Kultur 2- Philip Picon

Wow! I thought all of those articles were magnificently funny as well as informative. As far as the complaining article goes, I feel like in America we complain a lot too, although we really just complain about nonsensical stuff like how slow our cellphone service is or how inconveniently far we live from a McDonald's. The line I found most interesting was "Unlike in the US, there aren't giant potholes in the streets, public transportation exists and is generally extremely reliable, everybody has health insurance, people have four to eight weeks of paid vacation, and politicians aren't any more incompetent than anywhere else." For some reason in my US-centric mind I always thought we had it best. Do other countries view us as having it worse than them?

The brutally honest article I found to be a great read because one of my pet peeves is people who aren't honest (especially girls). From my experience, when a girl says "I am not mad" it usually means they are mad. If you ask them if you did something wrong and they say "no," then you definitely did do something wrong. It is that whole backwards logic that I dislike and I think I may go to Deutschland, meet a girl, and never have to deal with those issues again.

On the other hand, I dislike the fact that the Deutsch love statistics. Being mathematically challenged, I don't think I would be able to live in a society obsessed with statistics. To me, saying "a lot of people have dogs" is better than "87.2% of people living east of village X have dogs."

The last article about the Deutsch stare I found to be quite funny, amplified by the image of an old lady nastily staring out her window. Once again, this is very different culturally than what I am used to. If in NYC you even look at someone for more than "zwei" seconds, a fight will likely ensue. Meanwhile in Deutschland, the stare seems to be a popular thing.