Umm. You know what happens when you put a wooden chopstick in the dishwasher?
They get clean.
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Interesting. I will narrow my statement down to Austria, but I still suspect that it also applies to the other successor states of the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
Some regions of Germany are notorious for their directness.
The compliment thing might be related to the fact that the “direct” Germans are less likely to exaggerate their compliments. In the same situation, a German might say “That dinner was good” and an American might say “That was the best dinner I ever had”. In Austria, I’d answer “thank you” to the former but never to the latter.
It is, if you ask a German, but Central Europe is a wonderfully fluid concept. And of course the Cold War didn’t help. As I understand it, Austrians tend to disagree.
Yep, if I’d hear someone saying “The best XY I’v ever had”, I’d seriously suspect flattery or a severe lack of judgment. We like our compliments to be specific and realistisc.
Oh yes, I live in the North and come from the Ruhr area, i. e. so from a long line of urban industrial workers and minders now supplanted to a region where an ecstatic greeting begins with using two syllables.
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The cold war basically divided Europe into “East” and “West", yes. With the Austrians clinging to their neutrality, the price for getting a free pass by the USSR.
Now that that is gone, old structures which where more or less only repressed reestablish themselves.
Germany shares borders with 9 countries, in Europe 2nd only to Russia. (3rd worldwide after Brazil and tied with the Democratic Republic of Congo). Sounds pretty central to me. 
I’m in the central area. Telling someone, " es hat gepasst" ( it was suitable) or the everyday version " passt schon" ( it fit) is high praise indeed. If you said, " es war sehr gut" ( it was very good) you’ll get strange looks indeed. Anything above that is obvious hyperbole and will be greeted as such.
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I was being tongue-in-cheek. Meaning that this custom is well known in the US and often ignored because we have tons of rude people.
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And if a restaraunt does that, they may be in a bit of trouble http://www.nbc12.com/story/29565001/restaurant-report-wooden-chopsticks-washed-for-reuse
snip from article "break them open and stick them in food or put them in your mouth, and bacteria gets into the grain of the wood. That can’t be washed or sanitized, which is why they’re not supposed to be reused. "
We seem to have more sensible rules here or ignore them more sensible. Wooden chopsticks will survive multiple runs through a dishwasher before bending too much.
That said: I bring my titanium ones before or actually prefer the haptics and mouth feeling
I gathered as much.
But if nobody had spoken out about that, tongue-in-cheek or not, just presenting the advice not to do it in Japan sounds like “It’s perfectly OK to do that in America, but don’t do it in Japan”.
No kidding. We Austrians usually include Germany when we need to compile a list of countries, but that includes some rounding up, as we would consider the North of Germany to be, Northern rather than Central.
The old Habsburg monarchy and some of the adjacent regions is a recognizable cultural unit, and in Austria that’s what we use as the definition of “Central Europe”. So, wherever the cities look “just like home” even though everyone might speak a different language. Which means that I’d include Zagreb, but exclude Hamburg.
But the truth is, of course, that there are multiple overlapping regional cultural influences on the European continent; several of these have been claimed to be the essence of “Central European”. At some point, Germany as a whole decided to be Central European, so that leads to a different definition. And Poland seems to have decided that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is what defines Central Europe.
Ok, a compromise: if the Germans get to include all of their country, I want to include our include our friends & neighbours from Slovenia, Trieste and Northern Croatia.
I wonder if that strengthened our identification with the term “Central Europe”; even in Cold War times, we thought of ourselves as Central Europe, we only almost forgot that Central Europe continued beyond our Eastern borders. Our post-war national anthem even includes a line about our country being “in the center of the continent”.
And in case we fail to agree on anything else: Central Europe is a region that includes neither the United States nor Japan and where shoes are taken off more frequently than in the US and less frequently than in Japan.
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Spouse Irritation IS a thing!
IKR?
I still don’t understand why they got upset at my friend’s church when I asked for ketchup to go with that horribly dry wafer thingy.
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Uh, so if he posts twice he’s a re-tarred?
(No offense to @Papasan of course!)
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Always wondered about that, the walls are pretty thin. 
If the stand is large enough, why not both?
I can understand their outrage: Ketchup?! You should have been asking for hummus.
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It used to be that case in Germany, too. Used to me. Pretty solidly middle class, yet I’m surrounded by people who speak with abandon while munching. 
I’m seriously considering giving up going to the company’s canteen for this.
I like and sometimes use the compliment my grandfather used: “Kann man essen.” (“One can eat it.” or “Eatable”?).
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Usually they end up in the bottom and sometimes get stuck blocking that spray rotor thing.
Seriously non disposable chopsticks are supposed to be handwashed.
Not in my experience. But I use a dishwasher with a drawer for cutlery.
The super nice ones I bought from the Singaporean exhibition, sure.
The standard ones that cost a couple of dollars at most? Nah, not so much. They survive just fine on the ~ 50°C programme, dry out and that’s it. One or two bent too much to be used, the rest works fine.
