Little Things that Aren't so Little for Me.

Eggs
<rant>
I enjoy the occasional hard boiled egg. You let a few eggs simmer until the egg timer goes totally dark, then dunk the eggs in cold water and let them cool before eating, right? Not in Germany, you don't! You eat the hard boiled eggs still warm. Moreover, instead of cooking them until the yolk turns pale and maybe just ever so slightly grey, the eggs are considered "hard" so long as it's solidified. They call an orange-yellow yolk hard. I call it an incompletely denatured abomination.

That is not a cooked egg!

Now, I realize this shouldn't bother me so much, and it shouldn't be so important to me, but it does and it is. Warm, medium cooked eggs trigger the same freakout mode in me that the sensation of face paint or a burger with the lettuce under the patty does. I just need to scrub it off, rearrange it, make it NOT WRONG.
</rant>

(To be fair, the sliced hard boiled eggs served on salads and sandwiches live up to my expectations.)

Papers
As I may possibly have mentioned previously, the paper size in Germany differs from the US standard. This isn't all that surprising, since letter is measured in inches, and Germany uses the entirely superior metric system that the A4 sheet is based upon. When writing papers, this makes for extremely slight differences in how many words take up a full page. Although A4 sheets are longer, they're also skinnier, so it pretty much breaks even.

Far more significant is the fact that instead of double spacing the pages, the norm for academic papers seems 1.5 spacing. That...builds up. A 12 page paper is the equivalent of a 16 page paper in double spacing. I mention this because darn it all! Philosophy Papers are hard! I have managed to work out 3 of the 12 pages, and that's partly due to font experimentation.

Book Spines
While looking through the philosophy institute's library, I noticed that the book titles that kept popping out at me all seemed to be in English. This seemed odd, since I was very much in German mode at the time. I started to look at the books next to the ones that popped to try and reorient myself. Then it hit me; whenever I switched from reading the spine of an English book to that of a German one, my head switched from tilting to the right to tilting to the left.

It turns out the practice of printing bottom to top is common to much of central Europe while top to bottom is the standard in England, America, and most likely many of the countries colonized by Britain. Like with every rule, exceptions exist, but they're fairly rare from what i've seen. However, the power to filter by language with the tip of my head makes me giddy. Beware the awesome power of pattern recognition!