Kultur4--Matthew Viola

The stores always being closed in Germany became old very quickly after a week. At first, I found it charming and unique that pretty much every store after 6 PM or on Sundays closed down. In the first week, I was more focused on getting used to everything, but when I actually needed food to cook after getting out of class, the stores were closed, sometimes at 4 PM. In my mind, I just thought every time this happened, oh well, time to get Döner again. Toward the end of my time in Berlin, I got really sick and needed to go to an Apotheke to get some cold medicine. I am really glad I was able to get there on a Saturday right before closing, because I would have had to suffer through a Sunday since the Apothekes are not open on Sundays and you can only buy medicine there, unlike in the US.

The first cultural thing I learned about Germany upon getting there was about Männertag. I got there in the first week of May, and this was on everyone's mind since the holiday falls on Ascension Thursday (which was about the 11th of May, if I recall correctly). We found out that we had a day off and decided to celebrate Holy Thursday, which is a public holiday in Germany, but not to the point described in the article. Apparently, the Getränke stores have capitalized on this day and give huge deals on buying beer in bulk, so we took advantage of that. Despite this, we had a pretty relaxed day. We didn't really go outside into the bar areas because we had heard about the reputation of what everyone was like. It turned out that not near as many people as were described to us actually took part in the event, and if they did, they did a good job hiding themselves from the public.