😂😂 this was my first thought too. Never felt so relieved getting on an airplane for a 12h flight with a 4 year old as after that “vacation” at my parents’ house.

Unless you have a thick Slavic accent

Yeah that… that’s most expats. They have massive noticable accents. Even people who started learning their second language in school and practiced a decent amount since tend to have accents that will give them away instantly. And if you’re only learning the language as an adult, you can basically forget about trying to be “stealthy” and pass as a local.

My mother from Eastern Europe has lived in Germany for 30 years now. She came over for university, married a German, has only German friends and teaches university classes in German … She still has a noticable accent and gets comments (including really xenophobic ones) from students about it regularly 💀

Yeah I’m in a weird position where I’m half German, half Eastern European, though I grew up in Germany. I also lived in the “bad” part of town even though I’m from a family of academics, so I had/have friends from all those different “worlds”. It got extremely noticeable in secondary school, how native Germans - and especially middle class ones from the suburbs & villages - would generally not socialize with anyone outside of “their” bubble, and definitely wouldn’t date them.

Among working class German people in the city it’s can be a bit more relaxed, perhaps just due to proximity and also the shere amount of ‘non-Germans’/mixed kids in schools would make it more difficult to stay completely separate. But the middle class/rural folk mentioned above would probably call them “Assis” and not consider befriending, let alone dating, them either.

It’s a little different in University where it’s generally more diverse and I guess to some middle class ppl it also feels like the people attending are more…“vetted”, to put it bluntly. It’s expected that these are smart and educated people with decent job prospects and more similar interests. So it’s not as rare that a female student from Germany would date a male student from Romania who just moved there to study medicine or something, especially if his family at home are also educated middle class.

How do they know that you’re eastern European?

I mean…for the vast majority of people, the accent is extremely obvious no matter how long they live in the country (unless they moved there as kids and only socialized with locals basically) and also your name is going to give it away instantly - if not the first name, then 100% the last. And that’s more than enough to get rejected by a large number of people.