Outside

AOG, Madrid

Outside is different. What does this normally mean? Well, for starters, it means that everywhere you go, it is going to be different. Different? You may say, But of course!

Well Little Miss Smart Ass, you don’t know different until you see a French toilet up close and personal. Or until you enter a rest area on a British highway and marvel at the dried up and insipid food. You never knew sausages could taste like rope did you?

Yes, forget America’s obsession with hygiene and smells and get ready to enter the smelly world waiting for you just outside your local international airport terminal.

The planet is different from us. Not better or worse just different, and I suggest you strap yourself tightly, darling, because the great “unknown” just beyond our borders is going to smack you in the face like a wet fish and no, it won’t say sorry afterwards.

Start with Europe, one of our acknowledged cultural homelands (for what else is our country but an amalgamation of XVIII European Enlightenment thoughts and ideas sprinkled here and there with some good old fashioned social and religious persecution and a shameless excuse for slavery and world domination?).

Europeans feel superior to us. No, I can’t explain it. They just do. It does not matter that we tend to earn more, have bigger and longer hair, that our waistlines are expanding like mount Krakatoa on acid, or that we live in larger homes. 

It does not matter that the price we pay for gas is half of what they pay, or that anything the Japanese invent, we get first.

It goes beyond that.

Europeans have a certain knack for keeping old things around which we either lost along the way, or, quite frankly, never acquired. And yes, we must admit, that is why we go to Europe.

No one in their right mind travels seven hours from JFK to stare at London’s Canary Wharf, or eight hours to be marvelled by La Defense, in Paris.

No.

We jump into those flying tubes to get what we don’t get in America: old stuff. Sometimes, very old stuff. In the case of Greece and Italy, even ancient stuff.

And here’s where their dislike of us begins. Once, in Southern Spain, I overheard a group of American teenagers as they were being addressed by their tour guide.

“We will visit the Roman ruins of Italica”, she said.

And what did Miss Blonde Bimbo say to her friend within earshot of yours truly?

“Oh, we have those back home, how boring”.

In case you are wondering, la Bimbona was from Texas.

The tour guide overheard her and started to laugh when she glanced over towards the airhead section of the group and saw me trying to gnaw my veins off in disgust.

Europeans, I must confess, don’t hate Americans, they just hate stupid people.

Unfortunately for us, we do have an inordinate amount of those within our borders. Sometimes they even make it into the White House, so imagine how superior Europeans feel!

In Europe you will find old everything: homes, cars, clothes, people, museums, streets, jewels, neighborhoods, cities, bridges, and, interestingly, customs.

Europeans like their tradition even more than we do, the difference being that they have so much of it!

Like their tradition of keeping poor people poor. 

An age old tradition that one.

Why help the poor better their lot in life when they will only multiply and produce more smelly poor people? 

Like I always say, you can’t rape the willing!

Harsh, but very much how many European governments treat their population, and they then, in turn, say things like “please Sir, can I have some more?”

Unless they are Scandinavian. These are probably the only countries on Earth which have worked tirelessly to ensure everyone is middle class, and poor at the same time.

Poor? You may ask. But I heard they have a great social system!

Indeed they do. Everything is paid for…out of their salary. What is the point of earning 60K when half (or more) of it is going to the State? So ok, they are not exactly Brokeback Mountain poor, but they are sort of lower middle class on state aid poor… ish.

But they drive Saabs and Volvos! You say. Yes, but they tend to be cheaper there. And subsidised.

Unlike their alcohol, which is taxed to death and controlled unlike in any other place on this planet.

Which explains why Scandinavians like to visit Southern Europe so much: booze is cheaper there, and like the Vikings they really are at heart, they love nothing more than getting wasted on a Mediterranean beach after (or even whilst) “fertilizing” a local lovely.

Ah…Europe…so civilized…and yet…so not!

Like I said at the beginning, “outside” is different. Be prepared, yes, but bear in mind that our way is not the only way, nor the best way.

You really haven’t lived until you’ve Frenched a drunken Adonis on a Mediterranean beach under a star lit sky with Europop blaring nearby. 

Or until you discover what a foreskin is. You thought you had, but I assure you, you haven’t. Not until you've seen one upclose and personal.

Pack your bags my lovely, it is going to be a bumpy, yet thrilling, ride!