Germerica

That's Germany + America; I'm not implying that America is germ-filled (though it seems everyone's getting sick lately).

I've realized that when asked about their heritage, a majority of caucasians I meet claim to have some sort of German ancestry. But like the beginning of the article said, it seems as if the German culture has "submerged" into the American culture, as many of those individuals I've met don't speak German and rarely celebrate the German culture. For me, as an Chinese American with parents who are first generation immigrants, I'm pretty strongly tied to the Chinese culture. But it's understandable that German-Americans aren't as strongly tied to their heritage as I am. Germans have been coming over to America for much longer (300 years, as the article says) than Asians and part of their culture has become what is now considered American.

I thought the Oscar-Myer Weinermobile was an interesting example of this merge of German and American culture. Germany has a strong sausage history, and that's morphed into this all-American hotdog kind of culture now. I was surprised at how long it took for the Weinermobile to make its way to Germany, too.

I also thought that little bit about the German and English language mixing was pretty interesting. I took Japanese for four years, and one of the vocab words we learned was "part-time work" which is アルバイト(arubaito), which is derived from the German word arbiet, work.

tschüss!