“I wish I was back in Barcelona! Its fantastic there, the people are so beautiful! The sun is always shining and the culture is fabulous!” Jane Hoya is especially enthusiastic about her dearest Espa?a, and it sounds like a very nice place, but I sure am tired of hearing about it. Ask somebody what they did over spring break: “Oh, it was awesome! I flew over the pond Saturday and spent the week in London. Ate some fish and chips, saw some theatre, and the foreign restaurants there are just great! I went to this French restaurant and had this meat pie called Gratin?e de Coquilles St Jacques, one of the best meals I’ve ever had.”
It seems to me that everyone on this campus suffers from a terrible culture shock of living in the United States. I know that the School of Foreign Service basically breeds the international connoisseur that is as commonplace as canned tomato sauce at O’Donovan, but the entire school, from the mossy depths of the business school computer lab to the sterile peak of the cross of St. Mary’s seems to have been mysteriously transported from Europe to the United States, judging by their inhabitants at least. The sheer volume of E.U. citizenship hopefuls on this campus is mind-boggling. Why does everyone here love Europe so much?
I don’t feel like I’m a stranger to Europe; I’ve been to the continent twice and the United Kingdom once. I’ve seen the Tower of London, I’ve seen Munich. By the standards of this school I’m little better than the farmer that never travels more than 10 miles from the place he was born, but I consider myself to have joined the ranks of globe-trotter. But I think my travels have suffered from a fundamental anomaly: I’m happy to be home when I get back to the good-old U.S. of A. I had family living in Germany until my senior year of high school who we’d visit, and we’d get the real experience instead of getting a Eurail pass and backpacking across the glorified Asian parasite that calls itself a continent. It was a great experience, except for the unfriendliness of the people, and how an angry neighbor cornered my aunt and yelled at her for not sweeping her portion of the sidewalk. I also liked how my aunt came to pick us up, but had to come knock on the door to get us because it is against the law to honk your horn, lest it disturb the neighborhood.
But Switzerland was much better: We met a very nice trucker who helped us pull our car out of the ditch after we went off of the icy road; we had been sitting by the side of the road for more than an hour. He was quick about helping us though, apparently we were breaking some law by losing traction on an icy road. I won’t even go into detail about Austria.
But maybe my experience was a poor one. When I hear people pining for their European trips like lost lovers, they are usually speaking about the western coast of Spain, France and Portugal, or Italy, which I admittedly have never visited. They might really be as great as everyone says they are, though I’m already sick of paella just from hearing so many people talk about it. I don’t think that is really it though; in fact, I might go to Spain this summer to work on Spanish, and my opinion might change completely, though I doubt it.
I have not done a statistical analysis, but I think that this infatuation with Europe may be correlated with the prominence of New Englanders among students. I know if I was from New Jersey I’d travel a lot, and Europe is “right across the pond.” It seems to me that New England, that patch of America where the Interstate system becomes tightly woven and a small town can be a suburb of two cities simultaneously, is very aptly named. None can deny that the people of the West Coast hang out and do their own thing; their culture is uniquely their own. It may be a byproduct of their brains being melted by the heat, but no place in the world is like California (except perhaps southern Oregon). The mid-west is quintessentially American: hard-working, conservative and blue-collar. They work hard, drink hard and try to do better for their kids than their parents did for them, generation after generation. The south, within which I will hesitantly include Texas for the sake of brevity, does its own thing as well: barbeque, guns, wide open spaces and a respect for traditional roots.
New England, on the other hand, takes its roots to the limit. As the first area colonized, I suppose it’s not surprising that it has retained a large part of its European quality. I once joked that Europe was about a year behind on fashion and was sharply rebuked; apparently, what is all the rage here began in Paris. It seems like the entire region is a mirror of Europe. The Big Apple alone is akin to a confederacy of the neighborhood-sized versions of its citizens’ original homes. Even the little houses in Georgetown, lined up without enough room to slide an index card in between them, are reminiscent of the Amsterdam that I’ve heard so much about. If I hear one more rapturous comment regarding the liberality and sumptuous bounty of narcotics that that city is known for, I just might scream.
I like America; it makes me happy. I like how people work the entire day and don’t take a siesta between the hours of two and five. I like how our population is far from homogenous and uniform. I like how big it is. I like our lumbering giant mentality. I like how we inundate our television with Viagra commercials but become outraged at the sight of a woman’s breast; it is how we are. I would never go so far as to say that we don’t need European culture. I am a huge proponent of the melting pot theory, throw all the cultures together and enjoy a tasty mixture, nearly as good as paella is supposed to be. I’m just tired of hearing schemes to get an E.U. citizenship by marrying into a Finnish family.
Michael J. Bruns is a first-year in the Business school and business manager of The Georgetown Voice. He is no barbarian.
