Things change quickly when you're backpacking through Europe.
The cute German girl who was sleeping in the bunk above you vanishes without so much as an "auf wiedersehen," to be replaced by a snoring, hairy Greek guy. Sometimes you have to stay awake for 40 hours at a time; other times, there's nothing to do but take a siesta. All of a sudden, you wake up in Paris covered in the aftermath of a hungry (and not dangerous, I'm still desperately hoping) insect.
Restaurants didn't open for dinner until 9 p.m. in yesterday's city, but tonight they're all closed by 8. Bratwursts and escargots and paella all sit in your digestive system at the same time, and that's only the stuff I could recognize and/or pronounce.
Languages, social norms and local customs blur past as fast as you can get your passport stamped -- thank goodness it's okay somewhere to have a mullet with dreadlocks in the back -- but through all this vicissitude, there was always one constant:
Me.
While brainstorming for what to write in this column, I was sure I needed some kind of overarching theme, a moral or lesson of some kind to take away from the weeks I spent traveling through Western Europe. I wanted to avoid the pseudo-catharsis of something like "It was a summer I'll never forget!" but still felt the need to impart something to the faithful readers.
However, after weeks across the Atlantic, I'm basically the same.
I have a beard, I'm covered in the aforementioned bug bites, I might be thinner and I'm definitely broke. I have a craving for Nutella-and-banana crepes that never existed before I left.
Other than that, I'm the same. It was a great experience and one I'd do again in a heartbeat with only minor itinerary changes, but I'm certainly not returning to America a changed man.
In the month or so between the end of the spring semester and the beginning of my trip, I listened to all of my friends returning from study abroad programs go on and on about their epiphanic experiences, putting up with their faux-worldliness only in the hopes that I might soon be able to sample a piece of the life-changing pie.
In the end, I sampled delicious baked goods in every city I visited, but of that ethereal pastry, I never had a taste.
I don't think it's because I have an especially resilient spirit or immutable personality either.
Amid all the museums and bike tours and 3 a.m. conversations with European teenagers eager to flex their English-speaking muscles, the most important thing I learned was that all those clowns who come back from Europe acting all cosmopolitan and holier-than-thou for having done so were probably clowns before their trips as well.
Basically, Western Europe just isn't that much different from anything you could find in America. It's easy to find dissimilarity when comparing any two cultures, but when you look at a whole bunch of them at once, the similarities become much more prominent than the subtle differences.
Adam Clair is a senior majoring in journalism and a staff reporter for The Daily Collegian. His e-mail is asc5014@psu.edu.
