Month: July 2015

Weird thing #1 about Deutschland: lack of support for local pop bands Everything you heard from Lonely Planet and countless American and British travelers about the loss of nationalism in Deutschland is plain wrong. The German people have a quieter way of expressing their patriotism, and for the good old jingoists among them this can often be quite passive-aggressive, given their reserved manner. For the most part however, they are like people are everywhere else – they have pride in German everything, and the sense of German nationalism is well and alive. For these people, the constant reminders of WWII are unfair and get tedious. The hostility toward non-Deutsch speakers in this country, while lower than what you would face in France, is still far higher than what you would see in the Netherlands and Scandinavia. The Germans themselves tend to speak better English than their neighbouring nations, and that is a tribute to their education system as well as the controllability of the population (the nation decided at one point that they would need to speak English to remain competitive, and so they all learnt it with sincerity). You will have waiters being very rude to you for not speaking Deutsch but with Katy Perry’s drunken voice filling the restaurant, you find yourself exchanging amused glances at your colleagues instead of getting annoyed. I found it very unnatural though, that this country...