Hallo!

There were many things in this article that surprised me. For one, I would have expected the population of Americans of Irish decent to much greater than that of German. In actuality almost 5% more Americans are of German decent than Irish. Most of the people I have met claim they are Irish.

I was also not aware of the presence of a "German Belt." I did however relate to the fact that Wisconsin was particular popular among German settlers. I visited Madison a few weeks ago and the downtown area had many German bars, restaurants, churches, etc.

Reading that Germans had extensive contacts with Native Americans also took me by surprise. People in Germany dressing up and acting like Native Americans humors me. Until now I had always thought of Native American culture to be exclusively an American thing.

I was not at all surprised to hear that drinking beer and going to church are two big parts of German culture. In the times that I have been around Deutschland and the surrounding area there are very ancient churches everywhere, and certainly a lot of beer drinking (Oktoberfest).

Gute nacht!

Lukas