My GERMAN Culture Shocks as An AMERICAN

hey everybody so recently I just got back from Germany visiting my girlfriend and there was some pretty significant culture differences from America in Germany and I think I got a really good taste of German culture because I didn't get to go to any of the tourist areas as soon as I landed at the airport I was picked up I was whisked away to the countryside so this is a little bit more of northern Germany I got to see how people lived in Germany I got to say on a German house I didn't see ya there touring Germany so I got a really great first impression of Germany these are my biggest culture shocks I experienced my two weeks in Germany as an American so the first culture shock is of course is when I got into the car I kind of noticed all the cars kind of look the same I guess in America we're used to these big pickup trucks and big SUVs and then we have the smaller cars too but in Europe all the cars seems exactly the same and then when we started driving it kind of makes sense now because they're all smaller because the roads are super super tiny I almost think German drivers I haven't looked up the stats are safer than Americans because in America we have a lot of straight roads that are big and it gets boring and you want to pick up your cell phone and start looking at it and yeah you go off the road and your car explodes and Germany what I saw is the roads were not really straight it was a lot of whining and turning and they were much much smaller in these towns are just hundreds and hundreds of years old but they didn't anticipate that one day we're gonna have cars that's why the roads are so tiny that's my theory anyways yeah I think I might be onto something another big difference so of course I V log on YouTube is I can't film people in public this was a big shocker I pulled out my camera and little B's like no no don't film these people you're not supposed to do that and I'm like I can't film it's just the town centre thing it's really beautiful here how can i film it if there's people here I was like they're not gonna go away anytime soon so I was really shocked that I'm not a lot of film in public and we did do a few things like film in a store and we were asked to leave I feel like an American we could get away with this a lot more unless we were being disruptive or disturbing but in the store we weren't being disruptive or disturbing but they didn't want us filming in the store and that was a little bit sad but in America when you're out in public we view it as that this is this you don't actually have this privacy that you're in public everybody there's cameras everywhere buildings have cameras the police have cameras everybody has a cellphone with cameras there is no right to privacy in America and honestly I kind of like that a lot better it makes sense we're not supposed to be doing anything crazy in public anyways so it shouldn't be that big of a deal to be filmed anyways I hope Germany decides to change that one day that would be really really cool because I definitely wanted to take more footage out in public nothing actually really cool why I was trying to film in public is a ton of cars came by and I asked my girlfriend little B if I could film this and she said yes it's okay to film the cars and they all were honking I'm like what's going on it she's like oh it's a wedding so they all go crazy and they start honking like crazy cuz it's wedding time like okay they're letting everybody know that this is a wedding this is good to know [Music] so while we're driving around I noticed gas stations that there's no credit card thing you just swipe it you actually fill up your tank first and they trust you to go in and pay after you took all their gas that's speaking of which let's just get into this right here I just remembered I took my girlfriend to a very nice restaurant and I try to pay at the end of the bill with my debit card and she's like you know so I pull out okay what about my visa no we don't take Visa or MasterCard oh no it's like what you don't take my credit card what am I gonna do and it wasn't the first time this happened it also happened in a grocery store it happened multiple places I ended up just getting used to carrying cash and as an American we don't actually carry cash I hardly ever carry cash it to me it doesn't feel normal to have a bunch of cash on me but here in Germany just in case I was gonna go to the store or maybe go out to eat I was like do I need to take like two hundred dollars with me like how much cash should I have on hand anyways this was definitely really different for me and maybe it's a good thing too because maybe then I'll know it's like okay well with a credit card that you just swipe swipe swipe and then all of a sudden you're like how did I spend so much money but in Germany yeah if you're paying with the casting then you have to physically go and get more cash and bring it and physically go get more cash I actually think this might actually be a good thing and speaking of restaurants a lot of the restaurants we went to that people actually lived upstairs are next to the restaurant I was all built in all the buildings seemed to be very very old and people will just remodel the inside and turn it into a business and I kind of felt like this is like small-time America you kind of see this too they have the second storey and people actually live up there they have apartments up there too and so it kind of felt like old-school America and again I like to think of Germany as the old world so my first impression is German restaurants and everything it was really nice was very friendly it was more mom-and-pop restaurants and I actually really liked it that was really really great but again I kind of wonder how the cities are and the tour serious I bet it's completely different someone's gonna be like I went to Germany I was able use all my credit cards and there was nobody living upstairs in the restaurant but yeah this is my experience what I experienced at Germany yeah everybody in America Germany is amazing from every us person from Germany okay so the other thing I was a huge culture shock is the toilets in Germany they call it toilet ah anyways it doesn't sound too fancy to me but anyways so the toilets all had one thing they all had one of these next to the toilet in Germany this is standard practice in a public toilet you have to clean your toilet it is common courtesy that makes a lot of sense all the toilets I went to seems very very clean but here's the other thing not only are you supposed to clean your toilet after using it you're also supposed to pay to use the toilet fifty cents to a dollar is kind of standard customary an America no we just drive everywhere and you just go running to McDonald's and you use the restroom or going to a gas station you use the restroom and in Germany it's standard that you have to pay to do that and so that's definitely a huge culture shock and especially when you don't carry cash with you and you have to go it's like oh no am I supposed to go on a tree I don't know but anyways I actually like that their toilets seemed a little different like there wasn't really much water in the toilets and in America we have much more water so I wonder if that's why the whole cleaning issue - there's not much water so say if you go number two yeah you're gonna have to definitely use one of these