Germany
For a few days in mid-June I was in Munich, Germany at a conference. Since then I've been visiting a professor at the University of Bonn. In a bit over a week I'll depart for Helsinki, Finland for another conference. I have a German cellphone, but I left the piece of paper with my number in my office so I can't tell you the number right now. I just got around to installing an AIM client on this laptop that I borrowed from Brown CS, so I can be reached that way when I remember to sign in, or by email.
Here are some differences between Germany and the US that I've noticed (and remembered long enough to write down). Note that 1 Euro is worth about $1.50.
* Different standards for many things: A4 paper size, metric measurements, Euro currency, different electrical outlets, and different spoken language.
* The first floor of a building is the first one above the ground floor, not the ground floor itself.
* After a talk, the audience applauds by pounding the table with their fists. This really startled me at first!
* Most stores are closed Sundays, including grocery stores
* You have to pay for bags at supermarkets. One store charged 8 Euro cents per bag, another 25 cents. They are stronger than your typical US grocery-store bags though.
* To get a shopping cart, you need to insert a 1-Euro coin. You get your coin back when you return the cart.
* The deposit for water bottles is 25 Euro cents per bottle. I bought a 6-pack of bottled water recently and paid more for the deposit than for the water!
* Milk is sold in 1-liter containers. My apartment came with two plates but no bowls. I deduce from these facts that cereal is not as popular a breakfast item here as it is in the US.
* Tipping at restaurants is optional.
* Restaurants do not provide free tap water for drinking. If you order water, be careful or you might get carbonated water.
* The glasses at restaurants have a line marked with a certain capacity (e.g. 0.3 L), and are usually filled precisely to that line.
* People leave windows open a lot (the climate is too mild for air conditioning). There are no screens on most windows, but I've only seen an occasional insect sneak indoors. People seem to close windows when they leave a room, perhaps to keep birds from wandering in. I conjecture that is the reason because I had to shoo a bird away once that started to enter my office!
* There are parking spaces on the sidewalk (you have to drive over the curb). On one street, there's a line of trees on the sidewalk with carefully marked parking spaces in between! Apparently this is a quirk of Bonn, not a Germany-wide thing.
* The elevators I've seen have an automatic sliding door in the cab but an ordinary manual swinging door on the outside. The elevator cab magically unlocks the outside door when it arrives. Once when I was in Paris a few years ago, I used an elevator with no door in the cab whatsoever. The inside of the elevator shaft was smooth so even if you touched the inside of the shaft while the cab was moving you probably wouldn't be hurt.
* They have pseudo-riots after soccer finals rather than baseball or American football.
* People use cash a lot here. I was given some money to pay for food while I was here -- about $600 in cash! They seem to use big bills more here than in the US; I've seen plenty of 50 Euro bills and was paid partly with a 200 Euro bill.
* Waiters collect money and give change using money they carry with them rather than a central cash register.
* The money is very regular. There are coins worth 1,2,5,10,20,50, 100 and 200 cents and bills worth 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 Euros. The coins worth 1, 2, 5 cents are copper-colored so it's easy to tell which coins are nearly worthless.
* Neither the Munich and Bonn subways systems collect fares per se; they presumably do occasional inspections and fine those that fail to produce a ticket. I've seen this in the US before (the San Fransisco commuter rail), but it seems more common here.
Not knowing much German is awkward but I'm getting by. I've been listening to some Pimsler German tapes I borrowed from my father, so I know how to say "I don't speak German" in German if someone says something to me. If there's something important to say, people generally speak English when asked. Unlike French, Germans don't seem to treat English as an attack on national pride. Other times I just use cues from context to guess what things mean. When someone on a bicycle yells something that sounds like "atten[d]", it's pretty easy to guess that the meaning is "pay attention and get out of the bicycle lane or I might hit you. Don't you know that German sidewalks are split into a lane for pedestrians and a lane for bicycles?" Leaving late one evening from my office I deduced that a bright red sign on an exit door that mentioned "19h" was informing me that the door was alarmed after 7 pm; I therefore used a different exit.
I take a tram vaguely analogous to the Boston green-line to work. Unlike US subways, these trams operate on a schedule. Most of the day they leave every 10 minutes at 9:09, 9:19, 9:29 etc. There's a sign at each station announcing the time until the next train and what its destination will be. I have a vague impression that these signs are based on real-time data, not just the scheduled arrival times, but they haven't been more than a minute late often enough (while I'm paying attention) for me to be sure. The intercity trains are so well organized that they printed what track my train would be leaving from on my ticket -- which I bought almost 2 weeks in advanced! The doors of subways and trains only open at stops if you press a button, presumably for reasons of quiet. Overall the train system here makes the US one look like it belongs in a museum or a third-world-country or something.
My tram stop is the last stop, so the trams need to cross over from one side to the other for the return trip (the setup is similar to Alewife station on the Boston red line). This requires switches in the rails, which are controlled in a very straightforward way: the driver reaches out the window and flips a couple of switches attached to a post! There's a twist though: I see the drivers adjust the switches when they're at the station, but I don't see them switching anything when they're coming in. I'm guessing that the switches must be on a timer or train-sensor so that it automatically switches once the tram leaves to get ready for the next one.
