Culture Shock

Now, just to give an idea of cultural differences, the difference between being in Germany and Italy is similar to night vs day, sun vs moon, dogs vs cats.....

In Italy, the drivers are everywhere, aggressive, and angry, revving up in a similar fashion to a SCSU student with a big truck. In Germany, the drivers are few, friendly and will gladly wave a pedestrian on in front of them.

When crossing a road in Rome, people will literally throw themselves into traffic to get across. In Munich everyone waits patiently for the green walking man to pop his head out even if there are NO CARS IN SIGHT. Seriously, i've seen packs of about 30-40 Germans do this, they're just that courteous.

As long as we're talking about road traffic, let me go into bi-wheeled transportation. Across florence and rome, there are a hoard of motorcyclists who try to go as fast as possible (they'll even navigate through pedestrians). Berlin and Munich have no motorbikes, but instead of a great many cyclers. If there isn't a specific bicycle lane, they'll bike in the streets and it's quite possible that they're more numerous than the cars.

One last transport difference is trains. Whenever we had to go somewhere in Italy, we had to reserve our seats, paying about 16E or so (despite our possession of eurorail passes =/). Whereas in Germany, you can still reserve your seat, but you don't have to (the reservers obviously get priority on their specific seat, but playing musical chairs sure beats the extra cost).

As far as the mannerism the Italians were much more frequently loath and disliking of tourists, or at least english speaking ones. Like all things, there were of course exceptions to this rule, and there were several friendly encounters. I even acknowledge the fact that my statistical data pool is quite small, but it still seemed to be much more common than anywhere else we had been. Even our futile attempts to interact with them in their own language were generally responded with scorn, and as soon as they recognized our poor accent, they only spoke to us in english. The Germans were all delighted to have us try and speak their language and were all quite friendly as a whole. We even had no problem occasionally hailing a random passerby for directional information, they seem more than happy to be helpful!

Even in our hotel room, the differences were even more apparent, especially to a food crazy individual such as myself. A hotel italian breakfast consists of... well... I'll let you see for yourself:




Toast... in a bag. yum..........

The hearty German breakfast on the other hand.....



Yes, that is salmon on my plate. SMOKED salmon. It's also a buffet. A tall mans dream.