From my experience it’s just part of the cultural differences. While many Americans, at least in the Midwest where I spent a lot of time for work, are very friendly and outgoing, I hardly ever got the impression that it’s deep or meaningful. From my experience it was very easy to have great conversations with people whom I hardly knew or had met just an hour ago but hardly ever did it go anywhere meaningful.

Now to the question of how does one become this outgoing kind of person: just try and talk to people, remain friendly and open. It will likely take some practice and maybe not be reciprocated by your average European.

The weirdest combination I’ve ever met was a set of female twins. One was named after their mother. The other had a different first name. Must have been really odd when growing up.

You can (and some do) insist, that all phones and other digital devices be left outside or out in a well isolated place like a fridge. Furthermore you can use methods of encryption for both physical notes and digital notes. Neither is completely safe from being compromised, but then again hardly anything truly is.

If you want to be fairly certain to not be monitored, always leave digital devices behind and have meetings in varying locations with few or ideally no other people around. Only discuss confidential information with people you know and trust. Even then, experience from places like East Germany proves, nothing is truly safe from being compromised if enough time and energy is spent on the issue.

I dread the elections in France in 2027. France is one of the last bastions of Freedom that is capable of standing up to the authoritarian states if push comes to shove. The last few presidential elections have moved France closer and closer to having a Kremlin sock puppet in charge. While they have managed to pull back from the brink a few times, it only needs to go wrong once.

Thanks for sharing! Concerning logistics when travelling I can also share my experience.

I travel on a Dutch passport and my children, while also having Dutch citizenship, travel on German passports because that is where we live and where my wife is from. They also use my wife’s German last name. Therefore, when travelling, my kids and I have different names and nationalities. For some reason nobody ever questioned any of that. I keep a copy of the birth certificate just in case though.

The answer will likely depend on the place in the world and even on the cultural background of individuals getting married. I’ll just share my experience.

We got married out of convenience. While it’s technically possible to arrange the bulk of the legal stuff with various contracts, it is just easier to use the “default contract” that already covers the most common use case. Some legal arrangements, for example cuts to inheritance tax or the right to remain silent when asked about your spouse in legal proceedings, are only available for “real” marriages.

Once we decided to have children we looked into the various arrangements needed to make that work and quickly found out that marriage is the easiest way to sort everything out. In our day to day life nothing really changed. In legal terms quite a lot is now different.

By the way, as others have mentioned, getting married isn’t expensive. All we paid was the administrative fee which was something like 50 Euros.

I hope it was screwed tightly.

Ich bin alt genug, um der Stolze Besitzer eines ADAC-Straßenatlasses zu sein; mittlerweile leider hoffnungslos veraltet :-)

Anscheinend funktioniert “Bücherei” als Suchbegriff, “Bibliothek” nur, wenn das im Namen vorkommt.

Leider ein Beispiel, warum der Ansatz von OSM zwar gut ist, aber das derzeitige Produkt leider nicht auf dem Niveau des Platzhirsches ist.

OSM-Daten sind genau so gut, wie Freiwillige sie gemacht haben.

Ist bei Google Maps grundsätzlich an vielen Stellen genauso, aber die User-Basis ist vielfach größer.

Dafür, dass sie “on-demand” heruntergeladen werden wie bei Google Maps, haben sie wohl nicht die Ressourcen.

Leider noch ein Beispiel, wie die Funktionalität leidet. Für eine anstehende, längere Fahrt in den Urlaub müsste ich also das Kartenmaterial quer durch Europe runterladen. Das ist leider für mich nicht praktikabel und wieder ein Punkt, der den etablierten Marktführer weiter auf dieser Position verweilen lässt.

Bitte nicht falsch verstehen; ich würde gerne weniger auf Google-Dienste zurückgreifen und tue das an vielen Stellen (Mail, Cloud-Storage, Kalender, Browser) auch erfolgreich. Gerade Maps hat aber einfach keine ansatzweise gleichwertige Alternative, die nicht gleich zum Hobby wird.

There’s more with an agreement. Some also have a partial agreement, where only a written test is necessary. Here’s the full list, if you’re interested: https://www.german-way.com/for-expats/living-in-germany/german-drivers-license-reciprocity/

Can you tell/show me how/where I can use OSM as a replacement for Google Maps. I’ve given OsmAnd a try and found it lacking.

I ran a few tests such as searching for my local library. Unfortunately I had to use the exact wording (“Stadtbibliothek”) rather than simpler, more common wording (“Bibliothek”). The Google map found it immediately. Similarly I searched for a local Café, which I easily found in Google Maps (despite not capitalising anything). Meanwhile the business is not present in OSM, despite being the most popular Café in my town.

Additionally navigation doesn’t work for me for regions I haven’t downloaded. How would I go about getting it to work for navigation to places further afield that I haven’t downloaded?

Unfortunately this seems all to plausible. Despite Firefox and ad blocking in general, there’s very few services that rival Google’s Android and (in my opinion) none that can honestly rival Maps at present.

So, it’s basically a loss leader in this scenario to feed other sevices like the ad network?

driving license was another one mentioned. Having it not expire before you can transfer it is preferable

This is a giant, often overlooked issue. My home country of the Netherlands for example doesn’t allow a simple transef and makes you take a test (because road safety is important to Dutch people!). In Germany it’s even worse. There it depends on the state you obtained your US license in, since Germany has agreements with some states but not all…

Can confirm. I’ve lived in the Netherlands, France and Germany for basically all my life and I don’t recall ever actively saying thank you to a bus driver. I don’t even remember when last I exchanged any words with one thanks to modern fare systems.

On the contrary I say thank you to cashiers at the supermarket or staff at the bakery several times per week.

This is such an annoyance. As someone who regularly reads and watches media in several times different languages, the scourge of auto translate has only become worse. With the advent of more capable translation tools this will probably only get worse. I’ve already switched my OS language to English on all of my devices and found that it helped a little.

Turns out the supply chain for such a complex machine is in itself very complex. Some components are manufactured by suppliers in various countries formerly believed to be allies. This includes stuff like the ejection seats and some electronics that are made in the UK, parts for the wing sets that are made in Italy or inserts for the weapon bays that are made in Canada. Additionally the Netherlands currently houses the supply hub for spare parts for the European countries. It is estimated that there are spare parts to keep hundreds of F-35s in the air for a while there. The most worrying aspect certainly remains the software support, without which all the precious hardware loses much of its utility, even if there isn’t a master kill switch.