5 Things Americans Do That Germans Find WEIRD! | Feli from Germany
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- Опубліковано 19 тра 2024
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Germany and the US have a lot in common and moving here wasn’t really a huge culture shock for me but there were some things that Americans do that I found really weird at first! 😳😅 And in this video, I wanna tell you about 5 of those things that are pretty normal to Americans but WEIRD to Germans (and other Europeans)!
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ABOUT ME: Hallo, Servus, and welcome to my channel! My name is Felicia (Feli), I'm 29, and I'm a German living in the USA! I was born and raised in Munich, Germany but have been living in Cincinnati, Ohio off and on since 2016. I first came here for an exchange semester during my undergrad at LMU Munich, then I returned for an internship, and then I got my master's degree in Cincinnati. I was lucky enough to win the Green Card lottery and have been a permanent resident since 2019! In my videos, I talk about cultural differences between America and Germany, things I like and dislike about living here, and other topics I come across in my everyday life in the States. Let me know what YOU would like to hear about in the comments below. DANKE :)
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By the way, Americans only call it "toast" when the bread has actually been toasted! 😊What else comes to your mind when you think of things that Americans do that Germans or people from other countries might consider weird? 🤔
Guilty of doing that driving thing. Move the car to a closer spot in the parking lot at the same shopping center if I have to go back into another store. Literally every American, tho.
I make my kids cinnamon toast. My grandpa used to make that for me as a snack. Toast the bread butter it, let it melt. And dust it with a cinnamon sugar mix.
A note to my fellow Americans and restaurants. STOP refrigerating the butter you use for bread! Our flimsy toast rips apart.
Germans don't celebrate until the day of the event. Why should the USA call bread "toast" prematurely? Except for Faschings... Germany gets in on that really early.
Drive-through banking has been a thing for most of my life even before ATMs became a standard feature. I don’t remember my parents having to go inside a bank since the ‘60s that didn’t have a drive-through teller. As for bread, go to the deli section or just to a deli. It will cost more but can be worth it. Large product sizes are a leftover from the times of large families. My mom brought home 10 gallons of milk in half gallon cartons at times. I remember her complaining once that the cost of the groceries that filled the middle and back of the station wagon, at $40, was to high. I would hate to think what the cost would be today, 50 years later.
@@googull4778 Sorry but it is a health department law !!!! Know what you are bitching about and why !!!!
My roommate in college was German and was absolutely fascinated with American bread. Not eating it, mind you, but squishing it and watching it re-form, calling it "lava lamp bread"
Because it's full of strange chemicals they use in yoga mats
It cracks me up how US-Americans have all those conspiracies around water and flu shots yet nobody seems to ever question the insulation foam you call bread.
😅 I love that term. It shall forevermore be known as lava lamp bread. It is no longer sandwich bread. Sorry, Earl. I know you're the reason we call it sandwich bread but that's an accurate term. 🤷♀️
@@MasiukA Maybe you should meditate on you name
@@roberturibe3150 Maybe you should chew on a yoga mat
I had a German friend visit the U.S. about thirty years ago. He asked the hotel receptionist if there was a record store he could visit. She told him there was a record store ten minutes from the hotel. All he had to do was take the second street from the hotel and go straight. He could not miss it. So he goes walking for half an hour but did not find anything. Thinking he misheard the direction he goes to the receptionist and tell her he followed her directions and walked for half an hour and did not find anything. She said to him, you walked?
so funny
😂
Germany makes it very expensive for Germans to own cars! a driver's license costs over a thousand dollars, I guess Germany figures cars are only for rich people, and not for commoners.
@@thomaskalbfus2005German here. You assume wrongly and I have to correct your assumption, because Germans love their cars and each household with more than one person has at least two or even more cars, for each adult of the household an own car. Car's are the most loved objects for Germans and every teen starts to safe money from a very early point onwards so that they are able to get their drivers license as soon as they reach the age where driving is allowed in Germany. But still we walk a lot as well, especially short distances and in the centers of our cities, where the most shops are and where there are usually only pedestrian areas and no cars allowed. But on long distances we love driving, especially on the Autobahn. The EU wants to establish a Speed Limit on the Autobahn for environmental reasons but we Germans don't really like to give up the freedom of driving high speed on the Autobahn. But slowly awareness changes and people begin more and more to change to bicycles for shorter distance rides, especially in cities where parking space is rare. Therefore most cities have lots of bike lanes and they encourage people to use the bike instead of the car. In the moment this works pretty well because with the outbreak of the war the Ukraine petrol in Europe became even more expensive as it was before, for some people in the meantime at the border of unaffordable.
@@salindrab4493 Of course more money for the driver's license means less money for the car. What are the German Department of Motor Vehicles getting paid for anyway? Do the buerocrats get rich from all the people waiting on line, do they all live in German fairytale castles with large staffs of maids, butlers, and nannies to watch their children when they are working for the Department of Motor Vehicles?
We, (Americans), ARE “weird”, and it’s even more obvious when a foreign national points our idiosyncrasies out to us! That’s why I have always valued my experiences traveling so much. It has given me perspective and allowed me to see the world and it’s cultures in a different light. Your observations and experiences have helped to foster a greater understanding and tolerance of both the differences and the similarities we all have on our shared world.
I would say that it all applies to most Europeans 😊. I spent one year in the San Francisco bay area with my family. At some point we were at a children's park when a lady asked my for directions to Subway. I went on and explained to her that there was no underground system in that town and she should get on the Caltrain to SF first and then she could get the underground. Then she specified she just wanted DRIVING directions to the closest Subway restaurant 😅
Sometimes you just gotta get to the closest $5 footlong lol
I’m American and I never use disposable plates and utensils. Especially if family is coming over for holiday meals. Everyone gets real silverware and real plates. I’m not a big fan of creating extra trash, so I don’t mind the extra dishes. I also live in the south, so the stereotype of southern hospitality applies to me a little. I like to make guests feel welcome and comfortable.
I've used paper plates & wooden utensils a few times, but around a bonfire so it didn't make any extra trash. 😁
They only time I've ever used them is cookouts at the park where it doesn't make much sense to bring your dishes.
the only way I would use paper plates is we order paper plates is if we order pizza. I hate using paper plates.
@@mrsleep0000 Yeah, we use paper plates then. Doesn’t make sense to bring glass and ceramic dish ware to a picnic 😂
I only use disposable plates when I'm eating something so messy that a dishwasher can't clean it properly afterward.
This one really made me laugh. I met an old German woman from Danzig who went through the war before making it to Chicago as a refugee. She stayed with a host family and was traumatized when they didn’t use their china and silverware. I thought, ‘You survived the Nazis and the Communists only to be laid low by paper plates!’
mustache man is disappointed
Maybe the paper plates were the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back so to speak... i.e., she was able to keep all the harrowing wartime experiences inside and present a stoic front outwardly, but then she ran into one challenge (however minor) too many, and all the mental strain accumulated through those horrifying events finally asserted themselves and caused a mental breakdown.
I've heard of stuff like that happening before.
I had a German aunt who was a World War II bride, and as I recall she was horrified at summer cookouts when we eat corn on the cob. She couldn't understand that because in Germany they fed corn to pigs and such.
