Late Tuesday night... well early Wednesday
morning... I participated in an event that I suspect all (if not most) US
citizens did: election watching. I expect that I was like everyone else at the
beginning, nail biting and on the edge of my chair, watching the state races
and Electoral College votes unfold. However, this time was also different from
2008 election, when I was huddled in a friend’s college dorm room, completing
engineering homework and anxiously awaiting election results; myself, another
ex-pat, and two other Germans drowsily watched the elections, just wanting to
stay awake until our questions were answered, and not another minute more. In
the end, we didn’t make it through, but luckily woke up just in time to watch President
Obama’s acceptance speech.
Living in Germany, I am very humbled by
foreign interest in national issues such as hurricane Sandy, the election, and
even our healthcare system. Sometimes, I’m simply amazed at how much people
know and other times, I’m slightly embarrassed at how far some of the more
‘erroneous, biased facts’ tend to reach (and also, this). Whatever the case may
be, I still try to bring in relevant and personal observations about my culture
into discussion. My hope is to add dynamic to the conversation and (hopefully) portray
the U.S. in a different light from mainstream European media. (The link is to an opinion article).
Interestingly enough, mention of the U.S. has
managed to sneak into almost all of my lectures at the University. Most of the
time, the U.S. is used as a comparison to highlight a difference in political ideologies
(and court cases) and other times it’s American research and terminology. It always catches me off guard to listen to a German lecture and then have a few very familiar phrases thrown into the middle of sentences.
