Playing the Expatriate

Since coming to Vienna, I've been buying six eggs a week at the supermarket, saving them for the weekends, when I have the time to make myself a more elaborate breakfast, usually something between fully-loaded scrambled eggs and a messy omelet.  I look forward to this weekend meal as a bastion of Americanness in my week otherwise full of breakfasts of European cereal, bread, and espresso (I make good old American filtered coffee too).

This morning, my roommate joined me in the kitchen  to have a smoke as I was cutting green peppers .  He saw what I was making and said, "So typisch Amerikanisch," (so typically American) in reference to my eggs.  He smiled as he said it.  I told him "Das ist das einzige Frühstück" (This is the only breakfast).  This spurred what has probably been the deepest conversation that he and I have had so far, regardless of the fact that it only lasted as long as his cigarette.  Still, it felt good.  Nowhere has the language barrier been more apparent than between the two of us.  In close quarters the fact that neither of us speaks the other's native tongue too well is a large contributing factor to ongoing awkward silences.  The other factor would be that my roommate is a lot more like an American frat boy than I have ever been; we just have different lifestyles.

More important than this little conversational breakthrough was the fact that his words about being typically American stuck with me and not in a bad way.  So often used to being categorized as the norm, the un-exotic, it felt nice to be labelled culturally in a non-negative way.  For god's sake, I felt proud to be making scrambled eggs!  What a nice little epiphany.  I have culture!  My study abroad experience has been peppered with little moments like this, moments where, far from feeling ashamed for coming from the land of President Bush, I feel proud to be different and to share my differences.  I always enjoy a reversal of perspective and it's nice to be on this end of the cultural see-saw.

When I asked my tandem partner in Schwäbisch Hall, she told me that most Germans make the distinction between the people of a country and its government.  Of course, of all people, Germans do not want to be equated with their government, specifically their past government, so perhaps they as a people can better appreciate that kind of open-mindedness.  Still, I always expect the anti-American sentiment and have been pleasantly surprised again and again to meet people as open-minded as I'm trying to be.  

This week, for our German Idiomatic and Grammar class, we visited with the students from one of our professor's other classes in order to talk about cultural differences.  I sat in a circle with two of my American friends and four Austrian girls majoring in Economics and just talked about life in our various countries.  I asked them what their picture of America was (I seem to have a preoccupation) and they said, of course, that Bush hadn't made it look so good, but that they all found America interesting.  A few of them are even planning to study in Oklahoma and South Carolina.  I was yet again, pleasantly surprised.  It's nice to meet people and connect with them as human beings without the lines of nationality being drawn between us.

Of course, these moments are tempered by others that are less than uplifting.  I've said to a few people, both back home and here, that it's really nice to be abroad right now, not because the purchasing power of the dollar is crap, but because I can see the pre-election hemming and hawing from a distance.  From here I feel like an observer, like I am far enough away that I can make a more impartial judgement on what I see.  There's truth in that, but it's really an idealist and, ultimately, unrealistic sentiment.

I've been surprised to see how closely the politics in America is watched by the people of Europe.  I guess it shouldn't be that surprising, considering the amount of power America wields... Europeans - indeed, people from all over the world - have almost as much invested in the outcome of the 2008 elections as we do!  Thusly, they can't very well be impartial, at least not any more than we can.  

I say all this, I suppose, because what I'm trying to get at is this: for all the countless times I've been pleasantly surprised at the open-mindedness of Europeans who don't automatically hate me because I'm American, I still see the headlines with terms like "cultural imperialism" and "anti-Americanism."  There was a lot of anti-American graffiti on the wall outside the supermarket in Scwäbisch Hall, too ("F*ck america" and so forth... I meant to get a picture of myself pretending to pee on the wall, but I never got around to it).  This is another side I'm not used to being on... a minority.

Whenever I see something like this, or read an article like this, it makes makes me question my patriotism.  If the anti-American voices are not that numerous, why are they so loud?  Certainly some - maybe even a lot - of it is unfounded, reactionary, even radical, but there has to be something there to provoke that reaction.  It makes me feel ashamed whenever I see America portrayed as the bully, but the tough reality is that it is.  We've forced our will on too many people in to many places and we've lost friends because of it.  Sure, there's a distinct difference between Americans and the American government, but its our apathy, our complacency, our addiction to prosperity that allows that government to make such a negative image for itself.  

That's the appeal - for a lot of people and for me, personally - of Barack Obama and his campaign of "hope," but it's not that simple.  That's the reality I've been struggling to face for a long time and which has come to the foreground since I've been abroad.  Nothing is that simple.  I've always been patriotic; it's the way I was raised.  But I've had to come to terms with that patriotism, had to rationalize it and what it comes down to is that it's just not that simple.  Nothing is black and white.  It's true for any nation: there's a lot to be proud of and plenty to be ashamed of.  I haven't really found an answer and I don't know if I'm any closer to one, but these are just the things I see.  Coming to terms with the fact that sometimes there just isn't a simple straight answer is, as cliché as it sounds, part of growing up and it's something I've been staring in the face since January.