Culture Shock #10: German teens can open beer bottles with their eyes

I spent the past week in a youth hostel in the middle of the woods with two dozen Germans between the ages of 16 and 21. Here's what I learned.

1.  German teens can open beer bottles with anything. The edge of a beer crate. A piece of paper. Other beer bottles. I swear I saw one guy just stare at a beer bottle and it popped open.

2.  German teens would put U.S. American teenagers to shame in a trivia contest about geography, politics, and/or history. They are generally way more informed about where things are and how they got to be there. For example, we played Taboo one night and the category was "Towers around the World." Wanna guess who said the Washington Monument? NOT ME. 

3.  German teens can't speak English as well as they think they can. While a lot of German teen slang is English, they use these English words in contexts that make absolute no grammatical sense. For example, they use the word "safe" to mean anything from "yes" to "okay" to "heard" to "makes sense" to "I consent to these plans being made". In a conversation, it might look like this:

Me: The train is 10 minutes late.

German Teen: Safe, I'm gonna grab a pretzel.

At first, this frustrated the hell out of me. It was jarring to hear an English word in a German sentence, let alone an English word that makes no sense in the context of the sentence. That being said...I caught myself starting to say "safe" in German AND in English conversations. I guess anything starts to make sense if you're exposed to it for long enough. I still think it's dumb though.

4.   German teens prefer tea over coffee. They are certainly not Starbucks fiends like the U.S. American youth.

5.   German teens are in touch with Internet culture, but sometimes it feels like like they're 5-10 years behind. They make Vine references, dab, and call things "cringe" in a deeply unironic way, which makes me want to take a long walk off a short cliff.

6.   German teens often come across to me as more independent and mature than U.S. American teens. After some consideration, I think it's because I associate some German social norms and cultural values with adulthood. For example, the German love affair with functionality and practicality seems to me like a set of distinctly adult values. Like, what kid is gonna be thinking about functionality? Yet, I bore witness to multiple conversations between German teenagers per day about any and all of the following topics:

• The inconvenience of the youth hostel shower doors opening inwards instead of outwards.
• The aesthetically displeasing grate-covered hole in the middle of our classroom floor.
• The salad in the cafeteria, stubbornly dry despite heaping spoonfuls of dressing.
• The best utensil for scraping all of the cream cheese out of a disposable plastic packet. 
• The poor air quality and overhead lighting in the dorm rooms.

Like, do these not seem like the complaints of someone a little more crotchety and withered with nothing better to thinking about? These are real conversation topics that took place between 19 year olds! I was worried about bunking with German teens because I thought they'd be rowdy and immature. Never in my life did I expect to be bored by them.

7.    German teens, like German adults, do not drink water.