@@aspenrebel Fresst gut.
🤣
My grandfather came from Germany and, yes, apparently his biggest irritation with American food was the bread 😂
My German parents as well. Coffee too when I was a kid, but that's changed. Recently went to Bavaria, and they're really right about the bread. Here you have to get expensive artisan bread to get close.
Als Österreicherin hatte ich auch in England und Italien schon große Probleme Brot zu finden, das mich zufriedenstellen konnte :D Jetzt weiß ich das Brot in Österreich und Deutschland viel mehr zu schätzen
There's quite a few places in America that it's advisable to keep emergency supplies in your vehicle. Either because of winter road conditions or just how remote they are, many people have food, water, warm clothes and blankets, and even a chainsaw!
And a shovel! Western Minnesotan here; it's April and we have another huge snowstorm/blizzard coming in a couple days 😐 They often close the Interstate freeways here, when road conditions deteriorate.
Or extra water plus some form of shelter from the sun when traveling in desert regions, in case you break down.
I concur on this recommendation for anyone who doesn't stay confined to a metro area during moderate weather conditions. Look what happened to those poor people in Buffalo, NY, in last year's brutal snowstorms.
Swiss here: I have food, water, fuel, blankets and other emergency supplies in an emergency kit in my car. Our roads are not quite as remote as 'Nowhere Idaho', but since my wife is handicapped I am always ready to spend a night in the car.
Don't forget to keep a shovel in the trunk of the car and sand or some type of grit or rock salt to get out of a snow or icy situation. It's saved me from many a towing bill. Even to help other people out if they get stuck, especially if they are blocking you in.
Like the Colorado mountains
I'm American and I find some of this very weird myself. In fact, I wasn't even aware we did some of these.
I like walking around the strip mall. It is laughable to see people relocate their cars 100ft to shop at the next store. Unless I need to load up a lot of stuff at the other store I find it ridiculous. I also just park in the end of the lot while the sharks hunt for the closest spot. An extra 50ft is simply unacceptable to some people.
@@googull4778 You speak of the door dingers that when they do find a spot , can't even Park between the lines. Let alone wasting half a gallon of gas looking for a spot 20 feet closer to the door.!!
That's because we don't. She picked the things that maybe 5% of Americans actually do. I don't know anyone who does all of those things, and only a few who do any of those things.
@@curtisreynolds7375 AND... what business is it for a foreigner to come to OUR country and then critisize OUR ways. I say adapt,, deal with it or go Home !!
Feli isn’t really criticizing, just pointing out differences … and explaining in this video the reasons why these things seem weird for Germans.
(In other videos she’ll point out what Americans think is weird about customs in Germany.)
I think this is pretty much the purpose of her channel 🤔
As to getting the hell out of the States again, well I did 😊 and never regretted it.
But I think Feli rather likes it in the States, still I don’t see any need for her to “adapt” all the way. There’s no law against walking instead of driving, though a lack of sidewalks in many places (except inner cities or right in front of some stores) makes it a bit difficult.
There are things I used to do in the States, but when I did them in Germany, it was a weird experience.
In Germany, I went inside a grocery store to buy ice. The store associate looked weirdly at me when I asked her where I could buy icecubes. She told me that I can make ice at home.
Your story is so wholesome and made me laugh. And I can only imagine big question mark hovering over the store employee’s head.
I remember when I first saw bags of ice in American grocery stores and it just seemed crazy that people would actually pay for that. In my mind it was like buying boiling water at the store vs boiling your own at home.
My son and his girlfriend regularly by 20 pounds at a time to put in the freezer section. I would only if needed for a party somewhere.
Yeah it's used here for parties and barbecues and outdoor events a lot. So if you're going to have a party and you want a cooler to keep a lot of drinks cold, it would take far too long and too much freezer space to make that much ice using ice cube trays. So people buy large pre-made bags of it for convenience @@sammy0809
@sammy0809 just as Americans find it crazy to spend 3-4Euro for bottled water with a meal in Europe when tap water is free😮😊
Meanwhile, you can buy them over here too, but in this case, I have to take the side of the us-morons, for one reason only.
Have you EVER tried to drink water from the tube, at the kitchen sink? I bet you don't cause if so, you would understand why they don't do their own cubes, or only if they have a fridge with an integrated filter system, cause else, you would get sick very, very soon, not to mention the awful taste.
I am also a German …living in Florida since 2008. I totally agree with your points as of the disposable dishes I think it’s a concern of living very wasteful! I most shockingly discovered that lots of Americans keep their dogs locked up in crates during the day when they are out of the house for work etc. to me as a dog owner/ lover that is a NONO!
Dogs naturally like a small space, like a den. It's their space. When you are not there, it can help them feel safe. Typically, they won't go bathroom in there, so it's a very useful tool during puppy training.
I've had a dog who would go in her cage even when we were home. If we were leaving, she'd even paw the door closed. But then one day she decided she was done.
It's not the cage that is cruel. But there is a right way and a wrong way to use it.
For large families (2 parents, 3+ kids), a gallon of milk can go in just a few days! Same with small jars of peanut butter 😊
And the cost of the packaging is typically a large percentage of the total cost of the item. In the case of something like peanut butter, the jar may cost more than the contents. Since the cost of the jar is about the same no matter how much peanut butter you get, the cost per unit (ounce or gram) goes down as you get larger sizes. So with a product like peanut butter that has a long shelf life, it makes sense to get a larger package for the cost savings on the contents, as long as you have somewhere to store the larger jar. Which a substantial percentage of Americans do, as we generally live in larger residences than Europeans of comparable economic positions.
When you live alone or with a partner, larger containers are not that convenient. After opening a container aka after exposed to fresh air, you have to consume it relative shortly after. Especially with Apple juice you might just have one day or two. Means of is better to buy them is smaller containers which you actually can empty in this short amount of time.
And this time just shortens of someone drinks directly from the container. Or they put a knife with butter on it in a marmalade jar. Next day there will be mold in it. And you don't want that to happen. Especially in these extremely large containers. That's just waste.
And I just don't like these plastic containers. I know the only way to not have plastic at all is if you buy in glass but these gallon containers combined with a liquid are just a no-go. Even one liter plastic bottles are something I try to avoid because of the chemicals in the material.
@@aquilapetram - a typical European refrigerator is pretty small, it would be difficult to place a gallon bottle inside. When being thirsty, many (- or most) people here drink a glass of water right out of the pipe. So even in case there are 2, 3 or more kids in the family, there is no need to buy several liter milk per day.
Peanut butter is not much known here, it's not available in most grocery stores, and if so, only in tiny glasses.
@@helgekumpfert4011 Peanut butter seems to be a uniquely American food, or at least North American. Even peanuts in other forms don't seem very common in other places. In Israel, there's a snack food called Bamba - a sort of fried puffs like Cheetos, but with peanut flavoring instead of cheese. I've often wondered what the back story is on that; was it developed by an American immigrant?
@@FelanLP Most manufacturers are getting away from glass containers. They are heavy, expensive, and fragile. Shards from broken glass is s safety hazard.
