After a lo-ong few weeks, we are back in the US o'A. We've had a pleasantly surreal few days here in Seattle, in our own country but feeling as foreign as could be. We seem to require a brief retraining on the basics of American culture. The things which bothered us in CH somehow became normal. Now, for instance, I must remind myself that eye contact is not creepy.

The niceness of the US, Seattle in particular, must be overwhelming for complete newcomers. Why would the guy giving my sandwich tell me to "take care" in such a nice way? Why! And the constant smiling! Where do they come up with all the extra energy for this? It may be a sign of idiocy in some cultures, but to me it represents a kind of openness and care I never really noticed in my own people before. I am enjoying this generous perspective at the moment – beatific, really.

Though Swiss Ms. has plenty of other observations about Seattle, she's not sure whether she will continue public broadcast of them in the future. There's a time when enough is enough and one commentator more may be one commentator too many. (Also, it's hard to be a luddite and a blogger at the same time.) But she thanks you kindly for your attention and interest over the past few years and wishes you well in your own endeavors at home, abroad, or hovering interstitially in the blogosphere. Also, she heartily suggests, should any opportunity to escape your daily grind for a season or so arise, that you take it. A bit of early retirement is good for the soul, completely worth paying for later.

In which Swiss Ms. relates some real-life daydreams, gets temporarily nostalgic about weird things, and grudingly admits to missing her homeland

Sometimes I really long for a few American-style errands to run – the soothing and mindless Saturday morning kind. Slip into the car, catch familiar NPR voices in between purposeful jaunts, sip a coffee maybe, stop in somewhere you never have time for during the week, buy a book on World Religions from a yard sale, avoid the baseball traffic, put on Dick Biondi if the errands take too long and Garrison Keilor shows up. Or walk down to Kim's Hardware, overpay for a specialty tool, write a check for the box of vegetables next door, and stroll home. (Actually huff my way home, since I am carrying the big box of vegetables, but feeling pleased about the exercise I won't have to do later. Also everyone will be impressed and feel guilty when they hear I've done it myself.) I can think of a thousand versions of Saturday morning and somehow they all seem pleasant to me. Especially if we happen to run into Kim and Ryan.

I am overlooking the hateful truth in these real-life daydreams, of course. That is, that errands always take longer than you think, chomp up your fresh weekend energy, and leave you really hungry in the middle of the afternoon with a stupid amount of time left in the day. Distance makes the heart grow fonder, my mom recently pointed out, even of inanimate objects. I guess we can add "horrible and grueling tasks" as well. Maybe this is why I also feel nostalgic about cleaning graffiti off our building? And why people run more than one marathon?

The real story is that, despite loving so many things about the lovely lifestyle and setting and culture here, it is about time to come home. It's hard for me to admit that, by the way, like I'm exposing some sissy weakness. I never was the kid crying to go home at the end of camp, I swear. I was the one conspiratorially telling my parents in the car how some suckers actually had to call their parents in the middle of the week. It's not really about the errands or having a car or writing checks (which if nothing else is way more satisfying than making a bank transfer, by the way). I don't even think it's about feeling purposeful. I'm not sure what it's about. It's just the mystery of home.

At home in Stockholm

Cardamom makes me happy.

USA or bust!

Tomorrow I leave for my grand tour of the American Midwest: four states, three cities, two towns, four beds, three flights, a ride on Amtrak, and a drive across Michigan. Besides seeing family, friends, and my hairstylist, one of the things I am most looking forward to is, oddly enough, some friendly small talk. I generally hate and strenuously avoid exchanging meaningless pleasantries with complete strangers (or anyone, really), but after feeling mute, dumb, and ignored so often during my travels lately, I am actually looking forward to some unnecessary chatter. It's both a linguistic luxury and something special about the US that I've come to appreciate. Sometimes you just want something more than "buona domenica."  

So, chatty seatmate, gregarious salesperson, friendly flight attendant, neighbor at the mailbox, direct some prattle at me: I have some newfound patience to spare. I promise to listen and smile and comment blandly but kindly, without wishing you would let me read my book or wondering whether you are ignored at home. I will look at your pictures, discuss the weather, tell you where I live, show you what I'm reading, answer your questions, and generally be nice. In perfect English. 

In which I rail against Amtrak

Is it unfair to complain about Amtrak these days? Is it like beating a guy while he's down? Well, I don't care – I am tired of being patient and understanding. Amtrak needs to get a clue.

Do not let Amtrak's somewhat updated website trick you: they are as lame as they always were. When you buy your "ticket" online, they can't actually give you a ticket, they give you a bar code which allows you to go to a "Quik-Trak self-service ticketing kiosk" to pick up your ticket on the day of your journey. I am sure they thought they were being very 20th century by putting these self-service kiosks in some of their major stations, but a better, actually useful step would have been to provide conductors with ticket scanners so as to eliminate the need for ticket pick-up altogether. All the kiosks do, in my opinion, is save them money on service counter staff. We see right through your ruse, Amtrak.

