Those Saturday Morning Commercials

I watched a video my friend sent me. It's just a compilation of German commercials from 1992. It was pretty interesting to watch because the commercials in Germany bare a lot of similarity to the American commercials (at least in 1992, they did). David Hasselhoff even shows up!

Brutally Honest

"I don't like fruitcake at all and gifs make me swell up and break into a hideous, oozing rash."

Ah, something that I could never say in America. Although I don't mind the politeness that comes standard in America, it would be kind of nice to live the German way for a while. Being able to directly state what you want without worrying about offending anyone would be a lot less stressful. I know a lot of times my friends and I fuss about the invitation thing and I know a lot of people who are so polite they'll ask, "are you sure?" fifty times before they take the thing they asked for. Just take it!!

But I don't know, I'm kind of used to being polite around strangers and it'd feel pretty weird to tell my grandma (or anyone else's), "NO I DON'T LIKE THAT."

Chatting it Up in German (AMD1)

Lucy (me): Wie gehts?
Friend: Auch gut aber ich habe heute nacht viele hausafgaben…
L: Ich Habe sehr viele hausaufgaben…
F: Ah..
L: Sprechen sie Deutsch? Ja? Nein?
F: ja, ich spreche deutsch
L: super!!
F: wie gut ist dein deutsch?
L: ah, soso gut
F:wirklich? es scheint aus, dass es ziemlich schlecht ist...
L: shhhh nein, nein... es ist super gut!!
L: hast du einen kugelschreiber?
F: ah ja, ich habe

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!