1.) Offer them some Advil for a headache.
2.) Wear a sweatshirt that proudly displays the name of your alma mater, and then mention your "school spirit." Bonus askancey-looks for actually singing your college loyalty song.
3.) Talk about baseball or American football.
4.) Leave your house in the morning without opening up the windows to let in fresh air.
5.) Tell them you voted for George Bush.*
6.) Get specific about how much college tuition you paid and the average student loan burden of a recent college graduate.
7.) Wear a scarf around your neck for reasons other than to announce to the world that you might be contagious.
8.) Forget to use the toilet brush.
9.) Wear shorts and a tank top at the gym.
10.) Wear sweatpants ever.
*Which I did NOT, just for the record.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Things that will cause a German to look at you askance, Vol. I
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7 comments:
I don't even want to know about number 8! Are you getting a lot of looks lately? Surely, you must be blending a bit more by now. :) Though, the bubbly-friendly Minnesotan part of you will never be totally taken away.
Amy
It's actually commonplace to use the toilet brush ALL the time.
And if they don't wear shorts and a tank top at the gym, what do they wear?
Here I see people wear sportswear out in public and I CRINGE. Residual European-ness, I guess.
A toilet brush is one of these things, right (I cheerfully and proudly admit that I don't know for sure)? How the poo could someone know you'd forgotten to use one? I remember European toilets being fairly capable as far as flushing goes.
Yeah, I mostly can blend in now when I want to, but I *will* wear Wartburg College paraphernalia! Just try and stop me!
Man, I forgot how alien this toilet-brush concept is to the American mentality. As it turns out, we use about four times as much water as is necessary to flush our toilets. Here they use incredibly low-flow toilets instead, which reduces our environmental footprint... and also has the tendency to leave unsightly poopskids. (And even peeskids, if you can imagine...) It is everyone's sacred duty to remove these before leaving the bathroom or stall. It's the "flush and brush" method, and they even teach you about it in the intensive German
course. Kind of like how in the US, you are not supposed to wear the same thing two days in a row? One of those tacit cultural understandings.
After a while, you get kind of a technique that allows you to get the toilet bowl clean AND not leave unsightly residue on the brush, but it takes some perfecting. :-)
Charlie, that dude in the picture kind of looks like he's contemplating scrubbing *himself* with the toilet brush. I sure hope not.
If I recall correctly, most American bathrooms HAVE a toilet brush, it just doesn't get used any more than like once a month. Am I correct?
I am in no position to speak with authority on "most" American bathrooms, but I've not seen many toilet brushes out there. I do often see plungers; the result of America switching to lower-flow (and therefore less functional) toilets. I, myself, am partial to outhouses, where neither a plunger nor toilet brush is required. EWALU's shift from outhouses to flush toilets is a sad sad thing, IMHO.
Interesting shift from third- to first-person in the second paragraph of your comment. :-) What's "poopskid" in German?
Which explains why I didn't know what one was.
So people in Germany don't wear scarves, even in the winter?
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