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When I was in Paris a few years ago, I remember that food and drinks could get pretty expensive. Sit-down restaurants cost at least $20 per dish and drinks were another $10. You can usually get pretty cheap meals from grab-and-go places, though. I'm sure this is the same for the other cities.

I recommend buying a travel book, like "Let's Go." I like this travel guide because it caters to younger people traveling on a budget. For every city, it lists cheap options for hostels, restaurants, and clubs/bars.

Make sure you're aware of the tipping policies for restaurants, and also know what is included with your meal. For example, I think tip is included in France and the tap water is free. The opposite is true in Germany, though.

I recommend getting a traveling backpack for your trip, instead of a suitcase. Backpacks are easier to transport, especially if you'll be getting on and off trains. REI has several good options. For me, a 40L pack was sufficient for a 2-week trip.

Since you'll be traveling for a couple weeks, I recommend getting some large Ziploc bags for your clothes. You can squeeze the air out of these bags and significantly compress the volume of your clothes. I used these for the first time this past summer, and they were great. They enabled me to bring a lot more clothes :)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003U6A3C6

My overall recommendation would be to try and not worry too much about money while you're in Europe. You're young and you'll work the rest of your life to make money :)

Soukous: For an introduction, I'd recommend The Rough Guide to Franco/Le TP OK Jazz. Some of the earliest examples on the album have a Cuban rhumba feel. My favourites by him would be Chacun Pour Soi and Infidélité mado

Other artists I'd recommend - Diblo Dibala who played guitar with various groups including on this track Iyole and Sam Mangwana - Suzana

Zouk has popularity in both the Francophone areas of the Caribbean and West Africa. I highly recommend ANYTHING by the group Kassav', since they've been so influential. Much of their music is sampled by artists outside the genre. The albums Majestik Zouk and Vini Pou. I consider Rété their best track.


African zouk - Afrik Melody by Chorus and Bod Guibert 's Si Man Lé Save

Bonus: If you like Latin music, you may be interested in the parang music of Trinidad/Tobago . A type of Christmas music that is sung usually in Spanish ( it originated in Venezuela). Daisy Voisin-Goipe

I'm English but got an interest in Ireland as my city has lots of Irish people and was the only mainland city to elect a pro independence MP, and like most people here I have Irish grandparents and will probably get an Irish passport soon. It honestly depends who you ask, I've met northern Irish people who are adamant that they are British, others who don't believe in Northern Ireland and refer to it as 'the north of Ireland' and Irish people who don't care as long as there isn't violence. I've started reading this book which is fantastic https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Troubles-Northern-Conflict/dp/024196265X

Really impartial and gives both sides views but tried to remain neutral and just give out the facts. I highly recommend it.

There is absolutely no doubt that Romanian is a Romance language. It is true that many people in Western Europe might tend to forget it in the same way that they would forget, say, Romansh.

But I strongly agree with /u/Bezbojnicul: the concept of "closeness to Latin" is essentially meaningless: there is no natural distance in the space of languages, and depending on whether you emphasize the spoken or written language, grammar or vocabulary, intercomprehension or objectively measured differences, etc., you will get wildly different results.

While I'm on the subject, I'd like to mention what I think is an interesting project: a group of Romanicist linguists, coordinated by Jørgen Schmitt Jensen from the university of Aarhus¹, started the idea, in the early 2000's, of writing a series of books, targeting non-linguists who speak one of the Romance languages, to help them learn to understand the other Romance languages. So these books are supposed to be a bit like comparative grammars, but not really, because they're aimed at non-specialists. I don't know how many of these books eventually did come out, but I know the French version did: it's called Comprendre les langues romanes, by Paul Teyssier, and it describes Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Romanian in relation to French (and for the benefit of French speakers); I can recommend it.

1. A similar project had earlied been formed for the Scandinavian languages (which, obviously, are closer to one another, by almost any metric, than the Romance languages). This might explain why a Danish scholar would end up leading a project to teach speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian and French to understand each others.

not sure about that, but I guess an english native speaker could say more about it.

From what I read online, they use 'wanderlust' to mean Fernweh (love to travel, want to get far away to explore something new) and I've seen a lot of huge WANDERLUST signs in hostels in small urban hostels where the concept of 'wandern' (hiking) or exploring nature is definitely impossible nearby. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderlust)

'kindergarten' in the US is part of their school system an means what we'd call Vorschule (not sure how representative this example is, but I've read some comments where people thought germans are cruel for putting 3 year olds into kindergarten, and they apparently thought it means kids sitting in a school class setting getting school lessons about reading and writing).

I'm not sure about uber but I've heard several times now that people think it's a german word that means superior or best of all.
https://www.dw.com/en/uber-cool-english-speakers-love-using-german-words/a-5840690

edit: some links

Everything by Fredrik Backman, two-time New York Times Bestseller author. He has a truly unique writing style. His books are often set in small towns, portraying every day life in a captivating way. I love his subtle humour. He really sucks you in.

Here's some of his best ones:

• A Man Called Ove
  
• My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
  
• Beartown
  
• Us Against You

I always like to recommend Fabian by Erich Kästner.

