Homogany

As someone who has never traveled anywhere outside the United States, I had fantastic images of what I thought it would be like to live in Europe. For one, I always pictured the lifestyle in Europe to be vastly superior to that of my consumerist and, perhaps at times, superficial American existence. I thought that I was going to find a life that would be more culturally open and diverse. After all in Europe one travels a mere handful of hours before passing the boundaries, which separate extremely different worlds. I think that this was one of the main reasons that when I uncovered the monotony which was presented in Belgium, I was taken aback.

When I am faced with the task of describing my Belgian friends to people I find that it is nearly impossible to find things that distinguish the majority of them. For example, almost all of the girls that I know at my school wear their long with bangs that start almost on the other side of their face and swoop across to the other side. They are about all the same height, the same body type, with the same kinds of clothes. A very popular style here is an all black wardrobe with large woolen scarves knit into circles. Let's just say that my large lumberjack plaid coat, bright green converse, and jeans stand out a mile away screaming "AMERICAN." In my first host home, I ate the same thing for breakfast every single day for five months. In my new home, I find that it is the exact same meal. Everything about my life in Belgium is the same everyday. There are certainly benefits to living this way. It is not as though it is not comfortable, it only lacks a space for change and sometimes for different ways of being.

One of the things that I must not have realized in the United States was the huge amount of diversity that it provides. There are countless opportunities to do a large variety of activities and have a large number of experiences. In addition one of the benefits of living in the United States is that one can change their way of life at any point in time. For example, one of the things that my new host family commented on the first night I came to live with them, is that in America, one can truly turn from rags to riches whereas in Belgium that kind of thing is much more rare. In addition, the way that people live varies greatly. My parents have been happily married for quite some time, I have a great relationship with my brother, and am a good student. One could say that I live a classic middle class lifestyle. However, I have friends who live both above and below my standard of living. At school one can find a wide variety of clothing styles and a bigger focus of being an "individual." Small or large things that make a person different are more desired, even if that means that a person will not be "just like everyone else."