First let me just say I love your “differences” videos. I worked for a major U.S. airline for 35 years. So I have been fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit many foreign countries, mostly in Europe. I thoroughly enjoy the cultural differences and similarities between the U.S. and other countries. Just think how boring it would be if everyplace was the same. Boring!
Keep up the good work Feli 😊
You wear Burrow's jersey AND I see Pebbles the space cat on your back wall?!
Yup. You got my sub.
I am with you about the tendency to eat dinner on paper plates as a regular thing. That's just ridiculous. We, of course, use paper when having a family BBQ, but not for dinner and DEFINITELY not on the holidays!
When I was stationed in Schweinfurt Germany, I was shocked by the men who just went p on the side of the road (at a rest stop location) or wherever, the ladies who sunbathed top-less at local parks, as well as people sharing tables at restaurants that didn't know each other. I absolutely loved being stationed in Germany! On another note, the locals there were absolutely the best when 9-11 happened. We had so many signs and flowers at our front gate to post.. I would absolutely love to go back ajd live and get better at the language! This was a fun video! Thank you!
so you're saying i should visit parks in germany
@Blox117 🤣 yes, but also because they are nice. Lol
@@shelby6066 yes, both of them are nice 🙂
Man, I've been cuffed while pissing near the interstate in Georgia.
@@thereisnosanctuary6184 😅😅 oops! 🤣🤣
that's so true. I'm from Poland and when I went to US years ago and showed up at my workplace people were shocked that I didn't call them to pick me up despite me telling them the bus stop was literally like half km away. And another shocker. You cannot walk properly because often there is no sidewalk present so many times especially going to fast foods or shopping malls you just have to mingle with cars. I found that extremely inconvenient. It's somewhat similar to NZ where I live now but not to that degree. And here the only drive through is the fast food one.
Whenever I listen to your channel, it makes me so happy. I've learned over the years that sometimes when you share your life stories with us, it sparks memories for me of my grandparents. 😊
As you stated in your video, some of these differences are probably regional, especially as relates to food. Where I live in Western Washington, there are many good bakeries, which sell a variety of breads (including German breads) and rolls, which is what most of us eat with soup or for dinner. Prior to having guests over, we will always get a fresh loaf at the bakery.
I'm in my 50s, and bread has been getting sweeter my whole life. I make my own sometimes just to get bread flavored bread instead of cake flavor.
The funny thing is, many of us (nearly 40 yo now) were raised on this sweet bread... you'd never even notice if it's all the bread you ever had.
It's also an industrial thing rather than American's taste. It's been getting sweeter less from demand than the corn lobby pushing high fructose corn syrup into many products where it's not necessary. -like tomato sauce. I believe German laws or preferences are against having unnecessary additives in products - but I could be wrong on that point.
@@EdwardGregoryNYC Very correct! American food industry loves shortcuts or any way to make things cheaper to make even if it results in less appealing flavor as well.
@@robklossner9093 And some of the shortcuts make many people sick. Americans looked very different in the 70s and 80s than now. Also I guess it wasn't that common that teenagers have diabetes. I developed Crohns disease after 5 years of living here. And when I mind the American food and dining out I'm kind of ok. The the food industry is a big mess.
I don’t understand the obsession with bread. It’s filling, empty carbs and has no nutritional value. It’s not something I even reach for if hungry. It’s not an actual meal and fruit or something with flavor that doesn’t require butter or other unhealthy toppings just to give it a taste is a much better snack.
What a fun video. I'm a 70 year old that was born in the U.S. and I think you are spot on. We are a goofy bunch of people.
Everybody is, it's not something unique 😅
You have a great outlook on life! lol. As the saying goes, the more people I know, the more I LOVE my doggies, lol.
@@broncobra
Daß mir der Hund das Liebste sei,
sagst du, o Mensch, sei Sünde?
Der Hund blieb mir im Sturme treu,
der Mensch nicht mal im Winde.
Franz von Assisi
(That the dog is my favorite
do you say, O man, is sin?
The dog remained faithful to me in the storm,
man not even in the wind.)
@@BlackJack848s2 Dogs ask for so little, yet give SO much. Take care, my friend.
The disposable dishes really surprised me. In Europe we have proper cutlery in restaurants. And driving everywhere would drive me insane, so glad we can walk to many places we need to get to. Like places to eat, pharmacy, supermarket etc.
A lot of cities in the US are designed to where you have to drive or use a taxi or Uber service.
Walking is not an option.
Feli!!! Ich liben Dich ! You are amazing and you have honestly changed my life !! me and my son will be 18 and three years have decided to move to Germany. America has its issues and we want a better life. The university is a lot cheaper and so is food.! hi actually found you because I was looking for people who can’t give suggestions on Germany who have lived there and I live in the states. Honestly, you have changed my life I now feel confident to go and guess what my accent for my German is extremely improved with your help. I watch some of your pronunciations over and over again and it’s been better than my actual teacher. my teacher is dumbfounded on how well my accent has become and I owe it all to you daily. Please keep up the good work I look forward to your videos and you were the only UA-camr I religiously follow!!! Tschüss
I have neighbors here in the U.S. from India. One day I mentioned to them, I notice you two speak to one another in English, even when it is just the two of you. Their response was "that's the only language we have in common." Neither of them spoke the other's "local" language being from different regions of India, and only one of them was fluent in Hindi. They met here while in college.
Maybe one of them is from North India(the one fluent in Hindi) and the other one from the South.
There are 14 official languages in India; the 2 National languages are Hindi and English
@@prabjotgill7291 nonsense
@@BfnTime you’re right, my bad the Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages.
Thanks for correcting me! LOL
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_with_official_status_in_India
@@prabjotgill7291 brother every country has its own language Hindi Language in Worldwide not Important OK Hindi India m hi chalta H Foreign or Western m nahi baki tu samajh dar h
I think much of what is mentioned greatly varies regionally in the US.
Also, within regions, it can vary from rural, suburban, and urban cultures and settings.
As sort of a morning routine, I tend to watch UA-cam while getting ready for the day. I found the points you made quite funny as I was watching the video just after the toast had come out to accompany my daily breakfast of a gallon of milk and large jar of pickles served on a paper plate while driving to work next door.
Randomly stumbled upon your page and it’s very entertaining. I’m also from the Midwest and work for a German company so have lots of exposure to Germans and have traveled to both Munich and northern Germany. You aren’t wrong with your observations! 😉 I don’t know about the makeup/outfit change in the car though.
I really enjoy your videos! My mother immigrated to America from Germany in 1952 after she met and married my Dad (an American veteran of WWII; my mom was an interpreter for the American occupation forces). Anyway, like you, she was shocked to find that the real soft bread was the only bread available in the South. No Brotchen, no rye, no pumpernickel! My mother’s sister and brother in law (a former German soldier and WWII veteran) and my German born cousins immigrated to Toronto, Canada in 1955. So when we visited them in Toronto my Mom could finally get good German bread because in Toronto there were many established German communities with wonderful bakeries in such a large city as Toronto, whereas in America in the South there were hardly any Germans at all. I remember as a child we brought as much good bread as we could that would not spoil on the train back home to America after our visit. Eventually better bread became available in the South, but it took many years for that to happen!
