An American Furry in Germany

    Strangely enough I didn't have a Berliner while I was there. Or "Pfannkuchen", although they're definitely not pancakes. I saw some at Dunkin' Doughnuts, but then we had to leave, and plus, I can get Dunkin' Doughnuts anywhere. There's nothing special about massive chain doughnuts. Unless you're talking about massive amounts of doughnuts strung together like a delicious chain.
    I just got back from a weekend trip to Berlin. It was my first touristy experience since I've been here, actually--riding in a double-decker bus, taking pictures while someone talks about the history of this or that sculpture or piece of wall or something. I'm really tired right now, and my feet hurt--it was an intense 2.5 days. I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of what happened, but here are the basics:

• We went to an exhibit on the history of Berlin. The WWII section was intense. Very dramatic and educational.
• Also neat was the Gedächtniskirche. It's an old church that was half-destroyed by bombs, but they left it there... as a tribute to mankind, I guess. We can build these huge buildings, and we can blow them into pieces too. The steeple is broken off and the edges stick up jaggedly. Apparently people call it the "höhler Zahn"--the hollow tooth.
• Berlin is a huge city, but compared to Bremen it seems like there's a lot more open space. The streets are much wider (there's a story behind that, too), so it feels more like an American city. :P I liked the open space, although generally cities aren't my thing. It was a nice place to visit, but it's a nice place to leave, too.
• Out of the group of 45, about 20 of them (at least 20) spoke Spanish. And they always traveled in groups, so they never had to speak English or German. I started understanding them, and remembering some of my Spanish... but in the process I forgot all my German for a little while. I'll stick to one language at a time for now...
• During the trip my camera went through 1 gigabyte of memory and two pairs of AA batteries in about the same amount of time.
• I always knew this, I think, but it was brought to my attention that I don't like being in charge, but sometimes the alternative is worse. For instance, there were many times when the whole group of us walked around for hours trying to figure out where we were going, and how to get there, by committee. Except in a committee people talked... maybe we behaved more like molecules. Just bouncing around, dropping atoms here and there (we kept losing and regaining people), and not making any net progress in any one direction. The second night, I resolved to take action, and I successfully led us to our destination. Trouble is nobody really knew what the destination was--I just assumed that someone had a place in mind. I couldn't have taken that much charge, though... I don't know where bars in Berlin are. I don't much care, either.
• I walked around a lot. I got a lot of exercise, but I got very tired, and my feet hurt. Also I should have brought a change of socks. :(

    Speaking of tired, I'm going to go sleep now. Maybe I'll write something coherent in the morning.

At this point I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to get the typical emotional high, then low usually associated with travel. At least not at any extreme level--I think I'm too moderate to let myself be that unbalanced. But I'm tired today, so I'm feeling a little put out by everything being so different. :P Pardon me while I bitch for a bit. I'd keep it to myself, but then I'd never know if some of my complaints might be reasonable.

• First of all, your keyboards. I can understand the need to have the umlauts and ß (I set up my US keyboard to display them on Ctrl+[, ], \, and 8 (for ß)). But that's still no excuse for "Alt gr". Admittedly it's not used much in everyday life, but when you're trying to program, the many important brackets are all assigned to that key--and it's in the most inconvenient place on the whole keyboard. It's under the knuckle of the middle finger on the right hand, where we just have a redundant Alt key, and I always end up hitting the spacebar whenever I go for it. Plus most of its useful features are on the same side of the keyboard, so you have to hit both keys with the right hand. I've tried to change the keyboard layout (it's been years since I actually needed to look at the keys) in the OS, but I was never able to do it--and I'm not sure why, because the operating systems in the computer labs are all in German. Either the English layout isn't installed, I don't have the right permissions, or I was doing something wrong.
• Actually I'm kind of growing fond of the money. All the bills are different sizes, which makes them easier to distinguish, and you can't shuff them all together--which is inconvenient sometimes, but it reminds you that if you have lots of different sizes, you have a lot of money in your hands. In America we just have to go by the numbers and the much less colorful styles. Plus here you can have a handful of change worth 10-20 Euros, if you let it accumulate. It makes the money more fun.
• I don't see why everything has to close on Sundays. It's just inconvenient. I'm actually mostly just surprised by it. Shouldn't capitalism have intervened by now? I'm used to the customer always being right.
• I'm really surprised at the amount of paperwork. It seems antiquated. And when I say "paperwork", I mean the literal paper--everthing is printed. It all goes into the computer eventually, but in the meantime countless resources (both time and trees) are wasted in writing things down, handing them over to be read, photocopied, and typed in, probably only for someone else in Berlin to read it off the screen and fill out some other forms on paper... I get the feeling that the people typing things into computers before granting me a visa would accept anything with a signature on it. (And a signature is just a scrawl of a pen, worn smooth through endless repetition.) I was almost tempted to test my theory, but I'm not stupid. :P Which sometimes leads to me having less fun.
• Jimi Hendrix was not German. Heh, got you there. :P
• O.J. Simpson was also not German... aww.

