Love & Romance in Western Countries 2

この投稿は英語で書きます。(This post will be in English)

Christmas eve has come! But most students studying in Cologne have already left the city to spend their holidays with their families. School has ended, so have the Christmas Markets, and therefore, I have unbelievable amount of free time in Cologne. Before I go over to a friends to have Christmas dinner at his place, I was watching "How I met your mother", a popular American TV show at my house. It's so fun watching them, and also, you get to feel the difference between the American and the Japanese culture. For example, this thing would probably not be allowed on TV in Japan, because it contains many sexual scenes; probably a big surprise for the westerners. But then a French friend was telling me that the "massive eating contest" (A competition of who can eat the most within a certain amount of time; 大食い選手権) would probably be banned in France, because it is immoral that people are wasting food, when there are lots of people starving in the real world. So, cultural difference here and there; still encountering them with plenty of shock!

Recently I found out that Blogger started to offer statistics about blogs written by it. I was looking to see which post was most seen this year, and it was this one: Love and Romance in Western Countries. So, I took my time to re-read this stuff, and realized that for some of the parts, I was completely off track. Now that I have been hanging out longer with the people from the unknown culture (they're my friends, don't get that wrong!), I guess I'm gonna give it another shot discussing differences of Culture on this issue.

One thing I found out, was that these people I've mostly been meeting here, the ERASMUS students, do not behave typically, as they would have done in their home country. It's just that, ERASMUS is all about partying, forgetting about your boyfriend/girlfriend in your country for a semester, and enjoy hooking up. Well, yeah, I admit that this is an exaggeration, I can start hearing my European friends counter-arguing; Yeah, but at least an non-negligible proportion of the students are like this. And I have heard stories of guys who were scoring against 3 women in one night, unbelievable. This is an extreme case, but I need to present this here, to give the Japanese an image of how flerty this can be. And just to add, I'm surprised that the English language has all these words to describe things in this dimension; I can't think up of Japanese vocabulary for most of the issues, which is one reason this is in English, and why some words come with a link to clarify the meaning of words.

So, what should I re-mention? I admit that I totally got it wrong about the Western style of not having the "I love you, why don't we become in a relationship?" "I love you too, of course." (告白: "Confessing" is the term we use for this) process in romance. This is just another way to make things work. Once you are mentally connected with each other, you are in a firm relationship as you would be in the Japanese confirming style. One thing I learned, when looking at relationships developing around me.

Also, men and women equally have a role in relationships; at least up to some degree. But I would say that there is a "man role" and a "women role" in the society, more clearer than in Japan. People are probably more "sexier", both men and women, because of this.

I guess I'm not gonna write too much about this topic, since I'm starting to wonder if I have the so called "Japanese values" or not. I'll tell you why, perhaps in my next blog post.