A lot of the Germans in America settled in the Pacific Northwest and along some of the colder states.both sides of my family came from Germany and they settled here in Idaho.
@@wraithvendeta Eventually more Germans came to the South, but in the 1950s there were few in Tennessee. My Dad was from Tennessee so that is why my Mom ended up here. My Mom eventually found work in the German and Slavic Languages Department at Vanderbilt and was happy to find that her boss and a few others in the Department were from Germany. So we often had Germans visiting our home or we visited them.
My late husband as recently as 4 yrs ago brought back Lebkuchen every year he went to Nuremberg.
'n morgen Feli. with German ancestry, but growing up in small town Iowa - I can relate to your observations of many cultural differences. I would regularly walk to the post office daily to get the mail in my childhood, or walk to the swimming pool in the summer times, we would walk to school - but most of those walks were much less than a mile. To shop for groceries we had to drive to another city about 25 minutes away. But the wonderful experience I had in the summer of '87 (in the last century), was visiting Deutschland for 6 weeks, mostly in Freiburg, Wurzburg (my birth place due to American parents and father in US Air Force), and several other places in the Schwarzwald. THE German Bread - awesome !!! and the Torte's, and the ... just all of the wonderful foods. It was great!
I enjoy your videos so much. I grew up with a German family that moved to our neighborhood from age 7 to 15. I learned so much about German culture from them!
Hello Feli I have found your You Tube channel again. I lost it for a time, but I enjoyed this one. Thank You from the UK.
Driving everywhere was one thing I never got with my brother. The "next store is 3 stores down in the same parking lot and what are we doing?" really resonated. Great video
Americans will take 15 minutes to drive and look for the closest parking spot when they could have walked in 5 minutes.
one thing to keep in mind about the languages: LOTS of Americans speak a second language. That's because of the # of immigrants. But the reason why fewer native Americans than Europeans speak a second language comes down to simple geography. Aside from Spanish (if one lives near the Mexican border) or French (if one lives near Quebec), actually going somewhere that you can USE the language is expensive and inconvenient.
Good point. I grew up in an area with relatively few people who spoke other languages and was a good distance from either national border. People might take a foreign language due to their ancestry, but doing so for future job prospects was less common.
Most of the people I know who are fluent in other languages are either immigrants, spouses of immigrants, or veterans who learned other languages for their military service.
I think most Europeans only learn English as a second language, because you can get by with it almost everywhere. Americans can already speak english so there is no need for them to learn another language. I do speak english and I have been to england only once and I hardly used it there. And most people in Germany, where I come from, go on holidays to Austria (where they speak German too) or to Italy, Spain, Croatia, Greece, etc. and don't speak the respective language fluently. If anything, they can speak some basic phrases.
@@bananenmusli2769, I had a Dutch co-worker explain why they learned English - because they had no expectation others would learn Dutch. English seemed like the best ROI as most of the industrialized world has a fair number of English speakers.
I live in North Carolina, which is not near either border, and there are many Spanish speakers here. I attend a Hispanic church. There aren't many French speakers here, though, so my French is rusty. I also speak some German, Russian, and Greek, and found the Russian useful in Czechia, where people in hotels and restaurants speak English, but people in grocery stores and train stations don't.
but compared to population size, the immigration rate of the US isn't even that high. last time i calculated, switzerlajnd had a 6 times higher per capita immigration rate.
first generation immigrants make up a tiny fraction of the population compared to most first world countries
When I was on my one and only trip to Europe(for work) I spent a week in Dusseldorf. The hotel had a complimentary breakfast buffet and It had breads, meats, chesses. The one thing that impressed me was the bread. It seemed so rich I couldn't imagine adding butter. I could have lived the week on bread and beer. On the other hand, here in Southern California, even by U.S. standards, the breads are so bad that I have given up my sandwiches with bread and switched to lettuce wraps. So this is better for my diet and weight
Greetings from Düsseldorf, hope you liked your time here ;)
Lol gotta be careful eating all that bread and beer you’ll end up with a yeast infection 😉
@@fenrin6311 I did, I was actually in a suburb - Neuse. There was a big convention in the city when I was there
Had a good idea, lettuce wrap, since I’ve given up bread in the United States
Great videos! Keep up the good work
The production value for this video is really amazing
I live in Germany due to being stationed here. My wife is European! ❤ and our cultural differences have caused some very good laughs and raised eyebrows! But I yield on a few things and a few of those are some mentioned here in the video. Like Feli I come from Ohio! And I live in Bavaria just not Munich. 1. German Bread is 1000% better, 2. My wife now has me walking places even tho I’m stubborn sometimes and will drive, 3. The transportation is amazing here in Germany, 4. The food quality at fast food places is definitely higher quality, 5. The architecture is stunning and beautiful, 6. Germans are really active people! 7. ALOT of things are closed on Sundays which was a huge culture shock for me, 8 BAKERIES AND CAFES EVERYWHERE! Those are just a few things but I love it here: 🇺🇸❤🇩🇪
Germany is a great experience, for sure.
Make sure you get all your shopping done before Sunday in Germany. Only the bakeries seem to be open on Sunday, and even then I think the hours were limited.
Feli, how have you not given this commenr above a ❤?
To 3. "The transportation is amazing here in Germany": That is only true if you life in urban areas. In rural areas you need a car - the buses run maybe once an hour and stop the service in the evening. And we have problems with our trains for years and it is getting worse - if a train arrives on time you are lucky.
Closed on Sundays, as they should be. However I am a tad surprised they are not closed on saturdays as well to accommodate for other religions.
Yes to part 2....these videos are enjoyable and interesting
I love you in the Bengals gear. Looks good. I use paper plates at home due to I don’t have a large place and basically no kitchen; as a result I wash all my dishes in the bathroom sink, not a lot of room for large dishes. That’s also why I make a lot of simpler one pot meals as well.
When I was an exchange student in Siegsdorf, I fell in love with Vollkornbrot. For real, we Americans have no idea what actual bread is and how amazing it tastes. Every Saturday morning my host father would go to the bakery and get fresh broetchen for breakfast. Amazing. I am ready to move back.
Some of us do, because we've actually made bread using proper non-commercial recipes.
lol yes sadly bad bread have been winning for some time, iv started to make easy cheep bread, of cause in Denmark we have a toast machine for which you need "amarican" bread, cheap ham and American cheese
It hasn't always been like this. I was born in 1951. The bread (and almost everything else) in this country was top notch.
I dunno. After seeing what German bread looks like, I prefer our American bread.
@@coltjames9159 🙃
Thanks for your great videos! It's pretty interesting hearing all the things that are standard american in your experience in ohio. I've lived in the san francisco bay area, california for most of my life before moving to europe, and a lot of the things I hear about on your channel as standard american ways of life almost sound like a different country from what I'm used to where I grew up. I may have seen people having food at their house with disposable plates and utensils maybe 3 times in my life where I lived. And I suppose it also differs quite a bit depending on if you're shopping at walmart, safeway, or a local organic grocer, eating at a fastfood chain or a good quality restaurant/eatery.
My husband is Polish/Ukrainian and I think I’ve only purchased “blood mud” white bread a few times in the past 35 years. We are definitely used to paying a premium price for good quality bread.
