Kultur 2

Right now my brother is living in Germany. He's stationed at Baumholder, which, as far as I can tell by looking at German maps, is in the Rhineland. Most of the people he interacts with are Americans on the base, but the house he rents belongs to a German doctor. The doctor and his wife live on the opposite side of the house from Stephen, and he was invited to spend Christmas with them. It made me sad on Christmas, to know that my brother was spending it away from home with people he didn't know, but upon reading these blog articles (yes, they're exaggerations, but exaggerations have to start from a grain of truth somewhere), it's nice to know that the doctor and his wife probably invited Stephen to Christmas less through a sense of duty and more because they actually liked him. At any rate, he stayed at their house for something like thirteen hours and drank multiple bottles of wine with them and he DID say that they asked him lots and lots of questions.

Regarding the staring, I don't remember much staring when I went to Germany, but that was ten years ago now. When I went to China last May, however, I found that I was stared at a lot there. This could be because China is a relatively closed country and they aren't used to seeing very many Caucasians there, but it may also just be that American and British cultures are, when all is said and done, simply far more squeamish about eye contact than the rest of the world.