Kultur 6 - Eric Vander Putten

I found the article about the garbage in Germany to be very interesting. I never would have thought that any country would take recycling trash to be that serious. In America, the most that we usually ever do is separate our plastics from our trash, and the only reason most people do anything about cans in Michigan is because they had to pay a 10 cent deposit on it and the only way to get it back is to recycle it. I feel that if I went to Germany I would probably be very confused by their garbage system and would probably just end up throwing it all into one container.

The article about the closed doors was also very interesting because it is so different from how it is in America. Like they said in the article, if someones door is closed then they probably do not want to be bothered and have it closed for a reason. It was interesting to read that Germans will usually always have their door closed even if they would like company.

The German Way

In reading these articles, German people seem to be a contradiction; they will secretly watch you, yet they have sex shops posted for all to see, they are awkward when it comes to dating yet they splash pictures of scantily clad young women on the cover of their most popular newspaper.

It surprises me that German's enjoy trashy tabloids. In America, things like the National Inquirer are more of a joke than anything. Although I suppose they are quite entertaining. But still, they are known to just be a bunch of lies most of the time and I guess I don't really understand why Germans might find that so fascinating.

I didn't really understand the next article about door knocking. I didn't realize there was a special way to knock even in our country. What they described seemed pretty much like common knowledge, if you want someone to hear their door, knock harder. Duh

As for the anal way they analyze their trash, I don't believe this is something that should be written with negative connotations. Americans should be more like this and be eco-friendly. Trash really can't be that hard to figure out. This is probably why most other countries believe Americans to be stupid.

Willkommen!!

Welcome to our class blog!

We will be using this blog throughout the semester for two kinds of assignments:

1. Once per chapter, the homework plan will direct you to post a response to the culture readings for the chapter on the blog.

2. Roughly every other week, the homework plan will direct you to post here for your Abenteuer mit Deutsch (AMD) assignment. First you do a fun activity that involves German, then you post about it. You should spend an hour total on this (maybe 45-55 minutes doing something, 5-15 minutes posting about it). See Was ist ein AMD, AMD Ideen and Beispiele for ideas. This should get you excited about the kinds of things you can do!

Whenever you post something, please include your name and the name of the assignment (e.g. AMD2, Kultur5) as labels. See "Blog: How To" for more details!