I like the challenges that January brings. I’ve been living in Leipzig, Germany for the last months and the first challenge that I can think of is to survive the winter.
Living in a Latin country is totally different, nobody actually plans to take out their winter clothes from the closet.
While most Mexicans (including me) complain about the cold, we haven’t got any idea of what a real cold winter is. I’ve learned many things from the German culture and the goal of today’s post is to explain it to you.
(This post is written for people living in the Americas)
Planning and preparing. Winter is just one example. Germans don’t plan, they fucking plan a a lot, and with incredible detail. Germans plan their vacations not one or two months in advance, you can expect a German to plan their vacations six, eight, even twelve months in advance. The planning comes in hand with making appointments (Termin). Want a haircut, do an appointment. Want to pay your landlord, do an appointment. Never expect this from a latin, we consider ourselves more like improvisers and we deal with the situation when we have to deal with it.
Punctuality. Being on time is also a mayor deal here. Let’s compare everyday situations. In Mexico, when you invite people to a party at 21:00, you can expect them to come, not to come, to come late, to come really late but never to come early. You will receive constant phone calls and messages of people asking if the party has already started so they can actually start preparing themselves to come. In Germany is exactly the opposite. If you come here, always be on time, hell, arrive one hour before and wait outside until you have to knock on the door. So beware, if you are not on time you can expect to receive some angry looks.
Nothing get’s wasted. I think this is the most important lesson that I’ve learned so far (the previous points are pretty obvious) The “Pfand” culture has propagated across all levels of the German culture as I know it. The Pfand is a deposit on something that you buy. So let’s say you buy a Coca Cola on the supermarket, you will be charged 0.25 cents extra (or more) that you will get back when you return the bootle on a special machine. Simple. This happens also at bars (for beer bottles & glasses), concerts, when skiing (for the card), and for almost everything that you can think of.
So Germans have found a way to recycle things and basically to avoid people from breaking bottles when drinking at a Bar. How does the system works? Easy. The bartender will provide you with a plastic coin that only when returned along the bottle you will receive your deposit back. Although the more you drink, the more difficult is to remember to return the bottles. Its amazing how many of this plastic coins I have now.
But wasting is only one side of the matter. Saving and reducing costs is the other side. So the typical situation that a tourist will see this is in McDonald’s or Burger King. Expect to be charged an extra 0.10 cents for the ketchup, oh yes my friend, you will not get anything for free that you will not use. At the beginning is awkward and annoying, but its actually intelligent and you get used to it. This is reflected in all levels of German society and this has created that people save their money and invest it where it really matters. And of course, people know what are the costs behind the things they buy.
There are plenty of stranger things that happen here and that I will probably will write about in a future post. Consider this just a simple introduction to Germany.
Until next time.