Studying Abroad in Germany: The Stereotypes Are Not All True!

By Aaron Grubbs on September 4, 2016

I spent the better part of my first year at FSU just trying to plan my trip abroad to Germany. Running between office after office, advisor after advisor, all of which told me they had never heard of the program I wanted to do and didn’t know what I was talking about and pointed me in the direction of yet another office and these almost never changed: different face, same answer. Bureaucracy, man (insert eye rolling emoji)! Of course, I’m here now though so it worked out in the end and even through all the thrilling turmoil and agonizing excitement I spent a lot of time gushing about my plans to friends and family or simply feeding my YouTube addiction with 3 hour long(or more if I’m being honest) marathons of videos on German culture and language or just simply German bloggers talking about German stuff. It didn’t matter. And in doing that you wind up listening to a lot of people’s opinions of what Germans are like, what the food is like, what they think of us, and figuring out whether it’s OK yet to be American or if you should still say you’re Canadian. While I’ve only been here about two months so far, I’ve traveled quite a lot and met so many people. And I have to say: the stereotypes that Germans are a bunch of rude, drunken, rule-abiding goody-two-shoes that just eat schnitzel all day are so not true.

OK, a few of them are… like their strict regard for rules. Seriously, it’s insane. In America, crosswalk signals for example are a total joke and jay walking is the name of the game in most places. However in Germany, and most of Europe for that matter, this is not the case. Even at 2 am at an empty intersection with no one around but myself to see her, I witnessed a woman wait at least a solid 3 minutes before the signal changed and she finally walked her bike across the road. Seriously, count to 180 right now and tell me that’s not an absurd amount of time to wait on a crosswalk signal when no one is around. I have never seen that in America. Hell, I don’t even like waiting that long in my car.

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Germans are also very big on recycling. And by “big” I mean literally everywhere you go you will find these multi-divider receptacles with an opening for every type of waste you could possibly have. Glass goes in one, plastic in another, paper in the one next to that and any type of bio waste goes in yet another deep dark pit, none of which can you ever see into quite well enough to be sure you’ve chosen the correct one. And believe you me, I’ve tried. That’s how anyone could pick the “Ausländer” out of the crowd. He’s the one that nervously walks up and peers inside bin after bin before ultimately dropping what’s left of an apple awkwardly into one dark hole and the sticker it had on it into another one before quickly looking around to be sure no angry Germans have caught him messing up the system.

However, sadly one stereotype I haven’t found to be completely true is that “Germany has all the best beer!” The beer isn’t awful, don’t get me wrong, but when every bar you go to still just has the same Jever, Becks and Guinness it starts to feel just like going to any plain ole American bar. Based on the way people talked about it I expected the whole country to just be micro brews upon micro brews and for the bars to reflect that. Sadly though, I think I’ve still tasted my favorite beers in the states by American breweries. Not that I mean to imply I’m going to discontinue my… “research.” Oktoberfest is just around the corner and I have high hopes, even still!

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A really great one I have the pleasure of reporting the falsehood of is that “Germans are all angry and rude.” If this were Politico it would have to be a total “pants on fire.” One of the most nerve racking things I’ve had to deal with lies within the very reason I’m here: practicing and attempting to perfect my German speaking skills.

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Traveling with me for the first month was a friend of mine who loves to talk to everyone everywhere about everything, especially her pet Dachshund(partly because the sentence she was most fluent with is “Ich habe ein Dackel,” albeit that’s still not quite right either). Being a pithy sort of people, Germans only want to know what’s important without all the fluff, or so I had heard. In the words of my German 1 TA, “They’re not just going to sit down and bullshit with you all day.” So when it was time to get on our first train heading out of Copenhagen into Deutschland I was a bit nervous thinking, “OH please, oh please, don’t talk anyone’s head off. They’re going to hate us before we even get to our dorms!” So imagine my relief and surprise when not only was our seat neighbor not annoyed but he actually started rummaging through his wallet to find a picture of his own pup to show us. He has an 11 year old German Shepherd(of course he does). We were bullshitting with a German about dogs! And it was awesome.

One of the hardest things to get over when trying to learn a new language is just the stage fright of actually having to open your mouth and make foreign sounds come out in a logical order and mistakes and stuttering are just parts of that process. In the beginning that may be easy to know and understand but nevertheless difficult to accept. The good news is, at least if you’re learning German, that you don’t have to worry about them losing patience with you. Doing some research before hand about the stereotypes of the country you’re heading off to can be helpful in giving you some insight into what the people and culture are like. However, while stereotypes are based in fact somewhere, take them with a grain of salt and go into your trip abroad with an open mind, which is all we can ever hope to do with any endeavor.

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