If I seem worldlier when you see me, it’s thanks to my recent J-term trip jet setting through Paris, Prague, Berlin and Amsterdam with a ragtag group of Elmhurst students. When I dreamed of myself in Europe, imaginary-me was incredibly stylish and nonchalant. Of course I would be wearing a dark trench coat and drinking coffee in Paris, or smoking a cigarette while staring moodily over Amsterdam’s glittering canals. It didn’t ever occur to me that I don’t smoke, rarely drink coffee, and don’t even own a trench coat.
My plans on being fashionable were mercilessly crushed in Paris. French women are not only impossibly slim and posh, but each one has mastered the art of cool indifference that makes them seem like the kind of women who have never worn pajama pants in public or eaten a microwave burrito. In short, I clomped through Paris like a rhinoceros in a thrift store t-shirt.
Any plans of European assimilation scattered like a flock of Parisian pigeons (the most fashionable birds in the world.) The longer we stayed in the City of Love, the more I felt like a bumbling Midwesterner. Everything gave me away, from my booming laugh to my scuffed sneakers. Even my conversations suddenly sounded like the dialogue from a King of the Hill episode. “Well, gol-dang, is that the Mona Lisa? This is just like the Da Vinci code, y’all!” I might as well have been draped with the American flag wherever I went.
Two years of high school French didn’t prepare me very well at all for my five days in Paris. Thankfully, I remembered how to order a ham sandwich, which has been proven to be the most useful survival phrase in any language.
I fared a bit better in Germany. After a few days, I mastered how to say “good morning,” “thank you” and “I would like some tap water.” In general, I fit in a bit better in Germany, whose culinary pinnacles involve filling one kind of meat with another meat. Germans are a bit more substantial than the French, so I no longer felt like a wooly mammoth crashing through a tea party. The only time I really felt alienated was when an elderly woman behind the counter at a bakery began screaming at me in rapid German as I tried to pay. When I couldn’t understand what someone was saying to me, I usually resorted to nodding and smiling. Grinning maniacally and jerking my head up and down fast enough to dislodge my brain, I piled Euros on the counter until she stopped screeching—anything to free me from her sudden explosion of rage.
Thankfully, I wasn’t on my own as I made a fool of myself across the European Union. Nothing forms friendships as solidly as stress, and the chaos of navigating four foreign cultures means my classmates and I are basically bonded for life. Navigationally, I can rattle off “Never eat soggy waffles,” but my inner GPS does me no good. Luckily, most of my group members could proficiently decipher maps, and they allowed me to follow after them like an oversized toddler. They could have easily ditched me somewhere in Prague, and I’d still be stumbling around trying to figure out how to convert koruna into dollars (I still have no idea how much money I blew in Prague).
Also thankfully, I was not only paired with a great group of kids, but a group who supported me when I inexplicably decided to talk with a Benjamin Button accent for 24 hours. Jet lag does strange things to people, and before long we were all resorting to strange ways to pass the time. In Paris, we bonded over a “draw the best beard” completion. In Prague, we built an epic fort from hotel sheets and curtains. And in Berlin, when we accidentally bought cookies instead of crackers, we topped them with cheese anyway.
Europe was astounding, beautiful and life-changing, but I’m not sure I could ever live there. I like knowing the secrets to the local Goodwill, and I much prefer our saccharine-sweet Diet Coke to Europe’s imposter Coke Light. The first thing I did when I arrived home, after hugging my parents, was head to Taco Bell. And somehow, the greasy faux-Mexican fast food tasted just like America to me.
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