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Snapshots of Europe, 2010s
Notes from traveling in my 20s
Copenhagen, 2014: I’m staying at a hostel with co-ed dorms. It’s weird. One of my roommates is an Algerian man, who is about as uncomfortable with the situation as I am.
We talk, that polite small talk of strangers who have just met, from our respective bunks, ignoring the awkwardness of the situation.
Politics, life, movies, pop culture.
We talk about life, politics, movies. We get to know each other as best as we can, in the few short window between returning to the hostel and going to bed.
A few days later, we run into each other in the hostel lobby. A German man is playing “Country Roads” on his guitar in the background, the crowd singing along. Thousands of miles from West Virginia, everyone knows the words.
“I’ve been thinking,” he says, leaning in like he has something important to say as the crowd sings.
“You aren’t like the American girls in the movies,” he tells me.
I ask him what he means.
“Well, I think that most American women act like this:”
He holds his hands close together, indicating their small personalities, that they are quiet, demure.
