Pen pals in Germany

Ask two German teenagers when their summer holidays start and you may get answers a month or more apart. Each of Germany's sixteen states sets its own school calendar, and the six-week summer break is deliberately staggered between late June and mid-September so that the whole country does not hit the motorways on the same weekend. Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, in the south, have long kept the late slot. So if your pen pal in Hamburg goes quiet in July, your pen pal in Munich may still be sitting exams.

One country, sixteen ways of doing things

That federal streak runs through a lot of daily life. School rules, some public holidays and even the local word for a bread roll (Brötchen, Semmel, Schrippe, Weckle) change as you cross state lines. Northern Germany is flat, windy and close to the North Sea and the Baltic; the south rises into the Alps. Winters are cold and grey in most places, summers mild to warm. A pen pal in a small town in Saxony and one in Cologne will describe quite different weeks, so treat each letter as one person's Germany rather than the whole of it.

Mealtimes are a good topic. In many households lunch has traditionally been the main hot meal, and the evening meal is Abendbrot: bread, cheese, cold meats and something pickled. Plenty of families now eat a hot dinner instead, which makes "what do you actually eat in the evening?" a better question than it sounds.

German is the language of everyday life, but regional dialects are strong in places, and Danish, Frisian, Sorbian and Low German are recognised minority languages. Most young Germans learn English at school, often to a good level, so a language exchange can work in both directions. One thing a learner notices quickly is the choice between the formal Sie and the informal du. Between pen pals of a similar age, du is normal; a short "Hallo" or "Liebe Anna" (to a woman) is a perfectly friendly start.

The German year in a letter

• Karneval (Fasching, Fastnacht), in the weeks before Lent, so usually February or early March. It is huge in the Rhineland, especially Cologne, Düsseldorf and Mainz, and barely noticed in parts of the north.
• Easter, with Good Friday and Easter Monday as public holidays across the country; the dates move each year.
• German Unity Day on 3 October, a national holiday marking reunification in 1990.
• Advent and Christmas, when town squares fill with Christmas markets. In many families the main celebration and presents come on the evening of 24 December, not the morning of the 25th.

A misconception worth dropping

Germans are sometimes pictured as stiff or humourless. Directness is often the better word: many people say exactly what they mean and expect the same back, which can read as blunt in a first letter and turn out to be refreshingly easy once you are used to it. The humour tends to be dry and arrives once you know each other.

Our guide to language exchange covers splitting letters between two languages.

Questions to start with

• Which state do you live in, and when do your summer holidays start this year?
• What does a normal school or work day look like, and when does it finish?
• Does your town celebrate Karneval, or is it something you only see on TV?
• What is on the table for Abendbrot in your house, if you have it at all?