Living here I have to wonder: is the only reason I have been assumed to be American for the greater part of my life that I have lived that greater part in Oklahoma, where clearly, unless given much immediately obvious evidence to the contrary, the most legitimate assumption is that nearly everyone is, in fact, American? (Feel free to write and comment/complain on the length of that sentence. I'll gladly refer you to Faulkner.) Because here, if I never admitted I was from the U.S., evidently no one would ever guess. I am most of the time German, very occasionally British (that usually only if the person inquiring has heard me speaking English), but almost never American. It's probably been almost three months since the last time someone guessed I was American. Certainly there is a noticeable population of Americans here, so it's not that meeting one would be anything of a rarity. One theory is that these days everyone here is hoping that you're not from the U.S. People here, in general, like foreigners and wouldn't want to have anything immediate to hold against any of them. And as world tensions rise, this may become even more often the case. But that's not the excuse for me. I've been German since I stepped off the plane back in September. I'm pegged as a European even when I'm in the company of people who are immediately reconizable as Americans.
It's an interesting phenomenon to me.

For the past several days I've been in an odd funk, and though I had occasional moments of clarity and light, I was unable to dispell the mood for very long. This afternoon as I was walking to the tram stop suddenly the cloud lifted. All was better again. Impossible to predict or understand, but immediately I was once again contented at the thought of being here, invigorated by the challenges of cross-cultural living, and excited by the knowledge that every tram ride is a potential opportunity for meeting someone new.

This evening I went with one of my friends (American) to a cafe. She had brought a book to read, and I pulled out a notebook and started working on some Arabic verbs. Amy watched, fascinated, as I began listing the verbs and then writing sentences using them in different tenses. I was evidently quite a distraction from her book (though for those of you who know her, you also know that she doesn't need much external help to become distracted)-- she kept remarking on how impressed she was that I was voluntarily and independently studying Arabic. Finally I laughed at her and explained that in the past two days I have, in some way or another, used four different languages. Language study is, for me, nothing impressive or remarkable. It's simply what I do, given any chance at all. A function of my personality. An odd quirk I possess. Really, I thought that the unusual aspect of the situation was that Amy was reading a book.