Being an American in Europe

I’ve been to Europe a lot. Since my first trip to Stockholm in 2010, I’ve probably been in Europe …25 times? I went six times in 2023 alone (two of those trips were one week apart).

I’ve been to a majority of the major cities. I think Madrid is the largest city I haven’t visited (though I have been to Barcelona and Lisbon). Poland is the largest country I haven’t been to (though I’ve danced all around it: Germany and Czechia and Slovakia).

To be clear, these were mostly all business trips. I did combine a trip to London with a week of vacation with my wife, and I often tried to get out and “see something” when traveling to a new city. But I’m was mostly working or speaking at events during these trips.

Someone asked me about the best way to “experience” Europe the other day. I thought about it for a while, I think there are the “Big Four” European trips:

1. The U.K. and Paris, meaning London for sure, and maybe Edinburgh and some places in Ireland (not actually the U.K., I know…)
2. Southern Europe, meaning Spain, the French Rivera, the Dalmatian Coast, Greece
3. Central and Eastern Europe, meaning Germany, Czechia, Austria, and Hungary (maybe Switzerland)
4. Scandinavia, meaning Denmark, Sweden, and Norway (throw in Finland if you want, but Iceland would likely be separate)

Do the U.K. and Paris trip first, then the rest in any order. In no way do I claim this is the totality of Europe, but given the four trips above, you can claim you got the major gist of it.

What’s important to acknowledge for an American visiting Europe for a typical stay is that it’s not that different than the U.S. People go there and think they’re going to get immersed in some wildly different culture, but understand that you’re still very much in the Anglo-Saxon world. Walking around Germany, for instance, is remarkably similar to anywhere in the U.S., apart from the language difference.

(And something else about language: lots and lots of people in Europe speak English, especially younger people in the larger cities. I’ve actually only ever been in a handful of cities where I couldn’t count on most people knowing English – Lisbon, Portugal; Dresden, Germany; and perhaps Prague, Czech Republic. And even in those cities, at least rudimentary English is pretty common among service workers in hotels and restaurants. Lots and lots of signage is in English)

Most of the “culture” you will experience in Europe is largely for tourists’ benefit. This is something called “heritage commodification.” You can visit traditional cultural events and such in any country, but know that they will exist primarily only because you – a tourist – are willing to pay to see them, either directly in the form of a ticket, in indirectly as an attraction to get you to spend money on other things.

You might be surprised, and a little depressed, to know that the girl dancing in the Oktoberfest lederhosen has never done it outside this paid summer gig and it feels as foreign to her as it does to you. Also her long ponytails are just clipped in, and she has tickets to see Rihanna this weekend.

(Here’s a story of how I wanted to get “genuine” Scandinavian food on my first trip over there, but my Swedish hosts had trouble even figuring out what that was. I’m writing this on the way back from a trip to Berlin, where, for whatever reason, I ate Asian food almost every day.)

This is now got me thinking about “culture” in general. What is culture? What makes you feel like you “experienced” another culture. Here are some ideas:

1. A different language
2. Different food
3. Different architecture and built environment
4. Acute differences in how the people act and react in the moment
5. Different media: music, films, art, literature
6. Enduring differences in how people relate to each other, institutions, and concepts

Numbers 1-3 are pretty simple, and you’ll see those right away.

Number 4 is a little more subtle, and you often won’t see it if you stick to hotels and restaurants and the tourist-ish locations where locals have adapted to make foreigners feel comfortable.

Number 5 likely requires some effort on your part (maybe not music, but I can promise you most of the incidental music you hear will sound a lot like what you hear at home).

To me, number 6 is where the deeper aspects of culture lie, and this simply requires time and effort to understand.

Also, I maintain that a non-trivial part of experiencing a different culture is feeling out of place in it. And – as awkward as it is to discuss – some of this is racial. If you’re a White person, walking around with a bunch of other White people, in, say, Copenhagen, you don’t subconsciously feel out of place – no one would even know you’re a tourist unless you opened your mouth. But drop into Central Africa and you’d be acutely aware at all times that you’re the person who is “not from around here,” and I suspect that’s part of the fascination of it all. You would feel very out of place, and you’d come away feeling much more exposed to something out of the ordinary for you.

(Though, I swear restaurant workers know you’re an American, just from looking at you. Quite often, a hostess will look at me walking in the door, and instinctively grab an English-language menu, before I’ve even opened my mouth. It makes you aware that there are different “flavors” of White Europeans. I’ve learned to look at someone and determine if they’re Scandinavian, for instance. Slavs are easy to recognize too.)

If you – as an American – want to experience wildly different cultures, then you really need to:

1. Go to Asia or Africa
2. Get out of the major cities
3. Get away from any business that makes money from tourism
4. Spend a longer amount of time there

Visiting London or Paris for a long weekend at a Marriot is really not going to take you out of your comfort zone. If you want to experience something very different, then spend a month working at some humanitarian organization in the rice fields outside Hanoi.

Europe is fun, but it’s rare that you see something and feel totally out of place. Many times, it could be any town in America. There’s a tendency to romanticize it with visions of magical castles and ceremonies and food, but then you find yourself grabbing something at a Burger King in some strip mall covered in graffiti, listening to a cab driver blast Coolio, and wondering if maybe you really just flew to Wichita by mistake.