The first meal I ate in Spain was not paella but a falafel sandwich from a take-away Turkish chain called Doner Kebab. They are littered throughout the city, sometimes three in a square-block radius, more pervasive, it seems, than the classic tapas bars and cervezerias. This was Spain now, struck through the heart with a bohemian immigrant culture, one which speaks much more to Europe’s modernity than any Rick Steves documentary.
Europe is haphazard. Its cities are no longer pure representations of a traditional national identity, if they ever were. Madrid is not all bullfighting and wine sipping, Paris is not just cafes and patisseries.
Those postcard places still exist, of course; the Sleeping Beauty Castle called Neuschwanstein, just south of Munich, is nestled in one of those typical Bavarian villages and is almost absurdly picturesque with its December snow cover and its views of the Alps. The entire island of Venice is itself a museum, a canal-ridden relic from an era of regal maritime empires. (There is, however, still a Doner Kebab.)
Now, though, there seems an inauthenticity to them. The regional affects of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, those things they sell you in their tourist shops like shot glasses painted with matadors or steins to hold large Hofbrauhaus pints of Bavarian ale are part of a fable told as much to themselves as it is to the tourists.
Old Europe has been upended. We consider the United States to be a place of mass immigration, and we go to Europe hoping to indulge our brochure-induced nostalgia for that classic Spanish villa or that Belgian marketplace filled with waffles and wood toys. Except that outside the occasional glimpse into such a past, outside the city center and away from the churches, are the indications of a much more slapdash global reality of mass migrations and new, untraditional communities.
It is better that we see those places. In all honestly, I never felt comfortable in Monmarte the way I did in the trashy alleys of Madrid, where I could buy an apple for 30 cents from one of the hundreds of Asian-owned snack shops. I felt that other Europe was a dream, something plastic, something Hollywood might sell me the way it sells me nuclear families and picket fences.
The reality of the world is much more miscellaneous; sometimes it’s found in the pleading eyes of Roma gypsies, sometimes in the swanky interiors of Thai bistros, but never in the lederhosen or the gondoliers.
That Europe exists in our minds, in our expectations, and if that is all we try to see then we risk being offended by whatever foreign aspects have taken up residency in those countries and become as much a part, if not more, of their identity. I will try the paella, and the vino, too, but I will also tear my eyes away from that and go for the falafel.
Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, studying in Madrid.
