Things I Miss About the United States

I am at the juncture of being away from the United States for just long enough that, beyond appreciating differences, I am actively chafing at them. Wouldn't you know, even someone fraught with a case of wanderlust can show signs of having roots. Let's dive in.

• Food and the Culture of Eating Outside of the Home

The wide variety of flavors and textures from all over the world available in a matter of minutes, from which there is yet another array of options in which to take them is something I take almost for granted in the United States. If I want Vietnamese soup or Punjabi curry or sushi or soul food or Mexican dishes, whatever it is I'm in the mood for, it's available and not a hassle to come across there. Here, not everything is available—Vietnamese food is essentially nonexistent, Mexican food is Lusified to the point of not really tasting anything like Mexican food, and many of the other things I normally consume on a whimsy are either expensive or more of a hassle than they're truly worth it to find. Despite the fact of there being new and interesting things to try here, I miss being able to be bored by too many gastronomic options around me more than almost anything else. I miss being able to order things on menus with near-infallible reliability and the ability to order with minute precision; it is not uncommon for cafés and restaurants to be out of just one ingredient for something here, leaving options unexpected.

• One-Stop, 24-hour Shopping

Stores of almost any sort, any business enterprise for that matter, are not legally allowed to operate 24 hours a day in almost all cases in Portugal and across much of Europe. In the United States, the idea of a regular grocery store not being open 24 hours a day is something of an absurdity: take Wal-Mart, with its ubiquitous (if derided) presence in the country. Seldom is their modern store that is not open all hours of the day. 24-hour service is the norm, not the exception, and this has extended to the most common and largest grocery stores across the country, be they in the Kroger family, Safeway, or otherwise. Whole Foods is the only major exception I can find to this. Not only being able to go to the store at 2 AM on a whimsy, I can also find a surplus of varieties of every basic item I could possibly need at almost all of these same retailers, from personal hygiene and pharmaceutical needs to home goods office supplies, food, and everything in between. When we complain about a grocery store not having something in the United States, it's usually either because they don't have a particular brand of what we were looking for, or because we wanted a more obscure, niche-market item. I sometimes wonder about the availability here of things I wouldn't blink an eye about in Denver. I miss being able to get every small thing I need easily, without having to go to several stores, worry about the time of day it is when I'm going, worry about going on the wrong day of the week, or anything else along those lines.

• Sociability

The friends I have abroad are fantastic people doing interesting things in a plethora of fields, to the extent that my life is much the greater for having them in it. The day to day reality of living abroad, however, is that a lot of my interactions with friends and people in general involves surface-level linguistic interaction, difficulties in communicating, and in certain circumstances, contenting ourselves with the company of each other without actually communicating very much at all. I revolve around constantly learning from my environment and am prone to causing situations from which to learn from, to diving headfirst into things, and this includes language and the process of self expression, but perhaps the most valuable lesson I've learned recently is that the art of communicating with someone who speaks the same language natively and similarly shares your culture is not to be taken for granted. The way I speak English is entirely different with non-native speakers out of reflex because I find it grating to have to repeat myself because I talk too quickly in my particular accent or my Americanisms are lost on even very competent English speakers. I miss having a cultural and linguistic foundation from which to be able to better get into the nitty-gritty aspects of my character and connecting more closely with friends.

All of this and I still can't seem to want to stay put for very long at a time.

Things I've Learned at 21

• There will always be something broken at the end of the wild night out, no matter how inconsequential.
• Some people are flaky. Others just need an ice-breaker.
• No matter how subtle you think you're being, your roommates will always know what you're doing.
• The moment you decide to eat less is the moment all of the most delicious and unhealthy foods suddenly appear in your life.
• Hangovers and sleep are inversely correlated.
• A lot of learning languages is the art of bullshitting your way through interacting with other people who don't really understand you but don't stop you anyway.
• A man who continues to pursue you even after seeing you at your autopilot worst level of drunkenness is either a winner or very frustrated.
• The moment your age becomes one number larger never feels any different than the moment right before it.
• Economics lessons in inflation become personal when the average cost of a decent bottle of wine rises from 1.85€ to 2.25€.
• You should always counterbalance your questionable life decisions with a general scheme for accelerating the otherwise good things you have going on.

Cultural Identification

One of the hardest things to come out of the experience of studying abroad during my undergradutate career and living as a non-committed adult in Europe again thereafter has been the concept of reconciling what exactly the purpose of traveling this far and spending such prolonged periods of time away from my home country is. Coming from a country so large in which it is possible to live without considering the existence, much less the differences of, other countries and customs, to living on a smaller continent with a multitude, to a great order more, of cultural identities and differences is a lesson in what exactly an American cultural identity is and can be. To put it more simply, regional differences aside in the United States, there is a certain strength in the connected and continual nature of American culture throughout the entire country, and it is possible to grow up in the United States without perceiving that you belong to any specific culture whatsoever; the "default" exists so widespread around that it is easy to overlook how it is unique relative to others. A good example of this is the way in which we mistakenly tend to believe that our standardized accent, the "neutral" American accent featured in most news media and without extreme variation in large swathes of the country, is in fact "accent-free". Nowhere does this seem more obviously untrue than outside of that native context, in other words, in a place where what is taught (if not used in common practice) is a different variety of English. Relative to myself, as it were, is a creeping sense of assuredness in myself and my place on foreign soil.

I have spent a lot of time trying to "become European" by way of transforming my appearance and mannerisms so that at first glance I could be mistaken for a generic person from an unidentified European country, usually ascertained as from the north or east, and to a large extent that has worked. More importantly, though, this has been as an attempt to overshadow that which distinguishes me as obviously American. When I speak either French or Portuguese, I speak with good accents, noticeably foreign but hard to pin down as to their origins; I spend much time training myself to hear and emulate the sounds of each language both because I'd like not to sound like a philistine and because I find it one way of acknowledging that I make an effort to assimilate myself into my surroundings. Yet despite all of these things, my Americanness persists, and bit of it trickle down even so far as into my accent — the way I vocalize vowels tends to be more open and approximated than native French or Portuguese really allow — and it doesn't take much time to divine where I come from upon meeting me. Yet the reflection that has grown on me in my most recent months here has been to more fully own and embrace those things which make my American self come through. I have long since shed any pretensions of "becoming European", but what has happened in a more accelerated manner recently has been an acceptance of my role as The American within my social circles and managing the expectations that come with that against the reality of who I am when presented with the prospect of meeting new people.

Contrary to what we tend to fear when going abroad, my overwhelming experience has been that of interest and excitement in my cultural background as opposed to conceptions of ignorance and assumptions of folly. As opposed to sharp criticism, I find much more friendly comparison, regardless of where people come from. Instead of needing to exchange my culture for a new one, shedding the past and transforming myself into something new, the essence of what I am writing here is that I have come to realize a multicultural existence in which I am obviously foreign in any country other than my own, but my personal background is closely linked to a multitude of cultures, languages, and customs, and that is what I have to contribute regardless of where I am. It seems so simple once you reach a conclusion, doesn't it?