Captured By Love

            Living in a different country is… different. You think that would be obvious, but you don’t realize how different cultures are until you are there living smack dab in the middle of it. German culture is pretty different than Canadian culture. For example, I’m used to being as loud as I want during the night. However, here in Germany they have something called “Quite Hours”. Staring at 8 pm things outside have to be almost silent and at 10 pm things inside buildings should be quite as well. I am NOT used to this whatsoever. Things I used to do back home, like playing grounders until 3am, would NOT fly here.  This is disappointing because I love being outside at night having fun, but it is good in because it helps to make sure that I actually get to bed at a decent hour at night. 

We also take care of the trash quite differently. In Germany they sort ALL of their garbage. They have about 4 different categories of garbage, which are enforced everywhere, even in places like malls and outdoors. If we sort our garbage wrong at the base they can actually refuse to take our garbage that week. If we get repeated warnings they can even tell us that they aren’t taking our garbage at all anymore and we have to take care of it ourselves. They take it very seriously over here. I actually like it though. I wish we could adopt something like this back home… that is, until I have to throw out my to-go drink cup that I had my tea in, and need to use 3 different garbage cans for it! Haha.

Interacting with people in everyday life is different too. For example when I go to the store they usually don’t hand me my change directly. There is usually a shallow bowl that they put the money into. Line-ups are a free for all too. Just yesterday I had people, even old ladies, try to budge in front of me.

There is one interesting thing that I found out about. During lecture one of the staff brought up that when we worship on the street we have to be careful about how we raise our arms. They said that we have to be aware of how we angle our arms so that it doesn’t look like how the Nazi’s did back in WWII. I thought it was just out of respect, but after talking to a German, I found out that it was actually illegal to hold your arm like that in public. I found it interesting how much times have changed, but things from WWII still effect how people live their day-to-day lives.