Our view of German Culture

We actually never went to Stuttgart since we had bad timing and our friends were busy, we decided to go directly to Pforzheim and tried Couch surfing for the first time! We’ve got some nice new friends, and instead of a spring festival we went to a circus-school, trying some acrobatics and juggling and we even went to the movies and enjoyed a film in the German language. We have been through a lot during this 2,5 months and here are some things that we haven’t posted in our earlier blog posts.

Germans are a really friendly and curious people and we have noticed some differences between Swedish and German people. By walking between the small villages and eating at some local restaurants and cafés we soon noticed that everyone greeted each other. A courtesy we have noticed is stronger here in Germany than in Sweden, it didn’t matter if you walked by each other on the street or if you walked into the restaurant, you were greeted.

Religion seems to be more serious here than in Sweden, we have walked by a lot of monuments and Christianity seems to be practiced everywhere we go, more or less. We don’t belong to any religion, but it is really nice to see that the monuments are taken care of and that the local people puts flowers and candles by them. This is something we don’t see often in Sweden.

Easter is one of the holidays we have had the luck to experience in Germany. In Sweden it’s not a big of deal, some still decorates a bit and search for Easter eggs. It is nothing more or less than what you make of it. But in Germany it is a big thing! The community decorates the streets; every shop has Easter decorations in the windows and giving away colored eggs to everyone that wants one. And if you look at people’s gardens you will find a lot of decorations, colorful eggs in the plants and bunnies everywhere. The culture around Easter here is really lovely and around the same time there are spring festivals. A very nice way to celebrate spring time and everything that comes with it.

Other cultural things we have noticed are of course the typical half-timbered houses, but that is not all. Many of the houses are colored and have a special golden text over the doorway. We have also seen a lot of wall-paintings and tree sculptures on our walk, both in their gardens and in the forests.

The gardens out in the smaller communities seem to be a status-indicator. If the gardens aren’t packed with garden decorations they are very neat looking, the plants are cut into different shapes and surrounded with flowers, stones or wood chips.

Another thing worth mentioning is the solar-plant fields. We have crossed a lot of these here in Germany. Back home it’s more regular with the windmills, and the best thing about the fields filled with solar-plants is that they use the space for sheep. A good way to optimize the space. There are also a lot of rivers in this country and we have seen a lot of watermills, which is both useful and a cultural heritage. To us it seems like Germany takes more care of their cultural heritage than Sweden, but we haven’t been around as much in Sweden to actually tell.

We have just started our fourth and last trail here in Germany, Westweg Schwarzwald. In only 2 days on our new trail we have already collected 6 bags of trash, but we have not yet gotten far out from the bigger villages. The interesting part is that the place we picked the most trash had 3 trash bins in a row, maybe 15m in between. So sadly it seems like the local people have little respect for the nature.

So far the nature takes good care of us and Schwarzwald has really invited us!

Servus!