Thursday, September 04, 2008

Cultural differences

I was looking through Kinokuniya in Sydney the other day. A labyrinthine, multi-language bookstore near Town Hall. I wandered from the English language fiction section over to the German langauge fiction section to test out some of my incredibly poor High School German.

I immediately noticed that the printing on the spine of German language books was in the opposite direction to that of English language books. To read through the titles, you have to tilt your head down to the left instead of the right. Cool!

My kids weren't impressed with this revelation. You try to teach children to enjoy the little things in life, but they are Generation Z (maybe Z+1?), and everything is either "mad" or "meh". This was clearly the latter.