Okay, I think I'm good for another month. :P

Whew. What a day. Yesterday I got up at around 8 am, and very shortly was off to the Hauptbahnhof to meet furries, and catch a train to Hamburg to meet more furries. As it turns out (from a glance at some of my pictures), it looks like there were at least 30 furries there, along with 11 more in fursuits. That's a lot of people.
When we first arrived, there were already about 20 people there, and not a bit of fur to be seen. So I took out my tail and ears, which cheered everyone up, and served as a sort of beacon. :P (I had taken them with in a duffel bag, I should mention, because I wasn't quite ready to have to explain it to my host family.) We were meeting in a parking lot underneath the Radisson, a giant hotel right next to the Hbf. in Hamburg. Apparently this was where a lot of people were arriving, as we found out when great double-decker buses full of tourists drove by, pointing and taking pictures. More so when the fursuits were finally put on, and they started thumbing for rides and waving at the tourists. Then an hour or so later, we set off.
The weather didn't quite cooperate--it was raining, although only lightly. So the actual fursuit walk was relatively short--just an hour or two. We went through the Japanese Gardens, the fursuiters horsing around, the rest taking pictures, and me somewhere in between. We ran into our fair share of tourists, and I took pictures of the looks on their faces. We didn't get a single negative reaction, unless you count the dog at the train station that wasn't prepared to deal with a new species today. It was quite encouraging. The children were especially delighted, when we ran into some. Adults felt the need to figure it out, and worried a bit for our sanity, but the kids didn't care. "That man has a tail!" was an explanation in itself. That probably says something about the reason I was there in the first place... funny, I usually don't like kids.

And here are the fursuiters...

And here's me trying to smile for the camera, but failing as usual.


After walking around for a bit, the fursuits were taken off (the people inside were literally steaming as they hit the cold outside air--it was amusing), and we went to go get something to eat, before a rendezvous at 5 pm at the Dom. For those of you who don't speak German, "Dom" (pronounced "dome") means "cathedral". So naturally I was expecting a cathedral, and not an amusement park. How naive I was...

Apparently the old cathedral used to be a safe haven for transients and street performers during harsh weather. When it burnt down, the city gave them another area kind of close by, which used to be a field for animals. They kept the name "Dom" though, apparently. Unfortunately this was explained to me right before I saw the sign, or I would have laughed more. :D
So our numbers had dwindled by then, but there were still about ten of us going through the fair, having fun and winning prizes. (We saw a furry tiger head hanging from a prize booth--about an hour later, one of the lost furries came walking back holding it. Apparently it wasn't for wearing, as it had first appeared... but I'm sure it will be modified.) I bent my tail on the Airwolf ride, but it was a lot of fun, and I bent it right back. Oh yeah, and then there was "No Limit", which cost €5 (too much for me...), but looked like a lot of fun. I don't think the video really captures the sense of height, though.


After that, we rode the Ferris wheel, and I got a bunch of pictures of Hamburg from above. Then we began to depart. It was about 8 pm, so I had been on my feet for 12 hours. There were about ten of us by that point, most living in Hamburg, and only one other going back to Bremen. Three of us went off to the train station, where we arrived about 10 minutes late for the train, and had to wait there for an hour. We found another furry also waiting for the same train back to Bremen, so the four of us ate at Pizza Hut, which was very delicious. Three left on a one-hour train ride back, two of us walked out of the main station, he ran off to catch a train, and there I was, finally back in Bremen, a little dazed, all alone at last, and still wearing my furry tail and ears. I had decided by that point that I would go all the way to the house in them, rather than keep it a big secret, but when I got home at around 11:30, everyone was in bed. And now it's Sunday.

It was quite a day.

