As a departure from MC’s obsession with the way in which Spaniards walk (it is pretty insane, however we’ve received new evidence that it’s a Mediterranean issue and not a Spanish issue), we have a new topic to discuss: what the rest of the world thinks of Americans!

(I can hear the collective groan all the way over here)

I’ve had a couple interesting experiences in the past few weeks that have shed some light on the rest of the world’s opinions about the US and have actually made me feel a little bit better about international relations.

First of all, I, apparently, do not look American. Last Thursday, a Swiss girl from our school came up to me in a bar and asked me a question in German (after which I stared blankly at her for about a minute and a half thinking ‘oh, please, please, please don’t let my Spanish be that bad!’), and once we got the languages figured out MC asked her why she automatically spoke German to me. She replied that she wasn’t sure where I was from but that I don’t give off an American vibe, and she thought I might be German. So apparently I’m either Dutch or German depending on whether I’m sitting or standing. (I was standing when the Dutch tourists approached me and sitting when the Swiss girl approached). We were talking to her for a while when she said, completely unprompted, that she thought of America as a country of extremes. We have the fattest people in the world and yet so many people with anorexia or bulimia; we have such huge differences in political beliefs among citizens; so much of what the rest of the world sees comes from Hollywood so it’s rife with all kinds of extremism; and even our landscapes are extreme in the sense that our country is huge, our climate is varied and we have such extreme topography from the Grand Canyon to the Rocky Mountains to Death Valley all the way to Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp. She then said that it was very strange to meet someone from the US who is just normal and like any average person from Switzerland or France or wherever. I wasn’t quite sure how to take that, but I think it’s a good thing. Mom? Dad? I’m officially average! And I’m out spreading my American averageness to the rest of the world!

A few days later in class, my teacher wrote “America,” “Holland,” “Portugal,” and “Russia” across the top of the board. (My class consists of, at the moment, girls from Russia, Holland, and Portugal, a boy from Georgia – that’s Republic of, not the US state – and a guy from England. That day however, it was only us girls in class). He then turned and said to me (in Spanish, of course), “Al, what are Americans like?” To which I choked a little on my water and replied, “What are Americans like or what does the rest of the world think Americans are like?” Basically, we were learning adjectives, so each person had to come up with a bunch of adjectives to describe people from their own country. Of course, as we got into the exercise, the other girls became more willing to give their own adjectives for what Americans are like. Among them were fat, loud, tall, patriotic, friendly, open, religious and proud. As we went on for each country we discovered a lot of really interesting things. My impression had always been that most Europeans are pretty patriotic, but at least in Spain and Portugal, that’s not completely true. The other thing that I’ve discovered is that WWII is still at the forefront of a lot of Europeans’ minds. I’m in class with girls that are in their early, early twenties who bring up WWII all the time when talking about relations between European countries. Once WWII was brought up during this discussion, the Russian girl said to me that she thought Americans were very proud because we had defeated fascism. (To which my first thought was, “actually most people seem to be more upset about the whole not defeating communism thing than helping defeat some fascism in Europe,” but decided to keep that to myself). I said that it’s very different in the US because we didn’t suffer like Europe did in WWII, so to us it seems like a long time ago. I think the men and women of that generation were proud to serve their country and proud of helping Europe, but we’ve had so many wars since then that the threat of fascism seems like something from another world and a completely different time period. (Okay, so I wasn’t so eloquent – I had to speak completely in Spanish!) I then went on to say that the current mood for a lot of Americans is actually shame because we’re embarrassed about the situation in Iraq and our imbecilic president and we feel like the rest of the world hates us. The response to this was overwhelmingly positive – according to all of my classmates and teacher there is too much history to just think of the current president and the mess we’re in. They know that a lot of Americans disagree with the war and when they think of America, they think of the people they’ve met from the US who have all basically been friendly, open, tall, and patriotic.

So in summary:

1) I don’t look American.

2) America seems like a big, extreme country to the rest of the world.

3) The rest of the world doesn’t hate us! Yay! (Edited 28.04.08 – Okay, I may have spoken a little soon on this way. The rest of the world doesn’t hate us, per se, but we do have a bad reputation. poop.)

-cuptastic