How do you feel about your adjustment to life in Germany so far? What do you think you will take back from it to the US?

Living in another country is always challenging, there can be problems adjusting to the language, the culture, or just life itself. When I moved to Germany, I had in mind that it was going to be different from how I was used to living back in the US. Here, in Germany, there are certain social norms that we have to follow and I am trying to adjust to them. For instance, in Germany it is common to wait until the peaton traffic light turn green in order to cross the street, however, in the US that it is not really common, we do follow that, but if we see that cars do not come from either of the sides of the street than we cross, or even if a car comes as long as it comes far enough to give you time to cross, we crossed. Another thing that I am trying to get used to is the recycling culture, here it is really common to separate all the garbage according to which material they are made of, they are separate in color as well, paper, plastic, organic waste, glass, etc all are put away in different containers and I am still getting used to this since it is really new to me. Another thing that Germany does is return certain plastic to the store and get money back, when I first moved in here I was really surprised and didn’t know where to take them exactly, but my host family taught me how to do that. All of these things, in the beginning, were really confusing to me and I didn’t particularly like it because it was tedious for me, but now I came to like it.

So, once I move back to the US I think I would like to have that as well, the recycling and the respect to the light traffic to avoid accidents.