Okay, okay... this might be one of those "you had to have been there" moments, but I think it transcends that. I couldn't stop laughing. First, let me update you on the situation.

Today, after having been in Bremen for 6 days, it was finally time for orientation. At 9:30 am I went to the Hochschule (one of the buildings--the university is actually scattered all over Bremen), and met all the other transfer students here this semester. There was a big group from Spain, and generally a huge sampling of all sorts of countries. Along with me, though, there was only one other American student, and he didn't know any German at all. So finally I get to know more German than someone! Heh, heh. Anyway, I was pretty successful in my attempt to become a social animal. Granted, it was a pretty simple situation, but I didn't hide in a corner with the chocolates the entire time! (Yes, of course there were chocolates. It's Easter time, and it's Germany.)
Unfortunately, registration for the non-Europe students did not occur today. I'll go back tomorrow at the same time, then I will finally register and get my Semesterticket, so I won't have to pay 2 Euros for every tram. (The public transit here is convenient, but a bit expensive.)
Afterwards, we were introduced to the cafeteria, which I think was not quite as delicious as the J (the cafeteria at Humboldt State University), but still edible. Then was the first day of the short, intensive German course. It was three hours, although it didn't seem that long--there were so many different nationalities there, and we all had a lot of fun. (This intensive course was B2, the highest bracket. We all took a short online German language placement test, and only a couple of people were better than B2.)
Anyway. We started off, of course, by talking about ourselves. The girl from Finland mentioned that she was with a program (in Finland) called "Adventure Education"--the professor said it was "Erlebnispädagogik" auf Deutsch. Nobody really knew what this was, so she started out to explain it (in English--she didn't feel capable of explaining it in German). I'm not kidding, these are her words I'm using. (As best I can remember--but not far off.)
"Well, we go to people who need help, like for instance, someone using drugs, or something. Then we take them into the woods (this is the moment where I burst out laughing), and we do things with them (continued, barely stifled laughter). Then when we are finished doing things with them, we take them out, and they can get a job, or an education, or something." (Uncontrollable laughter. Wondering if she thinks I'm laughing at her usage of English.)
Maybe it was funnier in person, but really. Fortunately I had a chance to ask her later, because I really did not understand. It turns out that it's a program to build the self-esteem of disadvantaged persons. They find people who need help, like drug users. Then they take them and give them tasks--one example would be pseudo-boy-scouting, building fires, forestry stuff. Through success in these small things, they begin to realize that they can be successful in life, if they put the effort in. Alles klar?
Heh... it was funny, though. Oh, what a day.

I made up the word all by myself, although I don't claim to have been the first. It means "foreigner tax", and no, it's not literal.
One of the things I discovered about going to another country is that I don't know the rules, the customs, or even the brands. I mean, I expected that, but what I discovered was that this has a very real financial result. The "Ausländergebühr" is paid every time I buy a new train ticket, not knowing that I could have transferred, or every time I eat at McDonald's because I didn't want to take a chance on whatever "Backfisch" might turn out to be, or every time I accidentally buy lipstick instead of ChapStick. And no, none of those examples actually happened. :P The train tickets don't transfer, I know what Backfisch is, and I found the Blistex just fine, thank you (I don't think they have ChapStick here...). But I have been noticing the effect.

Oh, and there's no free refills here at McDonald's. What the hell?

It didn't take me a day here to realize that I was completely right--I couldn't have prepared myself for this. Everything is so different, in so many ways. It's really the little things that count, and that can't be explained properly. For instance...
When I was flying into Denver, looking out the windows, I wondered briefly when I would first know that I was in Germany--what would be the first new thing I saw when I landed. Turns out I didn't even have to get there--when I boarded the flight to Frankfurt, a bunch of passengers and flight attendants were speaking German, and there were German newspapers there to read on the flight.
When I got into Frankfurt, I decided to get some lunch at McDonald's. You'd think McDonald's would be the airport equivalent of a US Embassy (a little slice of America), but it was also very thoroughly cultured. The first thing I saw on the menu was a big speckly burger with the words "Shrimp Lemon" above it. I almost ran screaming right then and there, but they had the long-estranged McRib, so I decided to try that. I'm not sure if it always tasted this terrible, or if it was Germany's fault... but I'm leaning towards the former. Heh, heh.

