German lady and her child.)  (Our immaturity was apparent, even to the < 8 year old)

Journey to GERMANY part one. for lack of a better title. (THE PLANE)

Sooooo I am in Germany for Spring Break.  I'm here for Lutherans, and it's incredible, but we're not starting at the incredible part; we're starting at the beginning.

So Spring Break started for me on Thursday afternoon.  I packed my bags at breakneck speed, and hoped against hope that I was prepared to be in a foreign country for a week.  We took what was essentially a school bus with an unusually interesting driver (he basically spent his time talking to us advertising for Cat’s Cradle, which is a fascinating example of media overlap [is bus driving a media? Doubtful.]) on the torturous 3 hour road to Charlotte.  This was nothing, however, when considering the plane ride that we were about to undertake.

9 hours is a long time.

It is SUCH a long time.

So nothing extremely eventful happened between arriving in Charlotte and getting on the flight, except that I ate pizza. It was delicious.  Here is an example of just how subjective the definition of “eventful” is on this blog. ( MY WHIM IS LAW)

Then we boarded our plane to Frankfurt.  I am in a group of 50 Lutherans, which you can imagine would be quite rowdy all together on a plane.  Sadly for us, the plane decided to split us up a bit in hopes of keeping our volume down.  

It worked.  Rather than yelling and screaming to everyone else the entire flight through, me and my lcm neighbor flew much like we would if we were separated from a huge group of people.  (It was her first flight, so of course I knew turbulence and landing were going to be much scarier and stressful than I remembered them being before.)

I had my laptop charged and I planned on getting homework out of the way on the road, but you know what they say about “the best laid plans”….   Actually I have no idea what they say but I assume that it ends negatively.  Inform me if it is otherwise.  

So there I am, contemplating what to spend my 9 hour trip observing.  They seemed to have a good selection of movies, and I hadn’t figured out the trick to those stupid headphone jacks, so I spent 5$ on a crappy pair of airplane headphones.  They had both Social Network and The King’s Speech available, and this marvel of Oscar-winning content excited me to end.  

Unfortunately, I didn’t remember that movie watching on airplanes is the most inconsistent and low quality experience there is available in terms of sub-par observance of media. (Besides listening to your ipod while you wrestle down pigs covered in filth.) [I hope that isn’t hard to follow.]

So after 15 minutes of The King’s Speech, I gave up and decided to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks 2, but in Spanish.  I enjoyed myself immensely. (surprisingly, Alvin and Simon are actually pretty easy to understand; it’s Theodore whose squealing Hispanic speech is hilariously incomprehensible.)

TO BE CONTINUED