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Comment by zhemao | Hacker News Reader

Also the guide on German cultural expectations for Chinese is pretty hilarious. The thing about always making appointments and staying in queues is very different from how it is in China.

Also, do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and brown glass bottles? Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well, or do they just separate it out later?

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> do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and brown glass bottles?

It is indeed done in Germany.

> Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well

At home in Germany there are four bins: paper, organic waste, residual waste, Green Dot (recyclable waste) - at some places the recyclable waste has to be put in yellow bags (Gelber Sack) instead. I have also seen cans for metal waste at large apartment buildings in the past.

In a typical residential district there is a central place where there are bottle banks for clear, brown and remaining (including green) glass from non-returnable bottles.

Here is an excerpt which makes fun of the complications of separating the garbage from the German comedy "Otto - Der Außerfriesische", where the main actor tries to convince the people that if you throw away a teabag you have to separate it into tealeaves (organic waste), paper, staple (scrap metal) and string (residual waste):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBPIPzGBxYE

You probably mean: Otto - der Ostfriese.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Waalkes

EDIT: Ah, you're right, he made a film with that title: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_–_Der_Außerfriesische

>> Also, do Germans seriously need to separate out green glass, clear glass, and brown glass bottles?

yes, it looks like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Altglasc...

>> Do Germans need to keep 7+ bins in their homes as well, or do they just separate it out later?

Not really 7+ bins, but 4. - paper/carton - plastic/cans - residual waste (handkerchiefs/diapers/cigarette butts/sweepings) - biodegradable waste

Well that's more reasonable. Essentially what it looks like in our office here in the US. But there are more bins than that in the picture, so for the plastic/cans, you'd need to spend time sorting out the aluminum, plastic, and three types of glass.

The German system probably wouldn't go over well in the US, because we like to fob off tedious work onto other people.

usually, you just store all the glass and every few weeks when going shopping you take that bucket full of glass along and separate it when standing in front of the container. oh and you have to remove the bottle caps of course :)

The queue paragraph was interesting because that is one thing we Germans don't do very well compared to other countries.

But yes, there are separate containers on the street for brown, clear, and other glass (not to mention the deposit you pay for certain bottles that you get back when returning them to the store). Seven different bins might be a bit much but every one I know has separate bins for packaging, paper, bio waste, and non-recyclable waste in their home (that's not something you want to separate later on) – these are the ones that are collected separately by the garbage collection service. The rest (like bottles and batteries) usually gets no extra bin.

> The queue paragraph was interesting because that is one thing we Germans don't do very well compared to other countries

Maybe not compared to the British, but everybody is better at queueing than Chinese. Have you ever been to China and tried to take public transportation? It's madness. At rush hour it's just one big shoving match.

I'd like to see a queing match between Japan and England. Japanese queing is crazy polite, to the point where everyone deoptimises their advantage, so it only works when there is one big queue with the employees multiplexing. They also queue for train entrances, escalators, you name it. Escalators are also a thing of beauty here - absolutely noone stands on the wrong side. And there's two queues, onr for standing and one for walking.

Two queues on the escalator is how it's supposed to be everywhere. In big cities in the US, people generally obey the rule "walk on the left, stand on the right."

But sometimes you get chuckleheads like one guy who stood right in the middle of the BART station escalator during morning rush hour and blocked everyone behind him.

And then when he got off the escalator he just waltzed out the emergency exit (thus evading the fare) without batting an eye. Some men just want to see the world burn.

How does this form of fare evasion work? I thought a rider usually scans/tags a form of payment before boarding the train and does so again after disembarking.

Yes, you scan or insert your card when entering the station from which you are departing and then scan again when exiting the destination station. But you are only charged on exit because the fare is calculated based on the distance between stations. If you go through the emergency exit at the destination and thus avoid scanning your card, you can skip out on the fare.

They have emergency exits in most public transit systems, but usually they have some sort of alarm that sounds when you open it. But the BART emergency exits are literally just a swiveling door. If there's no attendant, you could literally just walk out of it without attracting much notice. I've seen people do this multiple times. I don't know why the BART authority considers this acceptable. I suppose they can catch offenders if they notice that the card is always used to swipe in but never to swipe out.

Outside of rush hour there is not much difference in queuing between both the Berlin and Beijing metro in my experience (i.e. nobody stands in line in either city). During rush hour there is more pushing in Beijing but Berliners try to get through the door as well, even if it means cutting someone off.

When I was an exchange student we had 5 bins. Most of the glass (beer bottles, of course) you'd be returning for a deposit.

In one of the apartments I had in Germany, next to the dumpster for trash was a giant thing for placing your sorted recyclables. Another apartment had such a limited trash can, if you didn't recycle, you couldn't possibly throw everything out. I am American and was a military wife with some ridiculously oversized American truck that just didn't fit in many of the parking space, and I once spent like a week with a bag of trash in the back of my truck, looking for a place to dispose of it. I finally found a dumpster on base that I could use.

Last I checked, Germany was like the recycling capital of the world, in terms of having well developed systems for making it happen and ensuring that a high percentage of items got recycled.

Though, to be fair, I lived in Germany like 25 years ago, so this info could well be out of date.

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