Kulture 8

The culture text I found very interesting, and perhaps even the most frustrating, was the one about German University education. The Spiegel online writers made it sound like it would be completely awesome to just cruise through college until you were 30, but to me that sounds absolutely horrifying. Not that I'm opposed to the idea of being at a University at 30, but perhaps as a Phd student, GSI or staffmember. I definitely wouldn't want to be finishing my undergrad then. And then, if you went to grad school you would be very old by the time you could actually use all your education. Something I definitely learned from the article that I did not know was that Germany has about 5 million unemployed. Germany takes care of it's citizens in the respect of health insurance, unemployment benefits and so on, but that would still be frightening coming out of college. As far as the conflicting classes, I think we have a bit of that here too. The most appealing thing in the article was definitely the 3 month VW bus ride through Eastern Europe. We can't even get a week for Christmas here let along time to do some real traveling!

I was not surprised by the sauna article whatsoever. It seems like the Germans are quite fond of being naked, seeing other naked people...basically anything to do with being naked. I'm not sure how I would feel about being in one. Ich werde wohl sehr unbehaglich sein! I am the uptight Anglo-Saxon type, so whatever!

-Stephanie