Blog 3- Reflections

 I am now reaching the close of my two week stay in Berlin, and I can say I thoroughly enjoyed it. One thing I can say I enjoyed the most were my restaurant experiences.  Unlike America, or at least where I’m from, there seems to be a restaurant on every street in Berlin. For the most part, the experience was fundamentally the same: you come in, you order, you pay. However there seems to be a obvious difference between American culture and German culture when it comes to eating. For one, they are huge on drinking alcohol, which we are not allowed to do. So on almost every eating excursion I’ve been to I had to somehow refuse getting a drink and I would get odd looks.  Secondly, it seems like when we are seated in restaurants, we stay there for hours. It seems like the restaurant eating is more of a social event then an eating event at times. Thirdly, Germany is filled with lots of flies and bees, and they came in to terms with it.  So when flies and bees land on the utensils, napkins or maybe even the food, to them it’s no big deal. Americans freak out and request new things if flies land on it. We have the  schema that flies equals unsanitary and illness, so we try to avoid them. But after being here, I begin to question that concept, given that Germans are relativity as healthy as Americans, yet they let flies around them. Now I don’t want flies around my food at all, but I wonder why there is an incongruity between the two cultures.  After much thought, German culture is not entirely different from America, it’s just the nuances in everyday life that we must adapt to.