Journalism

An early version of what I hope will end up as 2 May's "Notes from Abroad" column in Student Life, for the final piece in the last edition of the paper for the academic year. It's an abrupt ending--but I already cut out a page and it's still 300 words over the limit. Anyway, a bit of reflection about the time I have spent here:

A Taste of Euro-Pudding

London holds the last four months of my life. Working in a finance internship, my time has been measured by countless hours at the office or writing my thesis, broken up with pints among friends and espresso breaks with coworkers and vacuum-sealed sandwich snacks (all too often, they became dinner). Somewhere between the ritualistic daily pilgrimages on the Underground and the inebriated magnetism to “Joe’s” (the local Middle Eastern doner kebab shop), London and Europe worked their way into my very person. I approach my departure from London with a sort of fond exhaustion. This city has represented the best that urban life can offer—international flair, an abundance of both high and low culture, unique food, spectacular monuments, and verdant parks. Despite the fact that all this comes at quite a steep price and shuts down by midnight (although that’s not what the clubbers at Fabric and Ministry of Sound will tell you!), London leaves you breathless with delight and wonder.

But London has hardly been the sum of my experiences. The city, arguably ingrained deeper into the global fabric than any of America’s cities, is a microcosm of modern Europe. It is a Europe awash with new ideas jostling up against old traditions, waves of new immigrants stirring their rich cultural heritage into the pan-European mix, and people young and old questioning the old definitions of nationality and ethnicity. A Londoner finds this new Europe in the Brick Lane curry shops, the Thai food being served in the local pub, the schnitzel cart in Notting Hill, the Greco-Turkish restaurants in the city’s pedestrian markets, and the explosive growth of Chinatown. Arab royalty and Russian oil tycoons are snapping up London’s mansions and football teams; its newspapers and perhaps, soon, even its vaunted stock exchanges, are foreign owned. London is not an English city—it is Europe’s ambassador to the globe.

However, my true experiences interacting with Europe’s dynamic cultural landscape came not so much in London, nor in the EU capital of Brussels, but on the fringes of this supranational organization’s borders. The veritable backwaters of Slovenia and Croatia played host to my observations of the forging of a pan-European identity among the Continent’s youth. Just as in the film L’Auberge Espagnol, Europe is alive and vibrant.

Slovenia and Croatia were once sister provinces under the Yugoslavia flag, but the wounds of the Balkan conflict have left the two countries on opposite sides of the EU border. Slovenia is a proud and rising member; Croatia impatiently waits outside, its admission held up by a loose war criminal. My 11 day tour of these two countries—plus Trieste, Italy and Vienna, Austria on either end—was filled with all the foibles and adventures expected to be faced by two bumbling Americans who barely spoke a word of the language and who had the audacity to rent a car—accidental border crossings, driving through pedestrian zones, finding ourselves on every type of road imaginable, downing a liter of wine (each) at a wine garden in Vienna… it goes on. But this remains peripheral, a plethora of personal memories.

The most valuable part of this journey was our direct interaction with the future of Europe—the dreamy idealists that are the twentysomethings of Europe. In Ljubljana, we stayed in a converted prison, now a vibrant hostel. During the first night, I ended up conversing with a girl from Lithuania for about 2 hours about European federalism, the Baltic states role in the EU, and life and culture in Lithuania. Now this was in Slovenia, a continent’s length away, and the conversation was in English—my first language, her fourth. This is the new borderless Europe. You even have to specifically ask to get your passport stamped—we see entire nations opening their borders almost to the level found among the different states of the American union—simultaneously, we see America closing down its own borders. We see the difference between a culture of hope and a culture of fear.

This culture of hope manifests itself even further in Croatia, where the people have suffered through a long and bloody war from which Slovenia was able to extricate itself without any real involvement. Much of early the 1990s was spent with Serbia (Yugoslavia) and Croatia fighting back and forth, and the country still bears these scars. Somehow we found ourselves in the apartment of very distant cousins of mine in our first night in the country. I’d essentially never spoken to them before, and yet here we were, just talking about life over some local beer: communism, war, dreams of the EU, the aforementioned war criminal, the marketing industry in Croatia, school, music, clubs—people living life. My cousins had the bright fire of hope in their eyes—the same hope that carried my great grandfather to this country today fuels their spirits in their drive to join the pan-European fabric. This bright fire of hope is what fuels modern Europe, and it is this spirit that has touched us in our brief time this side of the Atlantic.