Germans and Spanish

In Belgium now, on my way to Rome, and I still had to prove the point that the Germans might be the most similar central Europeans compared to Spanish. Well, the results of the investigation are quite negative. Sometimes it is just good to refute a hypothesis.

Anyhow, at the beginning there were a couple of clues thatwere very good, it appeared to me since the very first day in Berlin that (1) Germans seem to speak loud and (2) spend a lot of time at the streets.

As for number (2), well it was the spring, although at night it was getting a bit fresh, the weather was pleasant, and in the city there's really a lot of restaurants and cafés, always crowded. There was also a big park closed to the room I rented, (the famous Tiergarten), quite full of people; this one day which was really sunny and I went there for a walk and there were so many people on the grass lying under the sun, some of them in swimming suits and some others in their underware, and some even naked!, then looking more closely I realised there were all men, one of them was even distractedly exposing his everythings to anybody passing-by; probably in the wrong place, I just kept walking straight staring at my own feet and got out of there. Then, it's been quite afew years I haven't lived in Spain, but that's not anything you'll see over there, (I've double-checked with my mum).

Then about (1), they definitively do speak loud in a bar when they are drunk, but I thought at home also... until the landlady came to me and kind of apologized since by chance I seemed to entered the house whenever she was in the middle of an argument with her son, she claimed she does not usually yell to him but he's in a difficult age, (around 15 is my guess?). Then I started switching off the mp3 player more often and yes, the streets and the underground are completely silent of conversations.

Anyway, there's a lot of clichés about the Germans, and they still drink beer on those huge jars, but they don't seem to be fat and big anymore, in fact kind of old ladies tend be skinny and to dress like teenagers, showing the belly, (for the confusion of the typical male staring at spring-dressed girls at the streets).


This week back in Antwerp has been nice, there is a guy who has find a finantial hole in the nadaist contract, (although that's more like a luxury problem), and there were some pseudo-trascental findings in Halle. I'll explain in following posts, (sightseeing in a place like Rome could be stressful but I will try to keep calm and cool and find time for doing nothing and also for the Internet).