As a North American of 55+, I have NEVer laughed and learned so much from a UA-cam video in my life! I found everything you said SO interesting, HILARiously true and your personality, choice of words and demeanor so far away from being offensive that it never even crossed my mind.
Liked, shared and SUB’d!!
Feli, being half German I can relate to your bread section. I have stayed with relatives in Germany in a small town and since I usually get up early I used to like to walk down to the bakery to get bread for breakfast. Nothing like walking into a German bakery early in the morning and seeing them bring a tray of freshly baked pretzels in from the back. It's a bit odd to an American to see open baskets with unwrapped bread behind the counter ... we wrap all our bread in plastic. But when a couple of my German cousins came to the U.S. to visit me once and I took them into a grocery store with a proper deli section, to hear them exclaim "real bread"!! I can relate to your comments on bread. 😅These days I could take them to Lidl which has a bakery section. But it's about 7 or 8 miles from my house so alas we'd have to drive. 😁 Good video!
@StrawberryStar oh yeah. We have several in the Atlanta area. I know they're in Raleigh, NC too as I've gone to one when I visit my brother.
@@davidh.4649 bro they’re nonexistent in California
You forgot to mention the extra ordinary good smell if you go into a real bakery early in the morning.
@@sandmanderl ahh, the smell of my blood sugar going thru the roof
90% of the grocery stores have bakeries and offer Euro style breads baked daily. When you have a large family, you buy certain items in bulk.
Very enjoyable, creative & fun content😊
I love these types of videos! You're awesome Feli! 😊 And although I was born and raised in the USA, I can relate to Germans with some things since that's where my ancestors came from 🙂
"Good bread" is almost always in the bakery section not the bread aisle (which is usually sliced bread, buns and rolls). But, there's also huge regional variation.
Love this video!! I'm U.S. American by birth, but I grew up in South America (where the culture is a lot more European). Even though I've been back in the US for ~15 years, I STILL cannot get used to these cultural differences! I miss real bread, my soul dies a little every time someone uses paper plates and plastic forks in their own home, and I purposely chose to live in a less car-dependent city so that I can move around more freely without having to depend on a car. Great video!
I absolutely love that you said U.S. American. Saying American by itself should never just automatically be perceived that a person from the US is being spoken about. Everyone on the continent of America is American.
I miss real bread, and I've lived in the US all my life.
@Viking8888 No, not everyone in the Americas is an American, only people from the US are. In fact, it's the only demonym available in the English language, barring circumlocution. It's a linguistic issue, not ethnocentrism.
...and lest you think me a horribly intolerant person, I do say, "I'm from the US," or "soy de los Estados Unidos" when describing myself. I just think that people are very unrealistic and overly dramatic about this.
Anyone from a country in the Americas other than the US will identify themselves by the term derived from their country's name, which we in the US do as well.... It's just difficult since our country doesn't have a proper name 🙃
ich mag deine Videos! Danke dafür
You have such a pleasant personality Feli, you deserve more subscribers.
And Feli is easy on the eyes too!
I’m also from Germany but living in the US and the comment about the onions cracked me up because I say that to my husband literally every time we go grocery shopping 😂 and don’t even get me started on the bread, especially how sweet most of them are (or how so many things in general are just soooo sweet…)
When I went to the grocery store in the US for the very first time with my American roommate, she told me what she needed to get and she mentioned that she needed "one onion" and I was like "just one??" and thought that was kind of weird and then we got to the store and I was like "oooooh I get it now" 😂
@@FelifromGermany We have these big onions here in Germany, I hope you know which ones I mean, they are also quite big and often sold seperately instead of a whole bag of them. And while they are huge compared to the "regular" ones, they taste a lot milder. How about these big onions in the US, are they like that, or do they still taste strong even being that big?
@@silkwesir1444 I think it probably depends on the species of onion. For example, the Walla Walla sweet onion, Allium cepa, from Washington state, can grow reasonably large, and have a pleasantly mild taste. Summertime hamburgers are well-enhanced with a center-slice of sweet onion.
I'm half German half Polish and living in Chicago because I got married here. My American family says about the European sweets that they are not sweet and about the food "you know, the healthy food". And to be honest American sweets are so sweet to me that it just burns in my mounth. Like there is no taste but just sugar
@@KMMOS1 not for me, I want an onion that clears your sinuses up when you bite into it.
😂Thanks for your insight Felicia love your videos 🇬🇧
I laughed audibly at least three times in this one. Thank you!
Interesting and fun to hear about differences in culture. A part II video would be a great idea! 😀
such great videos. camera work, audio, editing, context, and pace.
4:47 the hot Feli montage I never knew I needed
Feli, the good bread only lasts a day or so, and isn't cost effective for stores to carry. Here in the USA, a lot of people make their own bread at home, which is probably more like what you would consider real bread. However there are a lot of new home bakers that search for pans to make their bread look like what you call "toast". It is called a "pullman pan". That is baffling to me.
I lived in Germany (Berchtesgaden/Augsburg) in the early 70's and fell in love with their bread. Especially their brötchen. Frau Zöeller always had some when we visited her home. We left Gernamy in 1975, and it took me literally 30 years in the US to finally find a German bakery that made it correctly. Love your channel and these videos!
In Berchtesgaden and Augsburg you better don't call it Brötchen but Semmel😊
You can bake German bread yourself - it's very simple. Buy a bread maker and on the Internet you can find hundreds of recipes to try. All you need is water, (whole wheat) flour and yeast. And you can add whatever you want, such as seeds, oatmeal, tofu, egg, etc.
I've been baking my bread for 20 years (in Germany) and love adding way more sunflower seeds to my whole wheat bread than you can get at the bakery. And the bread costs a fraction of the price - the money spent on the bread maker is quickly recouped.
And it is not necessary to buy an expensive bread maker - a simple and cheap one will do.
It may not work out so well the first few times you try it, because you have to figure out the right mix of ingredients first. A little too much or too little water can make the bread "interesting". So don't be surprised if the bread tastes too dry or falls apart when you cut it - it will be better the next time you try.
An alternative is to bake the bread in the oven - but I've never tried that.
I would love to see your take on the differences between German and U.S. drink preferences. From beer, to coffee to all the things we drink daily. This was really fun to watch. I lived in Hanau for three years with my family when I was a soldier. Nice!
It is all about the FANCY disposable dishes for the holidays 😊
The past year or so I've started making my own sourdough bread. My favorite guy to watch about sourdough bread making is from Germany. I definitely come to understand the gloriousness of a crunchy outside and all the wonderful things that go along with sourdough bread baking. So there are Americans who understand the crap stuff you buy at the store versus well Made bread. I've heard that that German bread is another step up and I would love to go there and taste the difference! I might go to France for their cheese and just cuisine in general, but I might have to go to Germany for the bread.
I had one year of German in high school. In 30 years I have only used German once in the US. At 12.30 am on a Sunday, I managed to explain to some visiting Germans that they couldn't buy alcohol on Sunday.
Similarly, my three semesters of Italian dissipated from my mind after years of not using it-even here in New York City!
Neeeeeeeeiiiiiiiinnnnnn wieso 😭
How does one even say "puritanical sensibilities" in German? lmao
Two years of German in high school. I even purchased Rosetta Stone to help. My godkids went to school in Germany.
