Water

That is right, there is a difference in Germany in the water. I know everyone's thinking, who the hell cares about how the water tastes?

Well let me tell you, when you go to a restaurant in Germany and order water, they will bring you water that has bubbles in it. You swear it is not water because it is carbonated and taste closer to sprite then water. In Germany, when you want normal water you must ask for it special by saying mineral water or in German you can say ohne kohlensaure or without bubbles.

If you ask for mineral water, they think you are weird because in their opinion water is used only for bathing and is disgusting to drink without bubbles. When I drink water, I like to drink it pretty fast and just keep getting refills cause it's good for you and then I don't eat as much.

German water taste funny and with it being carbonated it's not easy to drink it fast. And the worst part is, in a restaurant one glass is around 3 euros or about $4.50, talk about a rip off.

This is one thing I do not miss at all about Germany. Back here in the United States, I get all the free water I can drink. $4.50 for a glass of water, that's robbery.

Environmentalist

I had heard before going to Germany for four months, that Europeans are much more environmentally friendly then we are. This is an absolute truth. Before even landing in Germany, I could see from the plane window multiple windmills. When I finally did land and got into my taxi, on the drive to the school, I saw no SUV's and lots of small cars and several smart cars.

Throughout my stay, I rarely came across any large vehicles, other then the buses used for public transportation. The buses and transportation makes it unnecessary to even have a car to get around. This greatly reduces traffic and the emissions emitted into the environment by removing cars from the roads.

One of the best examples of how much Germans  try to conserve energy, is with the dishwasher. I noticed my host family did not rinse off their plates before sticking it into the dish washer. I found this very strange because I was always taught to wash the food off first in the sink, then stick it in the dish washer.

I asked my host family about this and they told me it is wasting water if you wash the dishes off and use the dish washer. So, I did what they told me and just stuck my plate in the dish washer. It doesn't sound like a lot, but Germans do everything they can to conserve every little bit of energy as possible. It is to bad the many Americans do not have this same type of thinking.

In the above picture, I am in a Botanical Garden right in the city of Berlin. Berlin has many trees because as we all know trees are good for the environment to take carbon dioxide out of the air.

Beginning Travels

As I said, this blog is for a New Media class that I am taking, which talks about various media methods. One of the forms of Media we are talking about are blogs. This is my New Media class and we are all starting are blogs. We all looked so focused on what we are doing.

I knew that I wanted to talk about travel, but I was diligently thinking how I could use my travel in Europe and make it current. I look outside at the snow and it hit me, why can't I compare life in the United States compared to in Europe.

The reason the snow gave me the hint, in Berlin nobody shovels the snow. Early that day a few inches of snow had fallen and the snow was shoveled unlike what I experienced in Berlin. The city does not require it's inhabitants to shovel the sidewalks and it does not have enough money to plow the streets, so nothing gets plowed or shoveled. This makes walking anywhere in the city or driving for that matter a pain to say the least.

As you can see in the picture, nothing has been plowed or shoveled.