An American in Europe
American Matt Dysart explored Europe as part of a university exchange program. He shares his wide range of experiences from Amsterdam to Berlin and his unique approach to travel.
In the spring of 2011, I left Texas and spent three months in a study abroad program. My parents never thought this was something their middle child would ever consider doing, because being a middle child I am supposed to be an introvert who believes the rest of the world is my enemy, or something like that. But, after I convinced them that seeing and recording the wonders of the world beyond the four walls of my bedroom was my true calling – and after I further convinced them that a semester abroad was the same price as one at home – they let me go to the Center of European Studies at Maastricht University in The Netherlands.
I was going to live in a dorm room with the only guy I knew going with me, but the entire group found that it was easy to be fast friends in a place no one had ever been before. For most of us Americans, anything found in a movie was first pickings for our weekend trips. The male videographers found favor with the beer gardens in Berlin, Prague, and Copenhagen, while the female bloggers never noticed their over-using of the word “quaint” while reviewing their time in the streets of Paris, Bath, and Rome.
As for me, if you couldn’t guess already, I didn’t film for my Fraternity brothers or blog for the purposes of Facebook sharing, I kept a journal – you know, pencil and paper – that my parents gave me before I left. It’s rustic, leather bound with rough-cut pages sewn in by hand; and for those three months, it was never more than five feet from me.
Since I wasn’t recording my experiences like the typical American, I knew I didn’t want to treat my travels like one. Granted, I went everywhere my friends did, but I didn’t quite act like my friends did, not completely, at least. I wanted to act the way the locals did, to treat each city the way it was supposed to be treated, not the way Hollywood treats them.
We started in Amsterdam, only a two-hour train north of Maastricht. On the train and in the city, I noticed that Holland was a very misunderstood country, probably because no one could understand what anyone was ever saying. The Dutch are a wonderful people, kind and intelligent, but the language is quite the opposite, horrid and half-baked like the brownies at the coffee shops. You can add en to just about any English word and it’s automatically Dutch, toiletten was one of our favorites.
Bicycles are everywhere, and the city streets are designed around cyclists, so it’s almost a nuisance not to be riding one. You get your own, separately paved lane. When crossing any street in the whole country, car drivers are guaranteed to stop for you, and they don’t get angry and honk or straight-up run you over like they do in the States.
My Dutch Art History professor didn’t understand why every American gets a car when they turn sixteen, and my friends didn’t understand how no one in Berlin looked like a Nazi.
The thing about Germans is that they actually like Americans. Those in our group of… we’ll say a lesser intelligence… did what they could to avoid Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich because they thought Hitler’s family still ruled strong.
I can remember almost every conversation I had with a German guy or girl who was my age, I remember because they all started with me guessing their age, and always guessing wrong. And there’s a very simple explanation for that. Obviously, I grew up in America, with Americans, more specifically in an area of North Texas where wealth and privilege are commonplace, where maturity is measured by quantity instead of quality. So, it’s easy to see how I’d mistake an eighteen year-old in Germany for someone I clearly thought was much older.
Unfortunately, I made the same mistake among the young but beautiful women of Scandinavia. They don’t like it when college students offer drinks to teenagers. So, no, I did not find my wife like I thought I would.
By that time, there were still plenty of weeks and plenty of Europe left to discover for this little American traveller.
Matt Dysart is a recent graduate of Baylor University, Waco Texas. He has a Bachelor’s degree in English. Matt’s love for genuine literature and poetry lead him to the position of Staff Editor for an on-campus literary magazine and he continues to seek opportunities around the world to develop his writing.
