Observations on German Life

Whew!  What a day.  I just had a few things to do, but between forgetting things, getting lost, and not understanding the culture around me, I ended up walking 10 miles.  I had to go to the train station to get tickets for our visit to Amsterdam this weekend, then to the main shopping district to buy some real coffee mugs (the dainty tea cups we have in our apartment aren't good for anything), then go to the grocery store to get supplies for tonight's dinner.  Despite the very good map I now have, I got lost (including walking through the train tunnel multiple times to find a bathroom and to find my way under the freeway).  It was partly construction, and partly my confusion that I knew I wanted to go west, but I thought the train tunnel was going north.  Ah, some day I will develop a sense of direction.

At least the weather was beautiful.  In the mid 80s, very sunny.  In stark contrast to the earlier weather. Tuesday was overcast all day.  I understand morning fog and incipient rain, but the idea of a day that is just dreary gray all day -- apparently I am too much of a Californian to remember that these days are common in most of the world.

In any case, here are my very random observations about the people here:

• There are a lot of Muslim women (probably Muslim men too, but they aren't as identifiable).  Maybe as many as 1 in 10 of the women I saw were wearing head scarves, more near the university
• Probably related to that -- the vast majority of restaurants around here are Mediterranean or Middle Eastern; Turkish, Lebanese, etc.  I thought Germans liked German food, but apparently they have become more open minded.
• I've seen a few Africans, but other than that and the Middle Easterners, the rest of the people seem to be classic Germans: stout, especially if they are middle aged or older, often blond.
• Lots of cyclists doing errands, very few with helmets, many with babies in carriers
• Bathrooms in train stations cost money (1€)
• Lots more smokers than I am used to.  I thought I would sit outside a Backerei (bakery) and enjoy tea and a pastry, but the seats are full of smokers (they cannot smoke at the tables in the buildings, but I wanted to enjoy the sun).  The smokers mostly seemed older, so I hope the new generation has not taken up nicotine.  Cigarettes are sold from vending machines in the street, so there is less effort to keep them out of the hands of teens, I think.
• Germans apparently don't like vegetables, at least the ones I am used to.  I stopped at several produce stands to get a vege for dinner, and all I could find were cabbage, cauliflower, potatoes and onions.  No broccoli, no green beans, no snap peas, no asparagus (I suspect the last has to do with seasonality, but not the others.  Though I have lost most sense of when vegetables are in season in the temperate climates, since we can get most anything from Mexico)
• Lots of places sell french fries, here called "Hollandischer Pommes" (Dutch potatoes, in a bit of a linguistic hodgepodge).  Again, I didn't think the Germans ate fries
• They have human streetsweepers. When is the last time you saw that in the US?  The people doing it looked ethnically German, from which I infer it is a reasonable paying job, not one that is left to immigrants.
• There must be quite an elderly population in this town.  I counted four hearing aid shops in my travels today
• While lots of people live very densely packed into apartments, at least in the part of town I was in, there is a lot more green space -- small and large parks and hiking areas -- than you would see in a similar town in the US.
• Oh, and it's green  -- looks sort of like California in the dead of winter ::)
• And just like the US, everyone seems to have their head in their mobile device, or at least using it with headphones.