By Shanil
When I first started to write this blog post that’s supposed to be focused on my identity, I wrote about how being a gay Pakistani-American Muslim affects how I perceive the world and how it’ll affect my time abroad. However, seeing as how I’m going to be in England at a fairly liberal school, it wouldn’t really be much different than being at GW. If I were in a Muslim country or another area that wasn’t as safe to be who I am, it would make for some great reading, but while my background and history is interesting, I think my identity as an English-speaking American is even more interesting (and funny).
School doesn’t start at Sussex for another week and a half, so for two weeks my friend Anna and I are traveling around Europe to make the most out of our experience abroad. Our first stop was Paris and we’ve been here for a few days already. Coming into this city, we weren’t expecting any complications as tourists—especially when it came to dealing with my “identity”—but I quickly learned that there was more to my identity than I thought.
Instead of the Pakistani-American gay Muslim (& Democrat) parts of the identity that I focused on in my first draft of this blog post, it was just the American part of my identity that stood out the most to me in Paris.
Coming from a country where we are essentially the country to be, I was expecting to come to France, speak some English, get my way, and enjoy my time. I quickly realized just how wrong I was. It’s a damn good thing that I decided not to study abroad in Paris because I don’t know a lick of French, apparently. Those two years of French in high school did nothing for me here (well, using Google Translate to complete all my homework didn’t help much, either) because it took my friend Anna and I a whole half hour just to order some McDonald’s. MCDONALD’S.
We decided before leaving for Europe that we would try McDonald’s in every country to see the difference from the ones in the US. We entered one and realized that everyone uses machines to order their food. We walked up, changed the language to English, and began to order. While we could make out what everything was by the pictures associated with each item, someone from McD’s should really work on translating their items better because they clearly used Bing Translate or something—even Google would’ve done a better job. We jumped over the hurdle of getting the order in but met an even higher one—paying for it. To our dismay, THERE WAS NO ENGLISH OPTION ON THE CREDIT CARD READER. Without a functioning SIM card, we couldn’t even try to translate it. We kept putting in the card and hoping it would work and after four attempts, we gave up and walked back out. Fast forward to when we came back: we finally got the credit card to go through, but now we had to figure out what “52” was in French. We had no internet so we basically just waited around until no one went up to grab an order and finally made it out with our dignity partially intact. Total time spent: half an hour.
This is just one of the examples of how my identity as an American precluded me from realizing that I can’t just get away with English everywhere and have everyone understand my language because it’s the one that’s supposed to be used all around the world. Don’t get me wrong—I know that every country has its own language but I did think that Paris would be a lot more English-speaking. Instead, this trip has been filled with us (but mainly me) playing the stereotype of the dumb, English-only speaking American. This kept happening every time we wanted to buy food, shampoo, or even clothes—the employees at H&M weren’t very helpful in helping me deal with that French credit card reader, either. I went from feeling entitled to all the freedom and, well, amazingness that America has to offer to being the odd one out who doesn’t know how to get the waiter’s attention without being rude. Side note: do they ever bring the check around or are we supposed to go up to them? They take so damn long to get it to us.
Now, I was supposed to cover a little bit about my identity that didn’t have to do with being abroad, so I’ll still post about it once I’m in Brighton. For now, though, being an English-speaking American is probably the strangest part of my experience in this foreign city. Rome and Berlin are next—it’ll be interesting to see how we do at McDonald’s the next two times.