By sonyakalmin
The thousands of American/abroad students and other foreigners from outside the UK make up the majority of the student population here. I guess you could say Edinburgh hasn’t really altered my communal values. To a certain extent however I feel more comfortable identifying myself as a Ukrainian than as an American. Stereotypes flow freely across Europe, and as soon as my New York accent flies off my tongue I automatically get badgered with questions and comments. “Why would you ever leave and come here?” “I want to marry a New Yorker.” “How do you say ‘hot dog’?”
When I tell them about my heritage however, they seem to relax a bit. For instance, I ran into a group of Norwegian girls couple of days ago and they seemed to find my Ukrainian background strangely familiarizing. They even half-jokingly remarked that I could easily hang out with them, mostly because of my blond hair. It’s funny, the more complex ones ethnicity is the more interesting the person becomes here. Americans are plenty. It’s weird that we’re all classified as one. Kids here don’t inquire about our nationalities or that of our parents’. Instead, they place us into a totally different category, filtered in by our obnoxious English speech.
It just so happens that my friends and I travelled to Dublin this past weekend to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in all its authenticity. Astonishingly, we ended up running into not one, not two, but five of our friends from home. (And by home I mean America, just so we're clear). I’m not kidding. It was as if someone let loose the early 20 something’s of continental United States into the streets of Dublin, Ireland. In other words, it was a complete cultural buzz kill. We became just faces in a crowd. The Dublin experience made me wish to identify myself as an American even less, although I can’t say that the Irish hated us.
I guess what I want to get through in this blog post is that my identity did change over my time abroad. Maybe not internally, but externally I find myself wanting to separate from the ‘American’ filter and be placed into another independent category. Either way I’m loving every moment here, obnoxious speech and all.