But I live in Munster, Indiana, you say, a kiosk would be better than nothing – we have no service counter at all! So true, my dear Hoosiers, so true. But this illogical, c-fearing organization, I am sorry to report, only puts "Quik-Trak" kiosks in their "larger Amtrak stations," i.e., in cities.

So what is a resident of or visitor outside the city to do, then? Pay, of course: It's the American way. $15 and an afternoon off work to receive your express-delivered ticket later, you are enabled to participate in the pathetic excuse for a train system that is Amtrak. Not only is this just a lame way to do business, our country just cannot afford discrimination of this kind at this polarized moment. I say: Equal opportunities for all riders!

You know, Amtrak's board of directors is appointed by the US president. Since the future vice-president of the US is such an avid Amtrak user, I am thinking he might-could take this issue straight to the president in January. They seem to be in the mood for cleaning house. Although Mr. Biden probably has some fancy east coast version of the Amtrak service, I am sure he has at least one horror story of his own – or someone in Pennsylvania told him one. If any case, it's pretty much common knowledge that service in the rest of the country (pardon me) sucks. And since it's clear that Americans are too nostalgic (or practical) to give up the idea of passenger rail, we might as well make it worth all the money we are pouring into it.

So, why not get to redistributing the kiosk wealth? Why not wrest some of the tracks from rail freight companies so we can be on time for a change? Why not promote train travel as an often cheaper, more efficient alternative to driving? And, if nothing else, why not use US mail to deliver tickets?

The up side to getting blamed for everything

As I have heretofore diligently and occasionally bitterly chronicled, we Americans abroad often find ourselves on the defensive, easy targets for disgruntled Europeans looking for somewhere to direct their frustration with American policy and the irrepressible forces of globalization. Our unimaginably huge size, inward focus, and frequent complacency only exacerbate their sense of powerlessness and irrelevance. And, I think, they are weary and sober and disenchanted by history in a way most Americans can't really understand. A friend recently observed, more elegantly than I remember here, "Europe is tired of wars. We have been fighting each other for centuries and we are ready to move on, try different things."

We abroad here usually serve as whipping boy and scapegoat quietly, polite guests at another's dinner party. We nod and listen and explain and mediate. We concede points. We apologize. We laugh. Sometimes we, I, do not maintain the dignity of our country, but it is not without personal cost. 

Today, though, Europe celebrates with us. Europeans know our history and they see the grand significance of this moment. The blame has morphed into (literal) personal thanks and congratulations. For better or worse, we take all the blame and all the credit for our huge, amazing, perplexing nation.

Country shopping

Just in case you have been thinking lately you might want try citizenship in a new country, here are some handy reference tools for evaluating your preparedness:

• Citizenship quiz: Smart Enough to Be German?
• Skilled worker immigrant test: Calculate if you have enough points to become Canadian
• Questions (and answers) for the US citizenship test
• "Life in the UK" quiz for British citizenship
• Practice test for Australian citizenship
• Best not to actually include the Dutch immigration test

Getting Swiss citizenship, by the way, is a difficult endeavor. Not only must you have lived in the country for twelve years (no matter if you were born here), you must also take a test in a Swiss language, pay fees, and be approved by your local community. But on the bright side, even Paul Klee couldn't get citizenship while he was alive, so you're in good company.

Image: from the Swiss People's Party's (failed) summer '08 campaign to pass a referendum reestablishing the secret ballot system for local votes on citizenship requests.

Enter the American optimist

I'm the kind of person that roots for the underdog, so I don't necessarily enjoy the fact that I was born in a country that, at least for the moment, happens to be a major world power whose biggest export is a weird entertainment culture that, apart from being poorly representative, subsumes almost everything it touches. If I had to pick a country that fit my personality better I would pick somewhere much less flashy, someplace smaller, a bit more buttoned up and happy to have a discussion until the wee hours of the morning. But, alas, we do not pick our country of origin. And, sadly, we cannot change its history or cover up its sins or bury it under a big ton of rocks. We are stuck with it.

I feel particularly stuck with it because we are some of a few lonely representatives of this nation around here. I hope I'm not belaboring this fact in my writings here. I don't really mean to sound dramatic. But the US is a big country to represent and there is a wild amount of misinformation floating about. It is an exhausting job.

You see, for every misconception we correct, there is some other ugly fact that we can neither conceal nor deny. Just recently: Of course someone without insurance with get emergency care at the hospital. And oh yeah, millions of people have no coverage at all. Of course there are still some native Americans left in the US. Err... let me tell you about the first Thanksgiving! And although I used to try to deny the "so many more Americans must be obese" conclusion, I've been defeated on that one. Too many people come back from visits to the US saying this. How 'bout them free refills?

Also, no one seems to know or appreciate the really great things about our rapidly aging nation. Like how many kinds of potatoes there are. Or that we have trees that are wider than a car, even the big old American kind. How you can get edible Chinese food almost anywhere. That the sky can seem even huger if you can get alone enough. That you can find a hundred languages and a jillion small businesses in a city block. How it's so diverse assumptions are useless. And so huge you could never begin to summarize it in one paragraph.

