Quote Originally Posted by FirstHousePooka
Funny story.

I travelled to Germany at 14 on a school trip.
In the small town where we stayed we were stared at and watched quite a lot. It was particularly bad for the phillipno girl and aboriginal boy in our group. Daniel (the aboriginal guy) got pointed at by locals a fair bit. He said he didn't really enjoy it at all.
Funny indeed. Some people already mentioned similar experiences in Germany. When I was studying in Germany, people assumed so much I was a local that they didn't even check my passport at the airport, asked me their way (in German, of course), etc. So it could be that more German stare at non-Caucasian people, or maybe the problem was that you were a group of non-German speaking people and might have been noisy or not have respected so German social rules (did you know that many German cities forbid to take a shower or listen to (loud) music after 10pm. In some places, dogs are not even allowed to bark between 10pm and 6am).

Anyhow, did German people answer to you in English when you tried speaking German to them ? Where you met by gestures by people who didn't speak English (well) ? Did people in the street shout "Hello America!", "foreigner, foreigner !" or other inappropriate comments because your group spoke English ? None o these things ever happened to me (I stayed 4 months in the country + some travelling around), even at the beginning when I was just babbling a few words in German. The staring part alone is quite sunjective I think (some people don't notice it, other imagine it).