Culture Post-Food| #2

So my Internship experience is not like most. Working with kids, there isn’t too much you can do or learn, honestly. I am not helping to run a major corporation, but just playing different games with children. So my posts from now on will be about the German Culture and different things I found interesting. In a later post, I will discuss some things I found interesting/learned from the children. So here we go!

In Germany, they have some of the same meals as we do, but with different names. For an example, in America, hopefully some of you know this dish, we have beef stew. The stew includes the pieces of beef and potatoes and baby carrots. In Germany they have Schwein Gulasch. Its pork instead of beef pieces and served with potatoes and red cabbage. Not very tasty at all.

Lets talk about what you’d expect to have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.


Where we ate our meals 


Every morning I ate breakfast with the children. Breakfast consisted of brötchen (small sub sandwich bread), butter, honey, sometimes nutella, strawberry marmalade, a choice between salami, cheese, or kinder wurst, carrots and cucumbers (optional), and Kakao or warm chocolate milk. The kids would tear out the middle of he bread and eat that first, then add whatever they wanted after. Pretty simple breakfast, not all that nutritious, but it got the job done. Breakfast on the weekends were different. Sometimes the cafeteria would have waffles, but with no syrup. However, you could drown the waffles in honey, which is what I did, but it just wasn’t the same. The only time you could get pancakes was on Sundays., which is devastating. I actually went to a really expensive buffet. I paid 12.50 Euro for a tiny buffet. All that was served was of course, an assortment of breads, eggs, bacon, lunch meats and cheeses, with a bit of fruit and yogurt. This was a horrible buffet in an American’s eyes, which is also why most of the country is overweight.


Lunch was the only meal of the day where there was something other than bread to eat. Lunch varied each day, however, as an employee, every three weeks when we got new kids, you knew what was for lunch, because it’s always the same. Different meals at lunch included: chicken nuggets and fries, schwein gulasch with potatoes and red cabbage, scrambled eggs with spinach, etc. I wish I could tell you more of the names, but honestly, I had no idea what I was eating most of the time, or could not pronounce the names. After lunch, we would have dessert. Dessert usually consisted of different flavored yogurt, quark, and only once in the three weeks could the kids have apple strudel cake and another day jello. What I found most interesting was that the kids ate the jello with this vanilla sauce. I thought it was weird. I ate the jello by itself, and it was way to sweet and had a weird taste. Come to find out, the vanilla sauce sort of neutralized the sweetness of the jello, and made it more delicious!


Oh dinner, how I could not stand to eat you! So for dinner, we ate, you guessed it, bread! So for two meals out of the day, you ate bread. That is a slot of carbs! So anyway, bread for dinner. You could eat an assortment of deli meats, most of which I had no idea what they were, cheeses, and they even had little extra sides, such as salad and veggies.


Weird deli meat.


The “Snapchat” caption tells all. Yes, German’s actually smear raw ground beef on bread and eat it delightfully. I did not eat this at all, because this was just too risky for me, but they seemed to enjoy it.


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