I am lucky inasmuch that though I am English by birth and proud of it, I am of Asian ancestry and can get by in other European languages which makes it easy enough to distance myself from my more idiotic countrymen when required (another thing what annoys me is folk who insist everyone else must speak English when they are in a foreign country, although sadly I know very little of any Asian languages as both my parents grew up speaking English as they came from different racial groups in Malaysia which did not share common languages then).

As for sausages, they are a common thing across UK, DE other Northern European countries and the US. A German friend said that it wasn’t true they have better ones, there were as many poor quality ones and ones what contained dubious mystery meat (at least until the EU put a stop to some of them), many of these have shifted across the USA.

In some NL schools and colleges, an English teacher who teaches his pupils ropey English (Dunglish or steenkolenengels) is given a sausage as a mock award, because he is the “worst” English teacher 😉

I am aware of the type of sausage know_hope mentions and its method of consumption, but I think its only a certain type of sausage popular with the older generation.

Everyone else in North Europe eats sausages normally and in a rather more civilised manner. When I was in a hotel in East Berlin in 2001 for work (my then employers had a contract to revamp a local TV studio for Turkish people) they had this amazing contraption at breakfast which heated up bratwurst using a water bath below, not too much steam to make them damp and grey, and amazingly it was connected via a 2 pin Europlug yet made out of all stainless steel, and there is no way that could have been sold in DE with their strict safety rules as a class 2 (not earthed) appliance unless they had managed to make the whole thing electrically insulated. It would also be able to be plugged in from the 6A lighting circuit due to its low current consumption – maybe some Germans have breakfast in summer houses or log cabins or other places with limited electric supplies.

Anyway the combination of a 7am start and having drunk much Bier the night before meant that I made sure to eat as many of these as I could, the Germans must have been thinking “These English are half-starved in their country”. Also I had to call the UK to obtain a code for some software, and was so distracted by the food and the interesting gadget I completely forget my phone would be on the host nations dialling plan, forgot the 00 44 and rang up some random woman in Berlin who answered after just one ring and had to say in my best German “Entschuldigen Sie bitte, Ich habe ein falsche Nummer gewählt”.

When I got to site I had to download this new software patch, asked for a telephone socket and was promptly shown a ISDN connector. I had to explain that in the UK very few places had ISDN other than some music studio circuits or a E1 for a whole office phone system, I certainly didn’t have a terminal adapter card on my laptop and would need a old fashioned analogue line.

In the end I had to invade the CEOs office (which was like something out of a movie scene of a middle east dictator but he was actually a really sound chap), where there was a fax machine normally only used to communicate with Turkey and other developing nations. I managed to plug my laptop inusing the connection there and get the right damn number and not blast any more Germans with modem tones (which would be even more annoying in a nation were ISDN was more common) – at least the CEO wasn’t annoyed by this upheaval but found the antics of the “crazy English” highly amusing…to be fair they were really appreciative of the new equipment (thankfully they didn’t get any kit with a duff power supply) though I can see why other nations think Britain is a big backward..