A retrospective from Köln

What can I say about my time in Stuttgart?

My family was amazing. The things I saw were mind blowing. The people I met were unforgettable. The time was too short, but also just right.

I've definitely learnt so much about myself and Germany and Germans.

Germany is a place so different to Australia and yet so similar it's almost impossible to make a judgment about whether I really mentally left Australia, I feel like I adapted to quickly to the little differences that I didn't have any culture shock. And it's hardtop have culture shock when the place and culture gefällt mir so sehr.

And as I leave it feel like I've achieved my goals so far, I've learnt so much about the people who I've lived among for 6 weeks but I don't know if this is to say I've learnt about the culture.

I've definitely learnt heaps aboutvthe language, how to structure and respond to the things said to me. But I really feel that only time will be a good enough filter of what I have learnt, so much still swirls in my head.

I will write again in the next couple days as I am still travelling in Germany and learning ever more!

Grüße von Köln!

Week 5!

So the topic of week seems to be social problems in Germany,

I don't know if I can really comment on these as so far my perceptions of Germany have been limited to only one city, while furthermore, I'm not a German and my experience is only 5 weeks long, but I will say what I have observed.

As the others have, I have also observed homelessness in Stuttgart, whether this is more or less homeless than in Perth, I don't know. But it is highly concerning given how cold it is and I cannot blame them for taking refuge in the train stations as one of the few things that stay open all night and provide some protection from the wind.

Smoking is still prevalent here, as far as I can surmise, more so than Australia. It is a little dubious for me to say if this is a social problem. Smoking would be incomparable as a social problem to things like racism or sexism, in their scope and institutionalised nature. However, I agree that it has a great impact ont he public health and seeing smoking ads in public places for the first time (as far as I remember) was quite confronting that something that in Australia is so tightly controlled, is advertised the same way coke is (or alcohol, which is a much bigger problem in Oz than here.)

Also, graffitti, I'm not sure if there is more or less here than in Perth, but I think it is an issue. However, one must raise the real question, specifically with homelessness and graffiti, are these social problems in themselves, or symptoms thereof? Surely only a youth who feels they have no stake in their society would damage public property in such a way. But, as I must say, I'm not a sociologist and not equipped nor trained to comment on these things in a deep fashion.

In other news, this week has been a quiet one for me until Friday when I visited the Rockfabrik nightclub, very impressive, it was more like a building with a few smaller venues inside it. Something very cool.

And tonight i will visit a variety show called "Youkali" here's hoping it's interesting!

Dropkicks in Deutschland

First thing's first, tonight I saw the Dropkick Murphys play live in Ludwigsburg. The show was complete with stage invasion and encore that ended the show with TNT by ACDC, ein ganz tolles Nacht.

Shipping up to Boston, theme for The Departed and break out hit for the Dropkick Murphys

This week I want to talk about cultural stereotypes. At the concert Whitney and I speculated about how wild the crowd would be for the band. Suffice to say we were quite surprised! We had mostly speculated that fairly hardcore punks would have abounded and made the crowd quite wild with moshing and the like. We were actually instead very surprised to find the majority of the crowd to just be enthusiastic but physically casual listeners. This is a huge difference for us from Australia. And just the sheer kind of jokey comradeship that existed there.

In Australia going to a concert is like a competition. Who can get in the door first, Who can get to the front of the crowd, who can get to the front of the merchandise line quickest, who can show off their fandom the most. It's really pretty disappointing that it's like that in Australia.  But in Germany it seemed like everyone knew they were all there to have a good time and see the band and hear the music and they seemed correspondingly relaxed.

This is definitely indicative of a lot of the German society I've experienced, it correlates well to the public transport in that people my bump and jostle but no one fights or yells because we're all just trying to get to school/work/home/sonnenstudio whatever.

This is definitely something I really like about Germany, it's just so rational here.

And a nice folky one of their tunes to enjoy.

Peace and rationality to all reading (and a headbanging good time haha)