America to Europe: you miss the damnedest things

I moved from Seattle to Barcelona. Sometimes it’s subtle. For instance…

The coffee. I find myself in a cafe and I want a hot coffee; it’s in my blood. But the menu reveals only espresso after espresso. There’s nothing wrong with that; sometimes a small espresso or mixed beverage hits the spot. Sure some specialty coffee shops have a filter; but these are few. But on those breezy mornings when you go to work, you want to clutch a paper cup and smell the filter and just have a damn hot coffee and remember.

The roads. Cars only amble down streets; there are few. It’s a blessing to be able to walk to work, to walk the whole city, but I miss the roads. To go from one town to another was once common: you could see the mountains and the trees and the sprawling size of it all. Now I know these streets better and better, and the urban layout becomes familiar, the skinny side-streets, old buildings revealing small beauty in how hidden they can be. But I miss the roads. There are cars, but few young people can afford them, and you don’t need to drive so much. How the roads go on and on…

Sometimes it’s less subtle…

The optimism. That is not to say people here are unhappy; they are quite happy. They take pleasure in the small things where Americans, perhaps, do not. However, there is a difference I have noted between the youth here and the youth there. Here, there is a revel in cynicism about the world and about the future. Sometimes it seems like a competition in cynical attitudes; perhaps it comes from greater global awareness. But, at least in the Pacific Northwest, while there is a general cynicism of politics (when isn’t there?), there is a joy most young people have when they gaze toward the future. There is hope. Where Europeans may see disaster brewing in accelerated technology, we sometimes see hope in that the ability to claim the future for us. Maybe we’re wrong.

The nostalgia. Nostalgia is as American as leather boots. We look back a lot; previous decades, the music of the past, the clothes that were once popular. Our fashionable clothes are frequently dictated by cyclical values in fashion. And we always trend toward the most American touches: denim, boots. There is a warmth and a melancholic nostalgia that dominates American culture; a warm gaze at our past and the eternal feeling of a bygone era. You see it in our films, our books, our art. We look back as much as we look forward; here, they live in the present. Nostalgia here exists, of course, but it is not as deeply entrenched as it is in America. Maybe we have warmer things to look back on. Or maybe we have effectively capitalized on those feelings and landmarks in history.

They are two worldviews. Not each European person is like this, nor is each American (or Barcelonan, or Seattleite). Of course. But these are some of the more immediate trends I perceive, maybe informed by my own worldview. I love it here. But damn…

I miss it all sometimes.