I still managed to lose my skill.
My mother was born in this country with German as her primary language, though, both of her parents were also born in this country. Today she can recite every word of a dinner prayer in German but can't tell you a word of what it means. Her oldest sister, who was 20 years older than her, took confirmation classes in her Lutheran Church in German and was still fluent in German until the day she died (or least until her dementia became obvious). Also, my mom's parents spoke two different dialects of German, and my grandmother had to learn my grandfather's dialect.
Love your comparison videos. I travel to Germany a few times a year for business; it’s one of my favorite countries.
Also, I’m AMAZED by your FLUENT English. No accent that I can detect. How/when did you become SO fluent? Very impressed…
I like the picture with you wearing a ball cap backwards. 😂
Finding good bread is hard, when I was in Germany I would stop by the Bäckerei in the morning on the way to the base and pick up fresh bread from the oven with a slab of butter, You have never really tasted good bread unless you get it straight from the Bäckerei.
This video showed me that I should have been born in Germany haha! I was born in and have lived in the US my whole life, but many of these things you've listed are things I've noticed and honestly bother me a lot about being here... in the 1950's pretty much the entire US urban development focused on a car centric transportation scheme and a zoning pattern that literally doesn't let small business exist in a reasonable proximity to where people live... the result is everyone feels like they have to drive everywhere cause they kind of do... and it's now so burned into our brains that even when something is easily accessed by walking, we still drive! It's bonkers!
i might move my car closer to another store because when i come out i have to lug the bags further, it’s logical to move the car closer
I was going to comment the same thing about building zones. In a large part of the country, you're literally not ALLOWED to build blocks like they have in Europe or more urban environments in the US, where you have apartments/townhouses, shops, and dining all in one or two blocks.
@@Kate98755 For me, I have 4 kids so I shop in larger quantities. I will definitely move my car closer within the same shopping strip unless I’m getting only one or two items.
@@Kate98755 I hear that! I think though the times we are carrying so much stuff from the store that we feel we need to drive even relatively short distances like from one end of the parking lot to the other is also kind of encouraged by the built environment too... Like because shops are far away from where we live we tend to buy more in a single trip so we don't have to go again for a longer time. Now if we had a neighborhood grocery a block or two away from home making small runs to the store more often while just on the way from other normal activities wouldn't feel inconvenient. While I've lived in the US my whole life, I was lucky enough to have a study abroad experience in Japan, and this kind of neighborhood shop/little grocery trip experience was what it was like being there for a couple months. It was really easy to just pop by the store for a few odds and ends walking back from the train station. I'm also not saying that a different environment would mean no one would need to drive anymore, but just that more people wouldn't feel the need to drive as much as often.
Your last name sounds German, so maybe you just want to return to the country of your ancestors. ;)
Feli my Mom is British and so many of these same things she talked about. The walking, the transportation, the bread(&butter too) being too sweet, the plate thing...yeah, so true.
I also do the squeeze test on bread 😂 I'm from the US but my family background is German and growing up there was a fair amount of rye and pumpernickel in our house. That said, traveling outside of the country taught me that even that bread was relatively doughy and stripped of flavor and nutrition, so these days I only buy freshly-baked.
When I was in the Navy I learned a lot about different cultures. I also frequently go to other nation’s restaurants especially in Washington DC and around the UN area of NYC. I’ve found that if you truly want to learn about a different culture it’s a good place to start. Otherwise you end up with Americanized food. I have a friend who fluently speaks about 8 languages and he says he can get by with many others. An anthropologist by education he traveled widely for much of his education. When we get together he looks for those places.
I'm 48 and have lived in the U.S. my entire life and I've never eaten cereal in my car or seen anyone do that, so I was a little surprised by that part of your video. I have eaten in my car in the past but since I've been old enough to have nicer cars (Mercedes-Benz), I no longer ever eat in my car. I've also never seen anyone use disposable dishes or utensils for a holiday meal (maybe a 4th of July cookout), so that one was weird for me too.
I'm 47 from the US & my brother & friends eat cereal in the car sometimes my son too, it annoys me. Sooo many people waste paper plates bowls & utensils for meals, holidays, & special occasions here, I hate that but had to when I've packed to move. I have to eat in my car with my kids often because of time constraints, school, after school, basketball practice, doctor's appointments, work, etc.. No choice about that or we'd be up till 12 am on school nights & work days. Usually all those things happen here because of schedules, work, time constraints etc. Out of necessity. I don't think it's healthy though, it makes for anxious meals which are not good for our health. Wish there were more hours in the day.
Cereal is one of my favorite foods I can eat it all day and definitely had plastic spoons in my glove box for it!
Cereal is (if Special K or something less sugar ) overall more healthy than Starbucks treats or anything drive in for breakfast. I'm 55 and get bummed when places that have "breakfast" items don't have cereal they just have donuts and junk .
She is making shizz up b/c I’ve never seen it either
A+ video!
You are a master at observing and analyzing cultural differences.
Amazing. I'm almost 70 yrs old, and at least 3 great grandparents were from Germany but I never knew them. I lived in the San Francisco area for many years, never needed to drive and for various reasons didn't. I have spent a lot of time walking. Now that I'm older and in a smaller more rural community and have some health issues I cannot do it and miss it. So much that you mentioned applies to me. I grew up with a lot of home made bread, and I can't eat most of what is in the store. If you're walking to and from the store with groceries, you go more often and the smaller sizes are easier to carry but large sizes are more convenient in that you don't go as often. I do not like drive-thrus and I never will. I guess I'd fit fairly well in Germany. I can speak Spanish and I'm trying to learn a little more German.
Hi Feli enjoy your video's a lot. I'm an Octogenarian, and spent 2 yrs in Germany with the US Army back in 1961-63. so have some knowledge of what goes on in Germany. spent time In Munich, and a lot of southern Getmany. Heidelburg, Nürnberg, etc. I was stationed in Giessen. and the first thing I noticed once I had the time to get off post and go to town. was the price of gasoline!! at the time it was about 0.18 cents in the USA. and in Germany at the that time !! almost $3.00 us dollars a gallon!??? then I knew why allthe nationals were riding bicycles and motor bikes. scooters. etc. Most family's at the time could not afford a car. etc. so I think that might of had a lot to do with the mindset of getting about. ECF
Also I guess the most German thing ever, some fellow German's might be able to relate to: not being allowed to eat in the car 😂 like my parents went on 20h road trips to different countries but we'd always get out of the car to eat our sandwiches 😂
it's actually against the law to eat while driving in the U.S., but good luck enforcing that. You can actually get ticketed for eating while driving in the U.S., but most law enforcement have more serious law violations to deal with most of the time. Texting while driving, they take that a little more serious.
@@markadams7046 Drive thru restaurants have places to park to eat generally.
@@hydrolito I was actually responding to people who eat while driving.
@@markadams7046 Actually, in most states, it's perfectly legal to eat and drive. There are now laws prohibiting the activity. However, if you cause an accident or otherwise drive erratically, they could cite you under distracted driving laws.
