I recently attended an all-day foreign student seminar which was somewhat of a snoozefest, but during the last lecture my ears perked up once the question was asked: Being abroad, does that make you act more American, or do you try to hide yourself in a veil of pseudo-Europeanism?
It’s true that Americans tend to stand out like a sore thumb in Europe.
We’re the people in sweatpants, tennis shoes, North Face pullovers, flip flops and Ugg boots, with the names of our universities proudly displayed across the fronts of our sweaters.
Unfortunately, some people make the distinction a lot easier, and as I stopped to think about what the trip has done to my sense of patriotism, I kept thinking about one incident in
particular.
It was midnight and I was going out with two of my Barcelonian friends.
We were taking the night bus to the club when a row of American students piled into the bus. Without any room to sit down, they stood in the isle clearly drunk and talking loudly.
“I’m an Americaaaaaaaaaaaan,” one of the guys shouted, perhaps staking claim to his small space of realty on the Barcelona public transportation system.
Around this time I started to think: Oh my God, please stop, this is why they don’t like us.
I was hoping this inspired display of patriotism and embarrassment would stop.
Everything was fine until another one of the guys from the group stumbled and fell on top of me and my two friends, his face smashing up against the window.
They think we’re all party people who don’t know how to hold their liquor.
“Oh my God he’s so drunk,” his friends started saying, as they lifted him up without offering any sort of apology to us.
An older lady who was being smashed up against a rail and the line of rowdy students kept looking at my friends and me and shaking her head in a sort of sympathetic gesture. Maybe she doesn’t know I’m an American, I thought.
I exchanged glances with my friends as if to say “I have no clue what’s going on.”
Then I started to offer an excuse in an attempt to ease the awkwardness of the situation, “I don’t know what to say ... about some of us.”
No later than having said that I realized it doesn’t matter who these people are.
They could be Americans or indigenous members of the forest tribes of Timbuktu, the fact that we shared the same nationality said nothing about me or Americans in general.
I looked out the window just in time to see the guy who had, only two minutes earlier, been on top of us, fall out of the bus and roll into a gutter.
If they want to look like idiots it’s their prerogative, I thought. Although it sucks they have to evoke the name of my home continent while doing so.
So, do I find myself acting more or less American here? No, but I have a keener sense of being American.
It’s weird to think that I’ve developed a better understanding of what it means to be American 5,000 miles from home.
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