Here are some differences between Germany and the US that I've noticed (and remembered long enough to write down). Note that 1 Euro is worth about $1.50.
* Different standards for many things: A4 paper size, metric measurements, Euro currency, different electrical outlets, and different spoken language.
* The first floor of a building is the first one above the ground floor, not the ground floor itself.
* After a talk, the audience applauds by pounding the table with their fists. This really startled me at first!
* Most stores are closed Sundays, including grocery stores
* You have to pay for bags at supermarkets. One store charged 8 Euro cents per bag, another 25 cents. They are stronger than your typical US grocery-store bags though.
* To get a shopping cart, you need to insert a 1-Euro coin. You get your coin back when you return the cart.
* The deposit for water bottles is 25 Euro cents per bottle. I bought a 6-pack of bottled water recently and paid more for the deposit than for the water!
* Milk is sold in 1-liter containers. My apartment came with two plates but no bowls. I deduce from these facts that cereal is not as popular a breakfast item here as it is in the US.
* Tipping at restaurants is optional.
* Restaurants do not provide free tap water for drinking. If you order water, be careful or you might get carbonated water.
* The glasses at restaurants have a line marked with a certain capacity (e.g. 0.3 L), and are usually filled precisely to that line.
* People leave windows open a lot (the climate is too mild for air conditioning). There are no screens on most windows, but I've only seen an occasional insect sneak indoors. People seem to close windows when they leave a room, perhaps to keep birds from wandering in. I conjecture that is the reason because I had to shoo a bird away once that started to enter my office!
* There are parking spaces on the sidewalk (you have to drive over the curb). On one street, there's a line of trees on the sidewalk with carefully marked parking spaces in between! Apparently this is a quirk of Bonn, not a Germany-wide thing.
* The elevators I've seen have an automatic sliding door in the cab but an ordinary manual swinging door on the outside. The elevator cab magically unlocks the outside door when it arrives. Once when I was in Paris a few years ago, I used an elevator with no door in the cab whatsoever. The inside of the elevator shaft was smooth so even if you touched the inside of the shaft while the cab was moving you probably wouldn't be hurt.
* They have pseudo-riots after soccer finals rather than baseball or American football.
* People use cash a lot here. I was given some money to pay for food while I was here -- about $600 in cash! They seem to use big bills more here than in the US; I've seen plenty of 50 Euro bills and was paid partly with a 200 Euro bill.
* Waiters collect money and give change using money they carry with them rather than a central cash register.
* The money is very regular. There are coins worth 1,2,5,10,20,50, 100 and 200 cents and bills worth 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 200 Euros. The coins worth 1, 2, 5 cents are copper-colored so it's easy to tell which coins are nearly worthless.
* Neither the Munich and Bonn subways systems collect fares per se; they presumably do occasional inspections and fine those that fail to produce a ticket. I've seen this in the US before (the San Fransisco commuter rail), but it seems more common here.
Not knowing much German is awkward but I'm getting by. I've been listening to some Pimsler German tapes I borrowed from my father, so I know how to say "I don't speak German" in German if someone says something to me. If there's something important to say, people generally speak English when asked. Unlike French, Germans don't seem to treat English as an attack on national pride. Other times I just use cues from context to guess what things mean. When someone on a bicycle yells something that sounds like "atten[d]", it's pretty easy to guess that the meaning is "pay attention and get out of the bicycle lane or I might hit you. Don't you know that German sidewalks are split into a lane for pedestrians and a lane for bicycles?" Leaving late one evening from my office I deduced that a bright red sign on an exit door that mentioned "19h" was informing me that the door was alarmed after 7 pm; I therefore used a different exit.
I take a tram vaguely analogous to the Boston green-line to work. Unlike US subways, these trams operate on a schedule. Most of the day they leave every 10 minutes at 9:09, 9:19, 9:29 etc. There's a sign at each station announcing the time until the next train and what its destination will be. I have a vague impression that these signs are based on real-time data, not just the scheduled arrival times, but they haven't been more than a minute late often enough (while I'm paying attention) for me to be sure. The intercity trains are so well organized that they printed what track my train would be leaving from on my ticket -- which I bought almost 2 weeks in advanced! The doors of subways and trains only open at stops if you press a button, presumably for reasons of quiet. Overall the train system here makes the US one look like it belongs in a museum or a third-world-country or something.
My tram stop is the last stop, so the trams need to cross over from one side to the other for the return trip (the setup is similar to Alewife station on the Boston red line). This requires switches in the rails, which are controlled in a very straightforward way: the driver reaches out the window and flips a couple of switches attached to a post! There's a twist though: I see the drivers adjust the switches when they're at the station, but I don't see them switching anything when they're coming in. I'm guessing that the switches must be on a timer or train-sensor so that it automatically switches once the tram leaves to get ready for the next one.