@@markadams7046 Its fine for the passengers to eat while driving but the driver himself shouldn't be eating while driving, but its almost an unenforcable rule. The only way you can really enforce it is if someone gets into an accident while eating and the person you hit saw you eating.
As an American, I totally agree with everything! HOWEVER, if I may say..the bread issue may only really be like that in the cities or majorly populated places.. I am from the country side and we most definitely differentiate between regular old sandwich bread and good homemade breads/sourdoughs...but I totally get it..I think as Americans we just lump it all in together lol! Great video!
😂 the scene with the girl changing into a complete new outfit was absolutely hilarious 😂😂😂
But you’re right about Americans wanting to drive everywhere, we would be better off walking more. As for drive thru everything, I was shocked the first time I encountered a drive through liquor store! That was when I went to Tennessee (I’m from Michigan. It was illegal to have a open container of any alcohol in Michigan, so I was surprised.
The first time I was in New Jersey, I was shocked to learn you couldn’t buy beer in a grocery store. You had to go to a “state” store for that. In Michigan, we had Meijer and they had everything from beer to blue jeans as well as groceries.
I live in Munich, the hometown of BMW, and I don’t have a car, and I don’t plan to, because I don’t have to.
Great public transport, bike lanes everywhere, people walking on the streets.
Feli, my family experienced a culture shock with New Mexico eating rituals. For instance, digging a deep trench, burning wood in the trench, wrapping most of a hog in wet burlap and bailing wire, throwing that in the trench, covering it with dirt and then digging it up 48 hours later to eat. Then there are the dietary staples of enchiladas and tamales, and always always served with pinto beans. In New Mexico, you have to be specific with chile-red or green.
I bet you now only eat hog this way. I'm swearing by the method. It's unnaturally delicious
@@djnone8137 Actually I no longer eat pork because of religious reasons. If someone else wants to eat pork-hey, have at it-it is delicious, but no longer on my plate.
I liked Christmas omelettes in NM.
Red or green is a northern New Mexico thing. In the south, we don’t really do that.
@@Alex-kd5xc I did live in New Mexico for 20 years, five of that in Roswell. Regarding your statement:
1) Roswell is in the south part of New Mexico.
2) A check of menus in Roswell restaurants that do serve chile, some do offer the choice between green and red.
There used to be a lady who sold german bread here in Tennessee. She bought it in bulk. Thank you/danke for the video Feli!
I 100% agree with you on the disposable cutlery and paper plate issue! It drives me crazy. For some odd reason most Americans don’t like crusty European style breads. I don’t know why. In America I think most people that eat crusty bread go to a bakery and don’t expect it at a “supermarket”. Americans frequently don’t like food with a strong flavor, hence we have American cheese which is not cheese. It’s a pasteurized cheese product made from cheddar cheese. I guess I’m not a typical American.
I think its because we Americans have this wide availability of sandwich breads available whenever and it happens to be the cheapest thing on the shelf. We forget that breadmaking is actually a lot of work and what you're paying for in higher quality bread is the labor and time. I don't eat a lot of bread, so when I do buy a loaf, I want something with some chewiness to it. I want a crust with some crunch to it. My wife drives me nuts because she's almost the opposite. She likes the boring ass white bread because its what she's used to but I hate it because it can barely stand up to being a good sandwich with more than a couple ingredients. Give me a nice thick sourdough or some Jewish rye that I can tell is actually there instead of some Wonder Bread which just dissolves into goo the second you slather some mustard on your sammie.
Same thing with cheese. I cannot for the life of me figure out how Velveeta is still a thing in 2023. It is so nasty.
You might be onto something with your observation that Americans that want traditional breads, which would mostly be seen as “specialty” bread here, go to bakeries for it, though I think American supermarkets are more likely than ever to offer more traditional options- though maybe in a bakery section rather than the bread aisle. I know there are Americans that like traditional breads and cheeses though. I live in a non-major Michigan city (though we’re situated between two prominent cities) that manages to support not only a local bakery with more traditional, crusty breads but also a specialty cheese shop! I suspect there is a class difference here in the US where middle class and wealthier people have more exposure to nicer restaurants and better ingredients both domestically and abroad and are more likely to seek out (and be able to afford) those options. I also think Americans are accustomed to artificially cheap food, often to our detriment.
The weirdest thing about drive in ATMs is that there are still ATMs, as there are in Germany. Cash is so 1990’s.
German bread, especially Brötchen, is what I miss most after visiting Germany. Yes, you can get very good bread here at the various specialty bread stores, but it is very expensive. Totally worth it though.
It depends on the city or area for bread -- I live in a city with small artisan baker stores, you can even find German bake goods, and some of the medium sized franchise stores bake bread in-house, so you don't have to buy commercial mass produced soft bread.
Same here. That part of her video really puzzled me. I think it says more about the places she shops in Ohio, and the people she hangs out with.
No, she said that even when you find "German bread" in the US, you are disappointed because of the low quality.
@@oeqac7871 : Again, I think that says more about the places she shops in Ohio.
I’ve been binging on your videos. In Texas they even have drive thru convenience stores.
The All-American Love Affair with the Automobile, it's been that way for over 100 years, I love it and wouldn't have it any other way
Feli, I agree, some of the things we Americans do are just impractical and kind of silly. I generally will walk when it is at all reasonable and possible. When in Germany, my family and I walked almost every through Berlin. Unless my route to my destination is through a high crime area, or I would have to carry something unusually heavy or bulky, I tend to walk or bike. I do wish I was fluent in more than English, but I can speak and understand a little bit of German (took a full year in high school) and Spanish (took a semester in college). I go much into the car stuff, but some of it I or my family does. We do occasionally have bread you would call das brot, but most of the time we have sliced sandwich bread that we use both untoasted and toasted. Thanks for another great video!
Sentences like "took a full year in highschool" are funny to Germans. I'm German and I had the following languages at school: English as second language (8 years), French as third language (5 years), Latin as fourth language (3 years). Thats just school. In uni I took Spanish as my fifth language (only 1 years though)
@@Skyfighter94 That's pretty much all that we were encouraged to take in high school - 1 year. There were a few who took two years, and our school was unusual in offering German, French, Spanish, and Latin, but the majority of students only took the number of language courses required to graduate high school. A few took 2 years of a language course, and an even smaller number actually took 3 years. My father took (at least) 3 years of Latin, and then took 2 years of German, while his mother spoke German.
Growing up, my parents always used disposable dinnerware and I hated it. My friend also only uses paper plates and I'd rather wash my own plate at her house than use a paper plate. I don't even keep them in my house. Hahah. I don't know why it irks me so much, I'm aware of how silly it is. 🤦♀️
I'm with you I much prefer real dishes although I have Melmac(yes plastic but not disposable)for everyday and also real china for special occasions and holidays.
Nothing silly bout it. Silly is using disposible things where there are long-lasting options, imho. :)
The fascinating thing for me is how much some of the "German" habits you speak of which feel natural to me though I have grown up in the USA. My Great Grandfather VonKammerath Emigrated from Halberstadt for Salt Lake City Utah a few years before World War I... (USA over sharing habit happening here.) Thanks for your videos.