and I actually like this I like actually making sure you always keep a clean toilet in your house or when you go out in public you're gonna have a clean toilet this is good so it's a pro and a con there but it was definitely a huge culture shock I wasn't expecting it I wasn't used to it here's a really big one nudity getting naked in Germany I am very shy I would be called conservative when it comes - getting naked I don't want anybody to see me I'm probably over-the-top hyper self-conscious - I don't even want my girlfriend to see me naked so when I went to Germany and she's like let's go to the sauna and I'm like the sauna we have to get naked and she's like yeah we're gonna get naked in the side and there's gonna be a lot of other people there yeah there's gonna be a lot of other people there and I'm like okay When in Rome let's do it then anyways I make sure to kept a towel in front of me and actually honestly it was a ton of fun so my two weeks in Germany I went twice I would have went three times it was actually awesome I didn't feel like anybody was looking at me I didn't feel self-conscious I didn't feel like anybody stared at me and I know I wasn't staring at anybody and it was a lot of fun and a few of the Sun of things they put ice on it and there was like a bunch of us in the room and when they put ice on the rocks I just got so hot and there were waving towels and the heat was coming people are like screaming yeah okay I'm exaggerating they were going oh I don't know Germans make a different unique sound I think that Americans my opinion anyways I was the last one to leave that and it was really really hot but that was really really cool it felt like we all went through like this crazy experience together naked we all survived and I was glad I was the last one to leave - and also I wasn't the biggest person there actually I saw lots of actually big people in Germany - this made me feel a little bit happier that I wasn't the only big person so that made me really really happy so actually when I go back to Germany I'm totally looking forward to going back to the sauna it's not much money it's a lot of fun it's an experience and you feel really really awesome I feel like I could breathe better I can move better I just recently hurt my knee so my me felt better and like yeah so anyways I'm a huge fan of the saunas I wish there were more in America I haven't actually seen one in America but they make this maybe up in the northern part of America I don't know but this is something I've never seen in America that Germans do and Germans seem that their more liberal when it comes to nudity in America were very conservative when it comes to nudity so uh but nobody look at me nobody better be picturing me naked either kidding it's just awkward of the group really really fast right all right another big shocker is so yeah I was kind of debating one day maybe I might move to Germany maybe and I was trying to look at different things like the prices of utilities and groceries and everything Germany is very very expensive which is funny is I actually saw somebody else said Germany was very very cheap another American and I was kind of like maybe a different part of Germany but the countryside I was looking at prices and so electricity here where I live in Florida is seven to eight cents a kilowatt in Germany it's over 30 to 32 cents a kilowatt somewhere around that range so it's right around 3-4 times more expensive so if I spend $1,000 in America over the year on electricity in Germany I'm going to spend three to four thousand dollars that's a whole vacation right there to Iceland or Hawaii honeymoon maybe so I was like whoa so utilities expensive so also I noticed gas prices there were a dollar 34 a liter those are in Euros so actually four liters about an a gallon do the math that's right around maybe close to six dollars a gallon so in Germany it's about six dollars a gallon in Florida it's about two dollars and 34 cents a gallon so Germany it's about two-and-a-half times more expensive than in Florida also a little B she has no air conditioning I was like well I I can't live without air conditioning I need air conditioning I can't sleep without air conditioning but thankfully I looked up what the weather is and in Fahrenheit it's only high gets up into the upper seventies in June in July I heard 2019 was an extremely hot year for them though that apparently in gotten up to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit and that seems a little scary but it didn't last very long the average temperature seemed to be in about the seventies in the summer so that seems really cool okay I see how they can get away with not having air-conditioning I'm still shocked though that air conditioning is not normal in Germany but even if it was normal can you imagine what their prices would be though I was thinking in my electric bill would be yeah so in America we change the drinking age to 21 in the smoking age to 21 and Germany you can actually drink at 14 with your parents or 16 you can drink beer and at 18 you can drink the harder stuff and you can start smoking at 18 in Germany and this is definitely completely different than America especially the smoking thing in America I think that we have done so much advertising about how horrible cigarettes are that nobody wants to be smoking it's more of a taboo now so I notice in Germany there was a lot of people that they seemed like they were smoking and it seems kind of normal to actually be smoking and also there were smoking booths in the airport I have not seen this in America but I'm wondering I haven't been to a ton of airports but I haven't seen multiple smoking booths where you go in and you can go in and just start everybody in this giant booth and they're all smoking and it seems very very normal to have a smoking booth on every little corner and I was like wow this is crazy too so smoking is kind of a huge thing I guess I don't know but in America we definitely considered that more of a taboo most businesses in America you are not allowed to smoke and not a lot of smoke in front of their door you tend to have to go further away about a hundred feet and so yeah it was a big culture shock there too to actually see that anyways I think I could go on forever little differences in everything but if you liked this video I had a lot of fun telling stories and definitely hit that like and subscribe button if you haven't and that definitely helps me and wants me to create more videos when I see that people actually enjoy or watching it and everything and commenting down below so anyways thank you so much for watching let me know if you felt like I was spot on or you think I was a little bit off on something again it was as my first impression that of two weeks being there so I might be off on something that seems maybe stick out because those are this is a few spots I actually went to in Germany so I wonder how right I am and is this how German culture is it is Germany embrace nudity thank you everybody for watching have an epic night love you all I put my feet up and a we just sit along and I can't help but feel [Music]

Channel: Cory Chance

Views: 995,915

Keywords: GERMANY, CULTURE SHOCKS, CULTURE, AMERICAN, CULTURE SHOCK IN GERMANY, DIFFERENCE FROM GERMANY TO AMERICA, GERMAN, NORTHERN GERMANY

Id: JuxIgpVqsiU

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020