1. Emergency exit signs are not red, they are green with a little man running toward the exit.
2. Stop lights not only turn from green to yellow to red, but also from red to yellow to green. I've decided this must be because nearly all cars here are manuals. An extra second before you can go gives them a chance to put it back in gear...
3. Door 'knobs' are non-existent here. I have yet to see one. They are all handles. Ginette told me that she saw a door knob one time and it took her a long time to figure out how it worked. That made me giggle.
4. Windows here don't usually have screens. They also have two opening options. I haven't seen a window that slides like most American windows. Instead they have option one: turning the handle 90 degrees will open a window out like a door. Or option two: turning the handle 180 degrees will keep the bottom of the window in place and the top will fall in toward you a few inches. Straaaange, but option two conveniently keeps the rain out.
5. Window shades are on the outside with a pulley contraption from the inside to lower them. If you're real sophisticated they might be automatic with just a button. =)
6. Right on red is not legal. But most people do it anyway.
7. Chevy's are really rare, but I saw my first one yesterday. It was a blazer. I've only seen two pickups since I got here. One was some sort of metro pickup. The other was a Dodge Ram. I never thought I'd be excited to see a Dodge, but I was.
8. All the light switches here are those ones that are like plates that work like teeter-totters. But I think they're backwards from the ones in America. You push in the bottom of the plate for on and the top of the plate for off. I don't know if I explain it well enough but I can't find the name of the switch. But they don't have the up and down switches that a lot of Americans have.
9. Public bathrooms are usually two separate rooms; one for the toilet and one for the sink. This is rather efficient for one-seaters, because the next person can go in while you're washing your hands.
10. Toilet flushers are never handles. They're like big buttons and they always have a little picture of a hand and water waves just to makes sure you know the function.
11. Many people don't have dryers. They hang their clothes out to dry. Except it's usually raining so they actually hang their clothes IN to dry. They make clever use out of stairway banisters and the backs of chairs.
12. Hardly anybody drinks normal water here. It's almost always carbonated mineral water. I'm starting to get used to it, but it makes me burp. Nobody else seems to have that problem so I must just be strange. Or maybe they have a discreteness I could benefit from acquiring.
13. In Germany it's not three-ringed binders, but TWO-ringed. It's actually not so bad. I would normally worry about the corners flying so free, but when their in the binder they're fine. It makes hole punches much more compact. (I know, trivial, but interesting)
14. In German, bitte means please and you're welcome, and danke means thank you. However, in restaurants, the waiters say bitte as they hand you your food kind of as a "here you go. enjoy." It was really awkward the first time this happened to me because it was like they were saying you're welcome before I got the chance to say thank you. I just stared at the waitress in confusion for a minute and then mumbled "danke??" I'm getting used to it now, but it still seems so backwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment