Germany: New Home

For the past week, we have been taking German People and Places. We are currently reading, Germany: Unraveling an Enigma which surprisingly has been very interesting. We were even privileged to have an unexpected guest who was a teaching staying at our hostel. Since we are living in a hostel, we get many students and groups passing in and out through the rooms and halls. She further solidified what we had been learning about German people and culture in our textbook and gave us a personal experience to coincide with those theories. Here are some interesting facts that I have learned from this book so far:
Ø Oral agreements are upheld in court
Ø Home-schooling is illegal
Ø Spanking is illegal
Ø Germans have rules and regulations for EVERYTHING
Ø Within the German school system, a hierarchy is present which consists of 3 levels which are: Hauptschule, Realschule, and Gymnasium.
o Gymnasium are the students who are expected to attend the University
§ 3-6 years
Ø 22:00 – Quiet Hours
Ø Difficult to fire employees
Ø Turks cannot get citizenship
Ø Du versus Sie
Ø Generation after WWII was very anti-authoritarian
Ø North is predominately more Protestant than the South
Ø Bavaria – BLACK – Catholic
Ø Berlin – criminal rates are higher
Ø Bavaria – Academic results exceeding other states
Ø Sidewalks have to be shoved
Ø Socialized education and medicine
o Students complaining for having to pay a couple hundred dollars
Ø Germans are very direct
Ø Do not have a sense of “personal space”
Ø Do not like getting married, have “significant others”
Ø Young vs. Old Generations
Ø East vs. West Germany
Ø 83 millions people
Ø Size of Montana
Ø Rivers: Danube (west to east), Main (East of the Rhine, goes through Frankfurt towards Nuremburg), Rhein (north south), Elbe (comes from North of Prague, with a northwest course through Wittenberg), Oder (border between German and Poland), Isar (goes through Munich and drops into the Danube. Important to Regensburg.) Inn (in Bavaria, flow from Alps into the Danube.)
Ø Strong sense of accountability
Ø Highly taxed

Synagogue-Now Protestant Church Statue of Don Juan

We also toured Regensburg to see some of the main highlights of our new home. One of the sites we visited that had the greatest impact on me was learning about the anti-Semitic attitude and the atrocities that were committed in the past. We visited a church where a synagogue once stood, but was torn and burnt down. It was rebuilt and exists as a memorial and is currently a Protestant church. We also passed a statue of Don Juan, who was the illegitimate child of Charles V. He led the Spanish army into victory in defeating the Ottoman Turks at the 1571 Battle of Lepanto. We also crossed the bridge over the Danube which served as a tool for imports and exports. One of the major commodities was white gold, which is salt. On a specific arch of this particular bridge was where they would hang and dip people into the water for punishment.

Oldest Sausage House Old School Sista!