Here is a bit of a further explanation shamelessly stolen from the Amazon reviews.


>1. September 1999 - Veröffentlicht auf Amazon.com
Erich Kastner, a writer in the German Enlightenment tradition perhaps best known as a German poet and author of children's books, wrote a scathing satirical novel about decadence during the Wiemar Republic. Kastner's target is the political, economic, cultural, and spiritual climate of the years preceeding the rise of the Third Reich. He caricatured the times in an effort to awaken his contemporaries to the elements that contributed to the gathering storm. Jacob Fabian, after whom the book is named, is portrayed as a either a passive figure who waits for a return of decency or one for whom there was no place in such a deteriorating society. His life adventures served as Kastner's diagnosis of the diseased soul of Berlin. Fabian's escapades mirrored the interior world of a city seemingly oblivious to what it was doing to itself. He lost his job, sweetheart, and best friend in a series of events which eerily highlights what was truly at stake in such a culture. The suicide of Fabian's friend as a hapless reaction to what was later discovered to be a cruel joke is a metaphor for the heartlessness of the era. I was struck by the books apparant parallels to our own time and found the author's message to be nearly prescient. In his preface to the 1950 German edition he wrote of the moralist's task to defend "lost causes" and to "fight on notwithstanding." Kastner's quixotic writing deserves a fresh reading by Americans given our diseased culture at the end of the twentieth century. While his mood and some of his caricatures will raise the ire of some, the overall impact of the book is ample reward for the tolerant reader.

https://www.amazon.de/Fabian-Story-Moralist-Erich-Kastner/dp/1870352459

>if not nation states, then what?

Sadly, that is a fringe work in progress :-( You sometimes see that in academia too or long-lasting geopolitical conflicts, there can be a long time between "problem identified" and "problem solved".

>Surely the rational stance in your point of view would be the world-citizen view, to identify as a human mainly, no?

Correct.

>And, why do you stop your identity at the borders of Europe?

To be honest, it's possibly a combination of ignorance of non-European cultures and familiarity with European ones. That's really all you need to know, all of the below is just extra "might be interesting" fluff.

---

In my view, we still do not have great ways of classifying, measuring or comparing cultural traits. Some attempts have been made within each their limited scope:

• The anthropologist Edward T. Hall's cultural factors look at things at a very basic level and are mostly based on contrast pairs: high-context vs low-context, monochronic time vs polychronic time, large personal space vs large personal space, high territoriality vs low territoriality, etc.
  
  
• Richard R. Gesteland's cultural dimensions are designed for global manegement, so they are mainly for business cultures, again contrast pairs: Deal-focused vs relationship-focused, hierarchical (formal) vs egalitarian (informal), contrasts within time and scheduling, and expressive vs reserved.
  
  
• Hans Gullestrup created a model for analyzing the "areas and dimensions of culture" that looks at an entire society, splits it into different main areas and then moves down from the top (the more immediately observable layers) down to the invisible and almost unfathomable "world view".
  
  But these are all qualitative and they all rely on several subjective interpretations of various factors.
  
  One quantitative approach was made by Dutch researcher Geert Hofstede in the 1970's when he was allowed to do a large internal study at IBM that gathered data from participants in multiple countries. This means the context of his study was a business setting, which can make a big difference, but he then wrote the classic Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations to explain the data and his study and argue why his quantitative dimensions are of a more universal nature and why the quantitative data he produced was unlikely to change within several decades. New dimensions were later added, they are still referred to both at universities and high schools today now and then.
  
  Two years ago, I pulled out Hofstede's data on the EU28 and put them in tables. And I concluded that:
  
  >It would be impossible to make a single profile for the EU because the scales of Power Distance, Masculinity/Femininity, and Indulgence vary too much.
  
  >Aside from those, however, cultures in the EU clearly prefer individualism, clearly feel uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, and mostly prefer a long-term oriented approach that is pragmatic and open toward societal change, emphasizes thrift and prioritizes modern education as a way to prepare for the future.
  
  But a major problem with regards to your question is...how does that even compare to the rest of the world? Can we say that there is anything particularly "Europe-oriented" about any of this? Well yes, because one of the new dimensions (long-term vs short-term orientation, has a special meaning in his framework) was developed specifically with East Asia in mind and therefore they occupy a special place ranking at the very top of that one. Okay, but what else? I guess a widespread preference for individualism, but we share that with the US, Canada, Australia, and South Africa and many places in Europe are also a lot lower.
  
  Anyway, the thing is, unless we have tools like this my only way of answering with either "there's no reason to stop at the borders of Europe" or "yes, we should stop at the borders of Europe" would be spending my whole life doing first-hand research that probably can't be generalized to the next guy anyway.
  
  So it goes back to the original answer: probably a combination of ignorance of non-European cultures and familiarity with European ones. And as part of that ignorance I might intuitively tell myself that things are radically different right outside of Europe even though there's probably a continuum effect going on at least to some degree.
  