I’m from Sweden and moved to Tennessee about a year ago and I really think Europe should adopt the idea of a drive through pharmacy. When I arrived here I got really sick, as you do after an international flight, and my employer thought it was Covid so I had to buy home tests. Long story short I bought them at the Walgreens drive through and it blew my mind when I realized that I could be completely isolated and still buy medical supplies.
On an other note, I totally agree with you on that bread thing. Americans would not know what good bread is even if it walked up to them and shook their hands.
Being Tennessee born and raised, I’m appalled you would say such a thing about the bread, lol I’m just kidding.I grew up with cornbread as a staple…mmm lol.
@@user-pi8mg5bb4r cornbread might be the only exception, it can be quite good. What I'm primarily talk about is the sandwich bread you find in most supermarkets here, it is more a science experiment than actual bread.
@@tordjarv3802 i understand. I was just trying to be funny lol
The population of the US is 332 million, please don't generalize. You don't know what every American thinks.
@@user-yb6xn3ut7o No, but I have experienced enough of the bread culture here to know that the wast majority of them don't know what real bread is.
I have traveled to Germany many times for work, and one of my favorite discoveries was the breakfast with a hard roll or hearty break and sliced meat. Simple and delicious. Thanks for this great video.
too many carbs for me
Hi, here's something you might find totally absurd. I wanted to take German beginning in my freshman year of high School. I was told I could not do that because my mom and I were both born in Germany and it wouldn't be fair to my classmates in a German class because I would be ahead of the ball game so to speak. We left Germany when I was 4 years old and from then until my freshman year in high School I had forgotten most of it and didn't even have an accent. Needless to say my whole family was devastated. It was a school in Southern California.
Thats California for ya
A lot of Germans took German in my HS (military training town, had lots of foreign students). Middle Eastern students took French (which they spoke fluently)...to help them improve their English
But it's ok for Latinos to take Spanish classes lol that makes no sense
Many students in my high school spoke Spanish at home and were allowed to take Spanish but although they spoke Spanish fluently, they often didn’t know the grammar correctly so they still learned something, and since I was the only Anglo in the class I felt like I was so behind. They did seem impressed with me a little sometimes because they knew I worked harder with my homework.
Omg you nailed it! I got a big laugh about all the stuff we Americans do in our cars so very true! I do get a little perturbed when I make a nice meal and someone wants to eat it on a paper plate.
As far as a second language, United States is very big we might only encounter someone who speak Spanish now and then I suppose in Europe, there could be many different languages that you will counter encounter. Love your channel
Where I lived in TX, there was a drive through ammo place.
My father was Lithuanian and growing up we almost always had what in America is called Artisanal bread (which is what you describe as Brot). My father has long since passed, but even still today I prefer artisanal bread and really don't like the soft, fluffy stuff available in grocery stores. I also bake my own bread which I think tastes so much better with long fermentation times than anything available in grocery stores. In addition, I ferment cream with buttermilk to make European style butter. My girlfriend loves it and requests that I make it often. I guess after growing up with my father the European ways seem more natural and although I'm exposed to American customs... I don't partake in many of them.
sliced bread is called "Toastbrot" in german, because people refuse to eat it when it isn't toasted lol
@@jurgnobs1308 I can understand why. There is a type of bread sold here in America that's called "Wonder Bread". It literally has a light and airy foamy texture. My father always said the reason why it's called "Wonder Bread" is because if you eat it then you wonder what it really is! LOL!
@@StrawberryStar7 agreed haha
my dad used to make sandwiches with them when we went on trips "because it fits so nicely back into the packaging". and everyone who heard or saw was weirded out. like "uh... those are supposed to be toasted..."
@@johnNJ4024 yea. i mean i think it has to do with the same thing as the big packages people buy. most americans are used to making big hauls. i go grocery shopping almost every day. so, my stuff doesn't need to have long shelf life (i do of course stock some stuff). the result is that a lot of american products are very heavily geared towards convenience and preservatives. that includes bread. i think ideally bread should be eaten the day it's baked. but that's not the reality of many people who shop maybe once a week. so you need that artificial, industrial bread. but quality and taste suffer heavily. and that is also why american bread is so heavy on sugar. it's a way to keep something tsstikg good when it's actually stale.
i just think these things have a lot of societal reasons
@@jurgnobs1308
Actually my US mother-in-law made “sandwiches” for a picnic by the seaside near San Diego and totally weirded me out …
2 slices of Wonder Bread slapped together with some mayo, a slice of boloney and a slice of processed cheese in between.NOTHING WAS TOASTED.
It was pretty much the grossest thing I ever had to force down (I had to eat one of these to not hurt her feelings) and saw my husband giving me looks … by then he’d lived in Germany for 8 years or so, and had gotten used to real bread (white bread toasted only), real “Lyoner” and other good luncheon meats and real cheeses.
Feli not all states have drive thru liquor stores lol. I have done carry out beer to home from a bar tho , beer to go 😄
I really loved the bit about the car. I always change and eat in the car. As a single guy on the go all the time, and one who swims in the ocean daily, it's just convenient--almost necessary.
In New Zealand, we're somewhere in-between your two positions. We have sourdough, for example, and often really like it, but we would always specify 'sourdough bread' if that's what we wanted. At a bakery you would obviously specify what type of bread you were after: sourdough, bap, loaf of rye, bread roll, brioche etc.
In a domestic home, if you asked for bread *mostly* you get the same as the US, which we call sliced bread. Generally comes in two forms, thinly sliced "sandwich bread" and thickly sliced (as in your video) "toast bread". You can get it in white, wheat, whole grain etc, but it'll look more or less like the American one in your video.
However, it's just a colloquial term, and people *very* often toast the former (as I do, I prefer it) and make sandwiches with the latter.
However, context matters: if they've just bought, or baked themselves, nice sourdough and you ask if you may have a slice of bread, they'll assume you mean the sourdough, unless you specify "toast bread", say.
Growing up as an American Gen X'er, we were encouraged to drink a lot of milk. It was seen as essential for kids to get like 4 servings a day. LOL. So a gallon of milk for a family of 5 might only last a couple of days. "Milk does a body good" was the old advertising slogan. 😆 Plus, as someone else has said, milk is a common ingredient in a lot of our traditional dishes.
Europeans often don't have cars and rely on mass transit to get around in cities, this makes buying groceries for the entire week a bit different, so they tend to use the store as a refrigerator. Germans would buy the ingredients for a meal and prepare them in a kitchen for that meal, and perhaps store leftovers in their refrigerator. When you have a bicycle with a basket, it is hard to carry a lot of groceries when you go shopping, and bringing a bunch of grocery bags onto a city bus is a bit troublesome as well.
@Thomas Kalbfus That certainly makes sense! Since the US is so big, we've been a car culture since after WW2. Only really big cities have reliable public transit systems, and even then it's not guaranteed.
@@jenniferbaumgarden9293 I think a lot of Europeans fail to realize how big the continental US is. 30 European countries would fit into it. A drive from Austin, Texas to El Paso, Texas is the equivalent of driving from London to Edinburgh. Germany is 357,386 square kilometers while the continental US is 8,080,464.
@@DatDudeVince_ I agree. You'd be surprised how many Europeans believe they can drive from NYC to LA in no time🤣