vailian

There is another difference between America and Germany, and not only that they use the Centigrade system here. For years I would mentally convert the outside temperatures to Farenheit so I would know how warm or cold it was... now I am more comfortable with the system here, I like the logic of 0 being freezing and 100 boiling. Easier to remember than 32 and 212 (I am astonished that I can remember that now!)
Lying in bed now, feeling sorry for myself (actually it is just a bad cold but it is an excuse to lie in bed), wondering if I have a fever, made me think about another cultural difference: the medical thermometer.
In America it is oral, in Germany (mostly) rectal. I was shocked a little the first time the nurse said, OK, we are going to take your temperature, and I opened my mouth but got it in the ass.
Talking recently to a (female) German colleague, who had studied for a while in America; she had the problem in reverse: I hated holding the thermometer in my mouth. It is so much more comforting in the bum.
Here they give a lot of medicines (especially painkillers) as suppositories; in America this is considered cruel and unusual punishment. So I was amused to see that the doctors for the Army stationed in Iraq would deliberately measure the prisoners' temperature anally "because it was more demeaningfor them", but if it is like in Germany, the prisoners probably didn't think anything of it.
Maybe if the prisoners had been subjected to oral temperature measurement, America would have won the war by now! The prisoners would have been so humiliated by the invasion of their oral orifices that they would have confessed to everything.