Deutschlandreise!

Just so you all know, in just TWO days I will be on the road in a bus jam-packed with exchange students for our two-week-long trip all over Germany! A rough sampling of the destinations:

• Bonn
• Brussels
• The Marksburg
• Heidelberg
• Strausbourg
• The European Parliament
• Stuttgart
• Dachau
• Munich
• Neuschwanstein
• Prague
• Dresden
• Berlin
• The Reichstag/Bundestag building
• Potsdam
• The VW factory
• Hamburg

As you can see, it's a whirlwind trip. In a couple cities, we will barely have enough time to run through taking pictures. But it will be nonetheless fun; two uninterrupted weeks with other exchange students can't be anything but fun!

As to wether you will hear anything from me during the trip... I don't know. I will be taking all the necessary gear with me, (I'm not sure if my 8 gigabytes of camera memory will suffice for this trip!) but whether or not I have internet access on a given day is luck of the draw. Auf jeden fall, at the end of the trip I will post one heck of a photo album!

High-quality advertising

German advertising is subtly different from US advertising. Well, sometimes it's not so subtle: Kaya wrote a great post about some of the ads that are run here that would probably never see airtime in north America. But there is a more subtle bias to German advertising I have noticed: german ads often stress the quality of their products much more. It is a rare comestible that does not advertise itself as "spitzenqualität" (top quality) and many even bear the grade they received in a consumer-reports-style product test.

See? both at once: "Spitzenqualitat" at the top, and a prize sticker at the bottom for being the best... cooked ham. they've got me there, that's for sure!

But these appeals seem to work: Bittburger Pils, the most popular beer in Germany, runs an ad campaign based almost exclusively on emphasizing the purity of its ingredients. Anything I don't need to tell you that German auto companies do the same.

The whole attitude reminds me of those old ads in National Geographic. You know, the ads for stuff like Rolex and Cadillac that were more text than picture. This is an extreme example, but this style of "persuasive" advertising, that attempts to sell something by giving a pitch, instead of just associating it with a good feeling, like most advertisements these days, is basically gone in the US, but lives on in Germany.

Bonus best line from the Rolex ad: "On its clasp, you'll recognize the Rolex crown. So will other people."

Snow! (again)

IT SNOWED! in MARCH! This isn't supposed to be happening. Going into this exchange, I wanted to go somewhere where I could experience a real winter. I seem to have gotten my wish!

The weekend started out with snow. I went skiing indoors for the second time! It was tremendous fun. Hubertus, my host father, is a ski instructor, and a really good one. I went in two days (evenings really, from 5 until 11) from not knowing the first thing about skiing to a decent skier! Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures from that.

Friday night, though, came real, outdoor snow. A good inch of lovely, powdery snow!

And lovely clear skies to boot!

More pictures from the last two days on Flickr here.