Relationships trump paltry idiosyncrasies

One of the questions I am often asked since my return to the states is what I missed most while I was living abroad. So here it is, my enumerated list of what I am most thankful for in my return to the U.S., in no particular order:

1. Logical opening hours. My bank in Luxembourg would close daily from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. for lunch and then close for the day at 4:30 p.m. How are working people supposed to get anything done, you ask? I have no idea. I never figured this one out. Want to shop on Sunday? Too bad. Pick up some groceries after 7 p.m.? Nope.

2. Ample space at supermarket cash registers. This one seems silly, I know. But I am a big, clumsy man and an intolerable level of anxiety would overcome me when I would queue to pay in European stores. The space to pay is designed for one to two waifish individuals at most. Due to the limited opening hours, stores were always bursting with people, so checking out invariably involved being kneaded by people behind you and smelling the hair of the person in front of you.

3. Gas prices? About $7 a gallon. Enough said.

4. Quick meals. I once ate a five-hour dinner. No one else seemed to notice that this is an absurd amount of time to spend eating. My body ached and by the time we finished I was hungry again. Food is not a casual thing in much of Western Europe — it is to be respected and taken seriously. I am one of those people who do not “live to eat” but rather “eat to live,” so this approach seems like lunacy.

5. Being able to fully communicate. Never having mastered the languages surrounding me, I was constantly in a state of not really being able to understand or communicate any complex ideas. This oversimplified the world around me and made for some tragically comic misadventures.

6. Free, clean restrooms. The toilets of Europe are a dismal, depressing horror. A Frenchman once marveled to me that the thing he likes most about the United States are the bathrooms: “They are so perfectly clean, you could eat in them!” High praise indeed.

7. Free drinking water. For whatever reason there are basically no drinking fountains in Europe (except for cities like Rome that have been grandfathered in with a massive public drinking fountain infrastructure from ancient times). Some places even refuse to give you tap water at restaurants. In one particular instance, the waiter assured us that the tap water was unfit to drink and will make us very sick, so we needed to buy the bottle of water that costs six times more than an equivalent amount of wine — this was after we had been drinking the water at our home about a mile away for almost a year. Though mocked by my European friends, I regularly climbed upon my high horse and refused to pay for water at restaurants in countries with drinkable tap water.

8. Mexican food. I once ate at a Mexican restaurant in France that served ketchup as salsa for its corn chips. How the translation of this cuisine could be so brutalized I do not understand.

9. Undeveloped land. From the summit of Matanuska Peak, the Chugach Mountains appear impenetrable. No roads, no dams, no large outward markings of human development. I never saw that in Europe. Maybe it exists somewhere, but people and infrastructure always marked the mountain experiences I had there.

10. Voting. I truly missed playing an active role in our democracy. Of course I voted absentee, but that is just not the same as being crushed by political advertisements daily and seeing the results of local elections trickle in.

The follow-up of course, is the inverse list of things I miss about Europe. Many of the items below seem to contradict those noted previously, which attests both to the complexity of our world and to my own comfort with hypocrisy.

1. Old stuff. In Europe, it is everywhere and really, really old. As a child, I thought the Fourth Avenue Theater in Anchorage was old. Not really, it turns out. The castle in Luxembourg was built in 963. Any insignificant town you come across in Europe seems to have a church or a city hall that is a remarkable piece of history.

2. Ease of experiencing other cultures. In Luxembourg, a 15-minute drive can drop you into a new culture with the unique trappings of food and language that accompany it. Want Belgian waffles? Go to Belgium. Want German beer? Go to Germany. Pretty slick.

3. Health care. Luxembourg has a socialized health care system, and it is honestly better in just about every way compared to the health care I receive in the states. Per capita, Luxembourg pays a little more than half the price for health care as the U.S. I can report that waiting times, doctor choice and quality of care are in general much better. I am far from an ideologue on this issue, but after experiencing both systems it is clear that their system is more efficient and humane.

4. Fuel efficient cars. My Peugeot got about 55 miles to the gallon. Sure makes the price of gas more palatable.

5. Kebabs. They are ubiquitous, cheap and tasty — the burritos of Europe. When my wife would leave town and I was left to fend for myself, the siren song of the ease and affordability of a kebab would invariably drive me toward those mystery-sauce-soaked creations.

6. Mountain huts. During a weeklong ski trip with my brother and some friends we were served warm food and provided comfy beds each night at huts perched high in the mountains. There are huts just about everywhere across the Alps and they increase the accessibility of the mountains tremendously.

7. Not knowing the language. With the ability to understand what people are saying around me, I find that I am often slightly annoyed. I can no longer tune out what the people in line behind me are talking about; if they are discussing “Breaking Amish” or some other reality TV monstrosity, then my poor, influential mind is carried along in that torrent of stupidity whether I like it or not.

8. Eurovision. Never heard of Eurovision? Neither had I. I think Europeans keep it secret because they know that they should be very, very embarrassed about it. In a nutshell, it is a pan-European song contest that pits the dregs of pop stars from European countries against each other. It is like watching a slow motion, pop star car crash with lots of glitter, sequins and sometimes fire. Google it, I dare you.

9. Christmas markets. Despite never being a Christmas aficionado, I loved it when towns across Europe set up these quaint markets in their main squares to sell gifts, spiced wine and food. This was a great way to draw people out of their hibernation during the darkest month of the year and give the town an out-of-doors social center.

10. Trains. You can get almost everywhere via the train, and I would always get a little giddy when we would board one to roll off to some a distant city.

So that’s that. It’s thrilling to be back in the states, but a move always involves trading one positive for another. What’s missing in the two lists above, of course, are the relationships with other people; everywhere that I have lived I have been overwhelmed by the amazing and wonderful folks that I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by.

The relationships we forge handily trump any of the paltry idiosyncrasies brewed up by one place or another — they pave over the annoyances and turn good experiences into sublime ones, making life on this goofy little planet wonderful, wherever you may be.

Pete LaFrance grew up in Palmer and has moved back to the area after a number of years living abroad.