I'm sitting in the airplane on my way to North Carolina. It's great – not just the plane, but this whole journey. The U.S. is so big and I'm just very happy to say that I have already visited five states. It may sound very fancy when people from Europe talk about all the countries they have visited, but it's not! I just need one hour to the Netherlands and two hours to Paris with the car. London is just 45 minutes away with the airplane, and tickets are very cheap.
As you can see all the countries are just very closely connected to each other, and Europe is still smaller than the U.S. Not just the structure, languages and cultures are different, but also the holidays.
We don't celebrate Thanksgiving in Germany. This is just really American. The food was amazing and I need to thank my host family for this awesome dinner and experience.
A dark history
Someone asked me if we celebrate Veterans Day in Germany. The answer is no, we don't. It would be weird to have it as a holiday, because Germany started both world wars. We have a lot of great achievements in our history, but those were huge gaffes. And I don't think the Germans would appreciate a day like this.
We have been followed by the history of World War II our whole academic life. We don't want to be reminded of it on our holidays, at least.
Jokes about Hitler and the singing of the banned verse from our national anthem are applied as humor; very bad humor. It's so weird to sit between people who are laughing and comparing Hitler with a joke. Watching 'Inglorious Basterds' in a movie theater in Germany was incredibly unpleasant. Everybody was looking around and the laughs were so uncomfortable that it almost hurt.
Students in Germany are followed by the history and rise of the Dritte Reich their entire academic lives. We start in elementary school and learn everything about Judaism; we read books about the Deutsches Reich and the prejudices against Jews in the early history in seventh and ninth grade. History in 10th grade is the most intense year. It's not just the Holocaust and World War II, but also the Cold War. The teachers are doing a good job, but at some point, you just get tired.
We know that it's important to know about the cruelty to prevent such a tragedy from happening again, but the young generation in Germany is educated, and a lot of us are political, and we study different ideologies.
We are not guilty for what the past generation has done. Furthermore, there are so many immigrants in Germany, especially from the Middle East. Of course, there are still groups and parties of neo-Nazis, but they are everywhere in the world. Just take a look at Great Britain and Russia.
Hitler also wasn't German – he was from Austria. But of course the students there have no connection, because at the end it didn't happen in their country. Squares!
Everybody (including me) who has chosen history as an intensive course in Germany reads “Mein Kampf,” Hitler's biography. Seriously, I think I will know him better than myself after my graduation!
Shopping!
Abercrombie & Fitch, Hollister and Victoria's Secret are music to the ears of Germans. There is just one Hollister in Germany. People would even buy completely ugly clothes just to have something from those brands. I have never thought that it would be so hard to find an H&M. In Cologne, there are six different H&M's on one shopping street. Here I need to drive 45 minutes and almost out of New Hampshire to find one.
I wish everybody merry Christmas and a happy New Year! Let's have some goals for 2011. I don't need to solve the Middle East conflict, stop global warming or become a millionaire. Let's start with little steps to make the world a better place.
There are just six months left for me in America – a half year to explore more.
(Bahar Mahzari is a German exhange student spending a year at Concord High. She hails from Cologne.)
