Advice for people visiting Germany

Miss the bit about the avg of 2+ liters of beer per day?

 

seriously? thread police? We have this nice thing going on in the German forum...

and there were 2 mentions of beer

Prost!

 

It's an annoying German habit to first point out errors and mistakes in great detail and then to forgive them graciously. I think it's rooted in their inherent inferiority complex.

 

It's annoying Bavarian habit to pretend they're not German. (or Franconian habit to pretend they're not Bavarian)

 

Or Berliners to pretend the Bavarians (and probably anyone else outside of Berlin) aren't German.

 

I guy I work with has a wife from Munich. She has a rather large a weighty tome on the "History of Bavaria" and her American husband says that some of what is in the book might even be true.

 

Oh boy, did you go there!?!

Don't you remember what happened to me when I intimated a Texan joke!?!

Cheers!

 

As an American I enjoy Bavarians quite a bit. The Schwäbisch are a bit more of an acquired taste.

 

They're just mad their city's name translates to "dirty swamp hole" and people think their city is overrated.

Hey, apart from the whole Franconia/Bavaria/Germany debate Bavarians have been among some of the most pleasant people (particularly in comparison to the Schwaben you mentioned which seemed moody) I've met. One guy actually walked me and some friends of mine to the train station in Fürth after a festival in addition to giving us beer and pizza with the argument that he "can't just leave us like that".

 

Bavarians are like folks from the Southern US - friendly, helpful, hospitable, and willing to go that extra help you out of a bind. I like that.

 

I can see that comparison to some degree although I still think there's quite a few cultural gaps - particularly as someone else pointed out in another thread - the different concepts of "being polite/respectful".

I don't know to which degree Florida counts as "Southern U.S." but some of the customs there were certainly baffling.

 

I have two very good friends of hardy Schwäbisch stock -- but if you mean the dialect, I'm with you.

 

Referring to the "Redneck Rivera" between the Alabama border and say Panama City, FL? Then yeah - for sure.

 

As a native Texan, I can assure you, we're actually not German.... We also don't pretend to not be American. It's just when people ask us where we're from, we list Texas first because we think of ourselves as Texans first. The fact that this also makes us Americans is, well, rather beside the point...

 

That is how us Bavarians feel. We think of ourselves as Bavarians first. We're much more closely related to Austrians (who after all are basically Bavarian colonists wandering down the river valley) than to the other German tribes and many of us still resent the fact that we ended up in a state with (most of) the rest of Germans.

 

The 19th century called, they want their xenophobic hegemony-ridden ideology back. (and to pretend that that is any way better than any of the crap the Prussians pulled)

Also, that comparison doesn't hold up. Vastly different historical backgrounds, not to mention that even to this day American states are much more autonomous than even any German Freistaat (which is a pretty meaningless characteristic nowadays).