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Comment by chupa-chups | Hacker News Reader

This is like saying all Americans love McDonalds :)

(I'm German)

If this was voted up for fun I'm on it, if it was voted up because someone thinks it is true count me out :)

If we Americans were a little less fond of McDonald's, we might be a little less unsettled by the idea of other people seeing us naked :D

So based on your analogy you are saying that it's true for most of German population? Good to know!

yeah :)

Hey chupa-chups, this thing about nudity is of course a generalization.

However, I'm told all Germans absolutely adore asparagus, are passionate about them, and it is always an appropriate topic of conversation, whether discussing their many variants or how to cook them.

Can you confirm this?

From personal experience I can confirm a corporate event for a famous bank consisted on a field trip for asparagus-gathering, and that once the season starts, they pop everywhere in the schnitzel sauces of daily menus every week :)

Yes

You did not have a passionate asparagus discussion if you didn't touch the urine smell issue.

Please elaborate!

If you eat asparagus, your pee smells like asparagus (kinda).

It's pretty fun actually

As the other commenter wrote.

Pee stinks BUT there is a catch: only a certain amount of people have smelly pee and some people produce smelly pee but don't smell it.

It's genetic. Some enzyme turns something in the asparagus in sulphur. It's pretty bad. I have it and my SO too.

So a high end asparagus discussion contains the "are you a stinker" team finding competition ;)

I have a feeling this must be more common in ex-Protestant, now atheist regions and definitely not in the Catholic South and South-West.

It has less to do with religion than with the regional culture of East Germany (it's/was also as popular in catholic Poland).

Being naked in the sauna is even more common not only in (East) Germany.

The division between Protestant and Catholic parts in Germany is (as far as I can see) much more than about religion, similar to Ireland; these are just convenient names.

I remember watching a video called Hippies From Hell in which a bunch of German lockpickers (from Sportsfreunde der Sperrtechnik) were picking locks.. at a lake, naked.

It didn't strike me as German; it striked me as part of hacker culture. Was I wrong?

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sportsfreunde_der_Sperrtechnik

from the article

> A lot of Germans don’t get naked in public, but nudists are ubiquitous enough that the practice has entered the national psyche.

Nope, not true (south Germany)

This is assumed to be true in previous east Germany. I cannot confirm or deny how real this assumption is ;-)

On sunny days there are naked folks in Englischer Garten, Munich.

Yep. Riding to work, I often got an unexpected and unwelcome eyeful.

Virtually all Americans love McDonalds.

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