So yeah, now I'm in Germany. I'm pretty blown away... and I'm worrying about every little thing, because whatever I do, there's always the chance that I'm completely misunderstanding what's going on. (Lots of people here speak some amount of English, but surprisingly I often speak more German... so communication is a constant issue.) I'm getting better, though. And on Wednesday, I get to meet a bunch of other transfer students, so I might be able to make some friends who are in the same situation. :D

Okay, Germans, I'll admit it. Now that the flight date is less than a week away... I'm scared. I'm anticipating it, but it's pretty scary. Your country intimidates me.

Although I think what I'm most worried about is myself. I want to get out and see the country, and make friends, and all that sort of stuff humans do. But I'm afraid I won't be good at it, simply because I've always been terrible at it before. Actually, that's pretty convincing. :( How do I learn how to interact like a normal person? I don't know where they teach the basicbasicbasics, because apparently everyone already knows them... except me.

I've been telling this to people now and then, but I've only really thought it out halfway. I should get it down in writing.

    You see, I can hardly remember it now, but when I was packing last Friday, then a bit later when I was boarding the bus, I was preparing for Germany. I had all my stuff, and basically all my life, in Eureka, and I needed to pack as much as I was going to take with me into two suitcases (of less than 50 pounds each) before I left. Even though I won't be leaving the country until the 19th, I won't be going back to Eureka until sometime in August. So I was packing up as much of my life as was going to come with me, and preparing to travel to a distant land where everything would be strange and wunderbar.
    Then when I got off the bus, 16 hours and one Hanford later, everything is the same as I remember! When I got to my dad's house, I saw things sitting just where I had set them last summer. When I got to my mother's house, I noticed a box in the closet that had been there as long as I could remember. Someone put that box there and then not touched it for 18 years. I was amazed, and somewhat shocked. Really, though, what I felt was only a more descriptive form of the general uneasiness I had always felt at going home. It's something to do with moving away, and moving on. I enjoy moving away, and I've gotten pretty good at founding my own life, but it's hard to move on when I go back once or twice each semester. And every time I do, I get this feeling that I only now can name: stagnation.
    I should give you a bit of background, too. Before I came back, all this semester I've been noticing things falling apart. My clothes are getting holes, my computer is limping, and my bank account value never seems to increase. Except for the bank account, these are all things that I had counted on regularly, and sort of... put in place. In America we have the phrase "to have all your ducks in a row". It means that everything is organized, and perfect just where it is. That's what I thought I could do with life. When I moved away to college, I had a computer, I had enough clothing, I had a means of feeding myself, etc. I had all my ducks in a row. But now my ducks are melting, like so many Peeps in the microwave, and I have to face the fact that ducks don't sit still forever. Needs do not exist as checkpoints, to be fulfilled and then forgotten. All the needs that I thought I had fulfilled are becoming unfulfilled, and I need to take action. It's stagnation.

So I've decided to take positive action in my own life. I've decided to start living life, instead of just coasting through, content with happiness and no specific ailments. I need a job. I need a purpose. I need a plan for the future. I need to constantly build my life, not like a building, meant to last forever and simply added on to, but like a fire. If it is not built constantly, a life will dim. I need to feed it. I need positive action towards change, in order to combat stagnation. I think Hanford and Atascadero have taught me that as much as anything else. They're both the same city... really, what city is that much different than any other? Hanford frightens me because it is foreign, and Atascadero, being very familiar, merely disquiets me. But at their heart they are the same--the same old people, living life just to get by, with no purpose. Just because my life has been safe, predictable, and comfortable, doesn't mean it doesn't have the same potential to become meaningless.

    I have a theory. At some point after being awake for too long, one stops being tired, and all your tiredness is converted directly into existential angst. In any case, I've done something completely inadvisable--I stayed up all night, left on a 16-hour bus/train/bus trip at 6 am, and took along Atlas Shrugged as reading material.
    I don't even remember most of that day, but Hanford really sticks in my mind. I arrived at Hanford around 5:30 pm, after about 12 straight hours of traveling. I had until 8:20 before the bus arrived to take me on the final 2 hours of my trip. Previously on this journey I've had far too much luggage, so I've had to sit in the train station watching it all while waiting. Last time I got the idea of asking the station master to hold on to it for me, so I could walk around and see what Hanford is like.

Bad idea.

