Henry Poon's Blog

Observations about Germany and their Culture

Day 11

After being here for a little while, I’ve come to notice a bunch of things here that are just a lot different that what I’m used to in Vancouver, and I’ve made a list of these things here:

Old-style architecture with beautiful roads of cobblestone

Cool retro looking keys

Keyholes that you can actually look through

Tobacco companies are allowed to advertise and packs of cigarettes are readily available and cheap (about 5 euro)

Ads for Google Chrome but not any other browser

Obscure looking vehicles

Rides on the metro cost about 3.40 euro, which is about 4.50 CAD and about the same as Vancouver

For the rest of them I don’t have pictures for, but here they are:

  • Lots of people of middle eastern descent, mostly from Turkey
  • Nobody claps, but instead pounds their fist on the table repeatedly
  • Some people wear their wedding rings on the right hand
  • Car brands that only exist here (Citroën, Alfa Romero, Opel, etc.)
  • Some people here actually drive Fords instead of European cars, but it’s the only American brand here that I’ve seen
  • Since people don’t like using the 1c and 2c coins, they tend to round up transactions to the nearest 5c, which is probably why the cashier asked me if I had a 5c coin

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2 Comments

  1. Alex 2011-06-22

    actually its because they probably kindly wanted to reduce the ammount of change you would get, We have to use these coins because the supermarkets use the XXX.99@ price tags to suggest a lower price. I personally dislike this habit and envy the finnish people who got rif of the useless 1 and 2c coins.

    Alex (a German)

    p.s.: i stumbled over your blog because I wanted to find out if i’m the only one who find the german addiction to carbonated water very weird

    • hp 2011-06-22

      thanks for your insight. it definitely makes more sense than what i said lol. I try to give them something easy to give change with, but I just absolutely hate working with cash. i tend to use my card whenever i can.

      i noticed the german addiction to carbonated drinks too. in all the vending machines at my work, they only sell carbonated drinks. whether it’s water, juice, what have you. it’s all carbonated. the carbonated water doesn’t even taste that good either…

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