  But sure, I have no problem saying that the deeper and most important identity is that of a human. I'm not a "citizen of the world" though, citizenship is not human nature, it's a legal term for use within the societies we have constructed.
  
  But let's say it's like that. Then I guess going for "I'm European" is an okay first step in my view but not a final step, but still a lot better than confining myself to "I'm Danish and I can only feel commonality with 5.7 million people minus the 8-10% of immigrants ok lol"—we don't have a European nation, so it's also worth noting that European identity is a kind of quite flexible macro-identity and to me that's a big advantage.
  
  Okay I'll stop writing now, if you made it this far: I'm sorry.

I wonder when it will become useful in The Netherlands to paint your outside walls with an additive like: https://www.amazon.com/ThermaCels-Insulating-Additive-Gallon-Package/dp/B01AC5KRJ6/ (for approx 35 m^2 / 4.5L paint)

It insulates against thermal radiation, but not so much conductivity (hence the bad reviews). I already think it would be useful with container rooms, and other places with flat roofs. With the best polyurethane or siloxane paints it should be good for a few decades.

Bidets! I have this one and it is one of my best purchases of all time. Now I hate pooping anywhere but home.

There are other kinds too. When I was visiting Portugal they often had these bidets that were kind of a mix of a toilet and a sink, and I think you were supposed to run the water and wipe off with your hand... I never used it, but eventually the concept won me over.

Edit: amazon link if you're interested.

Well of course Germans have that. I mean they're historically obsessed with scat. There's
Mozart's "Leck mich im Arsch" (K. 231), or a multitude of quotes from Martin Luther like “I’m like a ripe stool and the world is like a gigantic anus.” and “Devil, I have just shit in my trousers. Have you smelled it?”

As the anthropologist Alan Dundes put it:

> "one finds an inordinate number of texts concerned with anality. Scheisse (shit), Dreck (dirt), Mist (manure), Arsch (ass).… Folksongs, folktales, proverbs, riddles, folk speech—all attest to the Germans’ longstanding special interest in this area of human activity.”

He wrote a whole book on the topic.

Thank you, added to my list. I'd add Wild Swans by Jung Chang and I enjoyed the Soul of the Sword quite a bit as well as The Hinge Factor. The first one is about Mao's China and the second about military history and the third about the role of chance in history.

This is a short, well written article that partially answers your question.

If you are looking to get an even more in depth understanding of Slovenia and its history, best way to do that would be by reading a book about history of Slovenia. You have to know the past to understand the present. :) This is a book on Slovene history that I am familiar with. Unfortunately I don't know of anymore English books that would give you a more comprehensive answer to your question.

I rarely read Portuguese literature (but when I do, it is in Portuguese naturally). My favorite one is the Maias. Mostly because of how the book is a nice insight into the 19th century - and it's interesting how it explains a lot of Portuguese mindset today.

Yeah -- a lot of home-made American mac and cheese is baked in the oven with some form of bread crumb topping that browns -- something like this. I don't know what's normal for mac n cheese overseas :-)

But I'm too lazy to actually bake it, plus I end up with four or five meals when I cook it and breadcrumbs will get soggy after sitting in the fridge, so I just put bread crumbs on it before eating :-) Something like this, though I buy much smaller sizes than that.

Yeah, you wouldn't like the US ones! I've been offered this meal of hot-dogs, US molasses beans, and weird brown molasses bread that comes in a tin (sweet AF of course) (Edit: this is the stuff - 1/3 sugar by weight!). I've had desserts that were less sweet.

But this is a country where a whole lot of kids are given "PB&J" sandwiches as their lunch - the main part of it, not a dessert. i.e. peanut butter and jam sandwiches.

But we have no idea why all the obesity and type II diabetes... why could it be‽ I know an obese family who talked about how they just have genes that make them gain weight literally while giving their children a chocolate chip muffin for a "morning snack" between breakfast and lunch.

Glad to have captured your interest!

Some books:

https://www.amazon.com/Who-Owns-Scotland-Now-Private/dp/1840183217

http://www.andywightman.com/poor-had-no-lawyers

What's the catch? I have a "toast maker" like https://www.amazon.com/Proctor-Silex-25401P-Proctor-Silex-Sandwich/dp/B002SB8LLE and a toaster like https://www.hamiltonbeach.com/media/products/22911-01.jpg . Could I replace them both with this and get meat grilling functionality with no catch? I'm guessing it's gonna take a while to warm up at least?

You can't directly compare US models sold in the EU. For example this laptop for sale at amazon (US): $549,99 ext vat = $659.99 inc 20% vat = ~€600. It is also for sale on amazon de: €746,-. Nearly €150 more expensive.

However, a similar laptop sells for €629,- on amazon de.

I don't think there's many books of all of our history in English. [This one] (https://www.amazon.com/Land-Between-History-Slovenia/dp/3631628773) is the only one I could find. I can't tell you wether it's good or not but it's pretty much the only one.

Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict is a pretty fair examination of the conflict. As someone else said, you'd probably be as well to read about stuff from the start of the 20th century and even earlier to get a real sense of it, but the above book is a decent one to get into the meat of the conflict.