    I know, it seems like it would be a good idea. Last time it helped me kill my whole layover time before I knew it. But apparently I had seen all of Hanford by then, so when I walked around last Saturday, it gave me the most powerful feeling of pointlessness I have ever experienced. Hanford is truly a city in the middle of nowhere. Not just geographically, but philosophically. Edgar Allen Poe should write about Hanford--I haven't the talent necessary. How do I begin to describe it?
    Well, right when I left I noticed some stray cats hiding in a drain. I'm pretty sure they were the same kittens I had seen playing in the park the last time I was there. They were wary, of course, so I sat down across the street and looked at them until they stopped glaring at me. They ran off as soon as I stood up, of course, but even if they had learned I was safe to approach, I wasn't certain that would be a good thing. I'm a nice guy, but humans in general aren't always. Maybe it's wise to stay wary.
    For the rest of the night as I wandered around Hanford, I kept seeing different stray cats everywhere. I started feeling like a stray cat myself. Last time I stuck to the main lighted areas, but nobody was around, and it would have bored me to see the same place again. But soon after I wandered into the less-lighted areas, I started feeling wary. This time there were people around, and I couldn't help but feel I was liable to get mugged if I kept walking around in the dark. So, I retreated.

Of course, every morning afterward, I wake up a few miles closer to Hanford, with dozens of little kitty paws surrounding me.

Whew. Well, it's 3:30 am in this time zone, and in another three hours I'll be on a bus. The bus will drive for about 7 or 8 hours, until we get to Martinez, where I will transfer to a train. 2.5 hours later the train will pull in at Hanford, a town in the middle of nowhere California. I will wait there for 3 hours until a new bus arrives to take me to Paso Robles, finally arriving at 10:20 pm. Total travel time: just about 16 hours. I never sleep before this trip, because I would only get about two hours anyway, given my normal sleep schedule, because I can always sleep on the bus (and usually do), and because I just won't risk sleeping through an alarm clock. If it can happen during finals, it can happen before a long trip... and I don't have anything planned for that frightening contingency.

I just realized that the flight I'm taking to Germany is also in three parts, and will also take about 16 hours before I arrive, much like this long trek I've survived several times before. This makes me feel like it won't be so hard--the only difference is the timing. I'll be leaving in the middle of the day, plenty of time for a good night's sleep, and I'll be shifting time by -9 hours. I feel like I might survive this. :P Of course, it's what's at the other end that scares me.

Germany intimidates me. Or maybe it's just the distance, both geographical and ethnic. I just can't prepare my mind for it--I'll have to take it as it comes. And moving always makes me sad. The Talking Heads were right... sometimes it's better to be stable. I love traveling, but I wish I didn't have to move my whole life every six months. And I'm not too long from graduating from college, either. I think I feel like settling down. I'm tired of traveling... I want to be somewhere. I want to form ties... I want to be anchored. I don't feel like I have any inertia on my own... at any moment I could just blow away.

I finally beat the devil in Guitar Hero III, on Hard mode. I've been working on it for about a month, and in the meantime I've also been progressing on Expert mode--I've gotten stuck on The Metal and Black Sunshine. But now it's finally time to lay Hard behind me, and focus on being able to pass every song on Expert mode. No easy task, but at least I can see myself making progress, even if it's slow. I only have a few more months to get better than my brother, before he gets back from Canada. I wish they would let me download new tracks already... :(

I just realized that I'll be buying Smash Bros Brawl about 10 days before I leave for Germany. Presuming I can get my Wii to work in Germany, I'll have it there quite a while before it's actually released in Europe. Just another reason, besides being a furry and a foreigner, that I might be more popular in Germany than here. :P

I wasn't terribly surprised to find that the day after I purchased my ticket, the prices at Student Universe were back down to normal. So I could have saved $50, but all in all that's not too much, and I did end up going through San Jose instead of SFO or LAX, which is a plus. And I got my e-ticket on Monday, and reserved three seats for three of the legs of my flight (the rest are through Lufthansa, and United.com won't let me pick a seat ahead of time). Now all that's left to do is pack, prepare, and anticipate.

