I am entering the metro, not expecting anything. I am on my way to my internship. It sit down in the crowded metro, everybody is dressed in business clothes, looking really important. The women next to me starts talking to me..about something random. I don’t even remember what it was. We end up having a nice conversation. We have maybe 10 minutes. We talk about random things that are randomly important in our lives. She is working for the government, I think the department of state. She is just going to leave for South Africa. I get excited and teach her some Zulu words she can use while she is there. We are having a good time. I am talking to someone that I have not known 10 minutes ago and that I will maybe never see after 10 minutes of talk. And still. It changes me. It inspires. Broadens my horizon. It opens up a world that I have not seen so far. Someone working for the government, having a nice job to travel. And still. It is the contact to that random person that is sitting next to me that counts. I remember her way of talking and how her face changes when she speaks about her trip. And how she enjoys meeting someone that had been there and shares her excitement.
This is what I love. This is what I love about the US. And this is just one random story in the whole picture. It happens to me almost every day. I have met so many interesting people that I could almost write a whole book about it and on the other hand it is just a little drop of all the possibilities, of random face-to-face conversations with people that I meet, that leave me more inspired, that sometimes open up more questions for me. The one thing that I really enjoy about being here is that it is so easy here to meet people. To talk to random strangers. Many Germans would call it superficial. “Oh Americans are always asking “How’re you doing?” And in fact they don’t care about the answer.” That’s maybe half true. It is more a greeting than a real question, what I sometimes just forget. Then I start talking about my day and bla bla…
But what is nice, they listen. I like the friendliness, just the little things. Like saying “Thank you” to a bus driver that you don’t know. Or people saying: “Hey I love your earrings” like the lady behind the glass house in the metro station while I was just passing her. This is so much more the way I feel, I think than the German attitude of not saying anything, not being really friendly until you know the person sitting in front of you. Germans always say Americans are superficial because they are friendly but you never know what they are thinking. I don’t get that vibe. I can feel the general friendliness and the difference when someone really likes you. It is just another way of communicating. I don’t want to marry my bank account manager that took the time to sit down with me for half an hour and talked with me about almost everything. Maybe I will never see him again. But what I will remember is the face-to-face conversation that I had with him. How he appreciated me by just being friendly. And you know what. That’s all I want. Because it makes me smile, and appreciate this moment, the person sitting there, appreciate life.
I mean there are also people that I meet that become friends, friends with whom I hang out now every weekend. Friends that I met eating a falafel. We ended up having a deep conversation about life, ex-boy friends and culture in general. Now I meet them every other weekend and could not imagine my time here without them.
“A stranger is a friend that I just don’t know yet.” I like this attitude. And this is why I really enjoy being here. Actually I get sad when I think that I have to go back. But while I am here “I appreciate it”. This kind of became my favorite sentence. Just a random note from a random stranger in a random situation. Just random.
I know this is just a very little episode of what I experience here. But it gives you an impression. Many people were asking me for a new blog entry..so sorry for all those who waited. Take care.