There's no explaining these things, really. And maybe I just need them to be great so they can act for me as a mental counterweight to the heavy bundle of cultural and political crimes America as a community has committed. In any case, pessimistic people usually like to stick with the dark version of the story. I cannot blame them. It's much easier to stick to a tidy narrative than to acknowledge you may have severely misjudged the complexity and diversity of a country everyone knows everything about.

America in the World

Not sure how I feel about this organization, but I think the above rant may have located me somewhere not so far away from these folks. Particularly interesting was their recent survey which determined that 58% of the British citizens surveyed believe polygamy to legal in the US. (Okay, 2,000 participants isn't exactly overwhelming, but 58% is pretty high.)

Proud macaroni

Perhaps because I've been daydreaming about Thomas Jefferson lately (more Jefferson in Paris than Jefferson on the two dollar bill, note), I recently had the tune "Yankee Doodle" in my head (the flute version). Which led me to wonder for the first time ever: What does it mean? I think I understand all the words in the song individually, but together they're like a bad macaroni salad (though perhaps that's a redundant turn of phrase).

Let's review the lyrics as I remember them:
Yankee Doodle went to town, a'ridin' on a pony,
Stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up!
Yankee Doodle Dandy!
Mind the music and the step,
And with the girls be handy!

A bit of research seems to suggest mine is the grade school version (the real one having many more painful stanzas). It was originally sung by the British in mockery of New England dandies who tried to be sophisticated but ended up looking like doodles (feathers apparently not cool). Macaroni (or maccheroni as it is actually spelled in Italian, interestingly) was the derisive term for well-travelled Brits whose grand tours around Europe made them really stuck up and annoying with their affected foreign culture and manners ("I don't know, I just feel so naked without a scarf on at all times").

Oh man, Americans have never liked being called gauche. The only choice was to appropriate the song and sing it back in their pale little faces. ("We're from America, couldn't be prouder. If you can't hear us, we'll yell a little louder.) Which is how Yankee Doodle came to be part of the Americana medley we sang at our fifth-grade pageant, "Fifty States Night" (I representing the noble state of New Jersey). And to be stuck in my mind at this very moment. 

It won't make History Detectives but it's nice to know.

Secret allegiance to the flag

Many Germans, it is safe to say, have a bit of a complex when it comes to patriotism. It seems they have a real or imparted instinct to self-censor any feelings of pride for country, to carefully exercise emotional restraint. International sports competitions, therefore, are a welcome relief, a time when it is okay to put out flags, wish for victory, have some pride. At a viewing of the Germany-Spain game on Sunday night, this pride was cheerfully on display. Even those without jerseys or flags managed to find something that approximated some combination or red, gold, and black.

As we walked around the beer garden, my observations about German patriotism soon became observations about US patriotism, which, shortly after that, became observations about myself: the inevitable progression. I'm not sure, but I think that most Americans would still have a special response to these flag uses (or abuses, as I teased my German friends). I myself am not a particularly patriotic person, but I found myself obsessively chronicling flag etiquette violations like some freak patriot.

For many Americans the flag is a sacred symbol in the religion of patriotism. I'm not really sure what this piece of fabric means to me – patriotism is certainly not my religion – but I have the same ambivalent feelings about it that I do about using proper grammar and wearing formal clothing – that somehow it is both silly and important, outdated and useful, ingrained in me and a choice. (ahh... Germans are not the only ones with a complex.)

As I realized during a conversation with friends about taxes and healthcare this spring, we cannot really live modern, integrated lives outside of a country; wherever we are, we are stuck behind a border, a flag above us. For better or worse. So the question is: Do you have a flag?

"No Motto Please, We're British"

I feel bad that I always pick on the Brits, but it can be difficult to avoid. Sometimes they just bring it on themselves, with their properness and whatnot. Anyway, I suppose it's to be expected.... Do robins get along with eagles? Not really.

In any case, today I neutrally share that Britain has decided, as part of some new measures to "boost pride" [Insert your own quip here], they would like to develop a motto. The Times of London had a motto-writing contest for the general public, and among the top suggestions were "One Mighty Empire, Slightly Used," "We Apologize for the Inconvenience," and (the winner) "No Motto, Please, We're British." Love that dry British humor. (Really!)

Until today, I had thought the motto of the United States was the first sentence I learned in Latin, the one that Latin teachers like to point out first to illustrate "Latin is everywhere," the phrase stamped optimistically on American currency -- i.e., E pluribus unum (Out of many, one). But, actually, I regret to inform you, Congress passed a law making in 1956 making In God We Trust the official motto. (Congress was certainly busy making all kinds of symbolic rhetorical changes at this time, weren't they?) 

How do you reduce an entire nation into a single phrase that means anything? Since America no longer has anything very special, maybe Britain should follow Switzerland's example.  Their motto -- Unus pro omnibus, omnes pro uno! (One for all, all for one!) -- is everything you could ever want a slogan to be: elegant, enthusiastic, hip, and Latin.