I think. It's the weekend, so I'm pretty sure the booking hasn't gone through yet. Hopefully I'll get the e-ticket tomorrow, and I can reserve my seat. As I predicted... I still can't believe it. One thing that scared me, though...
The day I was going to buy the ticket, from a little site called Student Universe, I was waffling. I could either get a cheap flight, or a reliable carrier, and it was a tough choice. In the end I decided that Air India had reviews far too bad to risk--more for my luggage than myself--so I would get the $900 United Airways flight out of SFO. So, a few hours later, I went back to the site to double-check, and possibly buy the flight right then. Only to find that every fare on their website had jumped by about $200. Now the only flight I could find for less than $1000 (most around $1,100) was Air India. So I was freaking out about this for a while, until I went to the other site I had been looking at. This one couldn't offer me better fares, because Student Universe sells tickets that aren't available to the general public--I have a slight advantage, being a college student. It was competitive, though, and this site hadn't raised their fares by $200. So rather than risk waiting again, I pounced on a $950 United ticket out of SJC. This had the added benefit of going out of San Jose instead of SFO or LAX.
So now I'm somewhat relieved that it's over and done with, hoping that www.airlineconsolidator.com is a reliable agent, and pissed that suddenly Student Universe's prices are back to what they were earlier yesterday. Mostly just confused, though. And it's still the weekend, which probably explains why I haven't gotten an e-ticket yet, and my bank account hasn't been debited.

Phew.

I was at a meeting this morning--an orientation for students going on international programs next semester (or in the summer). It was fascinating. I felt a small bit of... "belief", I guess. I was getting all the information I needed, and getting prepared, and actually feeling like I was going to send myself halfway around the world for five months. Also I only had about 4 hours of sleep...

At the end, the study abroad advisor warned us about culture shock. At the beginning, as soon as we get there we'll reach a peak. We've made it, we're in a foreign country, everything's organized, and it's all going great. Pretty soon after that, we'll start noticing the differences, and becoming dissatisfied, homesick, and depressive. One person said she ended up crying in a subway in... I think it was Bolivia. Eventually you level out, enjoy yourself, and prepare to go through the very same thing when you get back.
It struck me that this may be why some people find travel addictive. It's like heroin--you get a huge high at first, but before you know it you're crying in a subway in Bolivia. The only difference is that travel usually has less of a physical toll, and you learn useful things along the way.
And it's not chemically addictive. I'll never try heroin, but I don't mind experimenting with travel for a while. Don't worry--I won't inhale.

I've filed the paperwork, an orientation is on the 8th, this semester is almost over, and I'll probably be getting my ticket any day now. Yet I still think I won't quite believe it until I've actually boarded the plane.

Let me tell you about some interesting research I just found. It's not very new, I don't think, and I'm pretty sure I've heard it before, but it's compiled here in a way that made me think.

I'm taking a class on "Organizational Behavior". Despite what the title sounds like, the course is actually about behavior in organizations--mostly corporations. I didn't know that going into the class, and so far it's been more aggravating than educational, but it's still the best option to fulfill that particular major requirement. But anyway, occasionally I run across something that catches my interest. This week's chapter was about persuasion, and the supplementary reading listed the six basic principles of persuasion:

• Reciprocation: If you give someone something, even if it's something they don't want, they'll be more likely to give you something in return (even though they're not consciously aware of the "trade off").
  
• Consistency: If you get someone to say they'll do something, even if they don't mean it, they'll be more likely to do it.
  
• Social Validation: If other people are doing it, they'll be more likely to do it too.
  
• Liking: If you compliment someone, even if you both know it's insincere, they'll still like you better.
• Scarcity: If they believe a product or information to be scarce, it will be more valuable to them.
  

The most compelling aspect of these concepts is that they've so well-supported in research--they show consistent, very large effects. They touch on the basic reasons I'm interested in psychology--being able to predict and even influence people, even if they're aware they're being influenced. Which... admittedly sounds more evil than I thought at first.
But the reason I bring it up now is because of something else I read in that chapter. These motivations are all deeply human, as a result of our developing as a social species. But across culture boundaries, these six motivations have different weights. I've heard people talk about culture differences, but they never do a great job of explaining them to my satisfaction. I've never gotten much of a chance to travel, so I can't speak from experience... but I have a feeling that these trends, being so rooted in basic human behavior, might be the clue to the differing "feel" of different cultures.
In the United States, we apparently put a lot of weight to reciprocity. "What has this person done for me?" we think. In China, social validation is key--it's all about loyalty and status. In Spain, it's all about liking--friendship and close relationships are their main motivators. All of these make sense to me, from what I know. In Germany, they're more motivated by consistency... regulations, and such. Does that ring true? It might be, but I'm not sure. I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Fascinating, ne c'est pas?