Dear Germany

"A US citizen in Germany", by Carol Kloeppel - that´s the book I´m reading at the moment.
And I learn weird things here, about the US!

In the US you have a top sheet. It seems to be a sheet that is stuck under the matress. Hello?!!! I could never ever sleep with my feet being stuck under a sheet like that!
Is this true, a top sheet is used? Even in summer, when it´s hot?

And our pillows are "huge"? They have the usual 80*80 cm (31,5 inch). I know nothing else - and I want nothing smaller, too!

Coming to numbers, the author asks if we are so bored with our language that we play ping-pong with numbers.
36. Thirty-six. We say sechs-und-dreissig, "six-and-thirty".

Ok, that may be weid, but hey! We´re just maybe funny, but the French are real weirdos here! They gave me a hard time with numbers, really. Everybody who complains about how Germans do number-talk, please go to France!

Everything is ok til 69, soixante-neuf, sixty-nine. 70: soixante-dix, sixty-ten. Wanna go for 80? Quarte-vingt, four-twenty, 90, you can guess, quatre-vingt-dix, four-twenty-ten, and four-twenty-ten-nine (quatre-vingt-dix-neuf) for 99.
Now you go into the tube and find out which tram is yours on which platform at what time.
Ha... I am thankful I had to go through this only in the language laboratory! In Paris I had French colleagues with me, luckily!


Anyhows – it´s fun to look at your country through the eyes of a foreigner!
I laugh my head off here! So, Carol asked two men to move their van out of the way. Her daughter had been stabbed and she needs to fetch her home.

She could tell by the faces of the men she made a mistake.

Yes. There is a difference between erstochen and gestochen! First one says you´re definitively dead, mostly by a knife. The second is when a bee pricks you - which has happened to her daughter.

Fun hours to come!

The author lives here now for 15 years, seems the place is not too bad after all.

Have you ever thought about how a stranger with a foreign language and other habits might see the place you live in?