This weekend was characterized by a weekend trip to Glasgow. My sister graduated from the University of Glasgow (with a degree in Microbiology ) this weekend, so I planned a trip out to see her. I flew first to Dublin to meet my parents, and then we all headed to Scotland together. To my surprise, they did not check our passports between these locations, which I later learned had to do with some Brexit complications, but it was a real bummer because I was really stressed about signing up for a UK ETA, and I wanted someone to validate my effort on this matter.
Here is a painting from the national gallery in Dublin. It was a very very nice museum, and it was free! Possibly one of my favorite experiences from Ireland. That, of course, and sampling some beer with my parents for the first time (I had to try some Guinness, naturally).
Here is a picture of me, my sister, and my cousin after the graduation ceremony. The ceremony was very cute, and it was an extremely beautiful university building. Apparently, there were also celebrating 575 years as a university around the same time the USA was celebrating 250 years as a country, which is absolutely insane to think about, since her since is over double the age of the United States.
Though, thinking about the age of Europe in general is a wonderful exercise. It seems that every square mile is unimaingeably full of history. This is something I feel often come up in a comparative dialogue between Western Europe and the United States, but truly, the modern state of Germany is younger than the USA. At what stage can Germans claim to have more history? Is it the age of the oldest building on German land? Lots to think about regarding national identity in this sense.
I would consider Germany pretty low-context. I pretty much always hear exactly what people intend to say directly.
Though, I have noticed some communication differences between Germany and the United States. I tend to write plenty of emails for my internship, and one of the things I’ve noticed is that when communicating with Germans, they don’t add the same embellishments to their emails as I do. My emails tend to have lots of padding and exclamation marks (e.g. “So excited to work together on this!”), that others simply don’t use. I’ve also noticed that, while he is very kind and warm in person, my supervisor’s messages, on teams or email, tend to be rather terse, and come off a little cold. I often just have to remember that thats just my interpretation of his written word, and his intention is not actually to be mean.
Thats all. Bis Später.