Berliners walk faster than New Yorkers? I have my doubts. From my personal experience - being a fast walker myself -, I always found Berliners very very slow. Unbelieable slow, compared to the size of the city. New Yorkers are much faster, at least in Manhattan, where I have some walking experience - in Manhattan I feel like an average walker. Washington, by the way, seems to be even faster.

Anyway, it's interesting to see that the transatlantic relations in the last days get more and more underpinned by the revelation of, to say so, socio-physical facts: Germans are taller, as I could read here, and Berliners walk faster than New Yorkers. Germans will like to hear that.

What they will not like to hear is that, according to other media reports, Germans today are as fat as the Americans now. (For example here: http://www.tagesschau.de/aktuell/meldungen/0,1185,OID6643318_REF2,00.html).
The fat American is a core topic in Germany, since decades. This fatness underlines the lack of culture, together with death penality and other typical American habits.

Now the Germans are as fat as the Americans. What a shock.