Recycling in Berlin

I know I promised a post on the books I'm currently about to finish, but a cultural lesson just arose and I really want to write about that first. The past few days, my friend Eileen (I'll do a background on her in a second) came home from work and reprimanded me for putting a Kinder chocolate wrapper in the paper recycling. It's not paper, she told me. Can't you tell how shiny it is? It belongs not in the trash, not in the paper recycling, certainly not in the glass recycling, but in this box here. She advised me to google "how to recycle in Germany." I thought she was kidding, but then I found this: http://www.howtogermany.com/pages/recycling.html

Now, I won't go into all the details. You can read the article yourselves (and I strongly encourage you all to do so). Indeed, I found it hilarious!! I've been to Berlin twice now, but only as a tourist. The first time I stayed with Eileen was two summers ago after my time in Avignon, and I thought that the fact that she had four or five different boxes to throw out her garbage/recycling was just an individual quirk. I had no idea that it was a country-wide movement to reduce garbage. But wow, does their system seem to work wonders! You can see on the website that Germany produces about 30 million tons of garbage annually, which seems like a lot. But, with a population of 82 million people, that's actually very little garbage per person. You can see it on this site: http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Environment/Municipal-waste-generation

US: 760kgs of garbage per person per year
Germany: 540kgs per person per year.

So, quite a significant difference. There are a lot of rules. My favorite was that you shouldn't be sorting garbage after 6pm to avoid annoying your neighbors. There is a proper time for that!

In other news, like any good international traveler, I have been meeting other good international travelers! I found a language table on Tuesday night, where I met people who speak more languages than I could probably ever hope to in my lifetime. It's one of the many reasons I love being in Europe: in America, speaking 4 languages (well, 3 and a half...my German's still getting there) is extremely impressive, but here in Europe, it's just average. I met a guy at this language exchange who was raised bilingual with French and Spanish, also speaks English, German, and Italian amazingly well (I verified), his Arabic and Hebrew sounded good to me (I honestly can't tell), and he apparently also speaks ancient Latin and Greek (yes, speaks! He said that's the only way to learn them for real). I'm sure he spoke others (he mentioned Swedish at least once), but those were the ones I heard that night. The funniest part is that he is a student at the ENS (where I will be starting September), so I already have a friend there now! Talk about a crazy coincidence! I also met an Italian guy and a French girl, and we'll all be going to swim in some lake near Berlin on Sunday. International gatherings are always so interesting!

Okay, the next post will absolutely 100% be about a book. Unless I choose to write about Berlin's World Cup victory instead. I sure picked the right country to visit this summer! Tschüss!