Mind Your Own Business or It Takes a Village?

I promise to get some good travel blogs, with photos, up soon.  In the meantime, a little incident on the way home yesterday brought to mind a big cultural difference we notice between the US and Germany.

The US seems to have taken the "mind your own business" philosophy to an extreme (in many cases, obviously never all).  Often, people seem to not want to intervene even in cases where someone's safety is in serious jeopardy, or in which someone else's behaviour is negatively impacting them.  I think sometimes this stems from fear of hurting someone's feelings (and the reverse, a tendency to take any criticism very personally ourselves) and partly from fear (or being sued, or shot, or who knows what else).

Completely on the opposite extreme is the German attitude.  Germans tend to comment, and make things their business, whether is impacts them in any way or not.  Case in point:

Yesterday it was in the high 70s when we left Barcelona.  We knew we would be spending most of the day in the car, and the largest chunk of time OUT of the car would be the 10-15 minutes of waiting in line for a taxi after disembarking the ship (and the 5 or so needed to load luggage into our car once we got to it).

Marika always feels warmer than the rest of us, and opted to wear shorts and flip flops (with a hoodie for when we got to cooler German weather) knowing we'd also keep the car a bit warmer than she'd be comfortable wearing jeans in.

About 8:30 last night, we stopped for a quick dinner at a roadside Burger King here in Germany.  It was about 55 degrees out.  She was stopped as she walked into the restaurant, from eh car (less than 45 minutes after crossing the German border, and less than one minute after leaving our car once in Germany!) and lectured by a German couple about how inappropriate it was to wear shorts and flip flops in "winter weather", how she was likely to get sick, etc.  Of course, she would have been inside the warm Burger King eating area in under a minute had they not way laid her in the doorway to express their disapproval of her attire.

No worries--we have gotten very used to the Germans expressing their disapproval of a great many things, with no thought about offending--Marika just laughed it off an said "Welcome to Germany!"