Answering Anki

About a week ago, when I announced my tour de Europe, Chicago Anki asked me the following question:

Wow, you are doing a huge amount of traveling with in such a short time… Rotterdam is a beautiful place, not quite as old as Amsterdam, since it was more bombed during WWII, but still it is a very interesting city. Can I ask you a question? Do you miss the US? I mean not the fact that it is your home and that you left beloved people, but if so – what could you possibly miss? I am wondering, since I miss the lands Europe a lot, with all its liberal kind of attitude, the small villages, so the small streets, so all the tiny shops around the corner. Is it easier for an American to live in Europe than vice versa?

There is no simple answer to this question—I think it depends a lot upon the individual. I am better prepared today for international travel than I was ten years ago. Had I visited Armenia ten years ago, I probably would have gone into horrible culture shock the first day and never left the United States again.

I am rarely willing to make declarative statements about whether Europe (usually in terms of Germany) or the States is better.

For example, take eating out: In the United States one can get served ones meal relatively quickly. In Germany, eating hour can often be a multi-hour event—rarely is it possible to speed up service in Europe, whilst in the United States, one can slow down the service using both verbal and nonverbal techniques. The biggest difference is getting the bill, and in that case I don’t know which I prefer: In the US you get the bill as soon as your food arrives with the expectation that you’re leaving as soon as you take your last bite. In Germany sometimes you have to chase the server down and beg for your bill. It’s nice that in Germany you own the table for as long as you want, but paying can be such a chore.

Another place where I cannot decide where life is better is food shopping. In my experiences, in Germany you have lots of little supermarkets conveniently located all over the city, with a few large US style supermarkets somewhere on the edge of town. It’s possible to get from the store to home in ten minutes or so. In the States, I cannot think of a single place I’ve ever lived where there was a supermarket within a ten minute walk. In that sense, this is definitely advantage Germany. However the advantage is negated when you realize that your shopping must be completed by 8pm and that you have no hope to buy your groceries on Sunday. Advantage: United States.

I think there are some areas where moving from Europe to the United States, or vice versa, will be challenging no matter who is involved. I only have a vague sense of what Celsius temperatures mean, what a kilo weighs, how much a litre is, or how far a kilometer is: but this is an issue of how one is raised. Certainly from a scientific standpoint, the metric system makes a heck of a lot more sense—but for me 32° is freezing.

I don’t think I can make broad statements about liberal attitudes and the like in a universal sense. Certainly its less of an issue, in general, in Europe than the United States, but there are still places in Europe where I would hesitate to announce that I am gay: Poland, for example. I would be a bit cautious about announcing it in rural parts of Slovakia, or in the parts of Germany where the Neo-Nazis are getting more than 5% of the vote. Obviously I wouldn’t announce it too loudly that I’m gay in Idaho’s panhandle or, for that matter, the New Life Church in Colorado Springs. Simply put, there are just too many differences within Europe and the United States to be able to make a blanket statement.

In answer to the last segment of your question: I would say it is easier for a European to live in the States than the opposite, but mainly because Europeans are more used to shifting cultures within a short distance. In the amount of time it takes to drive from Chicago to New York City, one would cross at least two, if not three or four countries in Europe—crossing several linguistic frontiers, as well. Because this is common, the average European has developed a better set of skills to communicate with other people. Americans may have substantial regional cultural differences, but there are, in general, common linguistic and legal structures.