Spanish, for example, differentiates between masculine and feminine nouns and conjugates verbs six times in every tense (in English, we often don’t conjugate at all).

In German, verbs are just as horrendous as their Spanish counterparts, but nouns are even worse. Its arbitrarily attributed three-gender system (skirt = masculine, masculinity = feminine, girl = neuter) with four different cases, all of which require a different combination of umlauts and letters to form the plural (Kraut becomes Kräuter, etc.) is like a sixteen-tentacled kraken ready to pull you to the deepest depths of the linguistic sea.

After attempting to learn the seven cases in Polish and its absurd tense forms, I retreated to the English-language kiddie pool. I thought I was safe teaching English to non-native speakers. Little did I realize how naive such thinking could be.

Take grammar as an example. A solid grammar regiment is essential to beginner courses. Each day presents a new point until students have mastered all 145 (yes, 145) of them. Especially with a book as a guide, work like this should be brainless, but simplicity in teaching requires rules and reason, two aspects English clearly lacks.

Although a book is a quick read because I read it quickly, and a sweet smell also smells sweetly, I cannot accomplish hard work by hardly working, nor can a fast runner effectively run fastly. Completely unprepared for my first class on adverbs and adjectives, I walked into booby trap after booby trap. As I tried to untangle myself from the grammatical exceptions in which I was ensnared, my students looked on helplessly and cried out, “You’re not doing that so well-ly.”

Never again, I vowed. At times I have spent an hour researching a grammar point in preparation. Unfortunately for my students, even the most well-versed scholar cannot make English grammar make sense. The word refuse, for example, is followed by an infinitive (to + verb, He refused to help), yet enjoy forces its successor to take a gerund (–ing, I enjoy baking cookies). There are lists of countless similar cases. I hope to go but I feel like going.

In an attempt at pedagogical methodology, I run my students through a selection of the forty gerund/infinitive cases I consider most important.

“What is the rule?” they ask, distraught after twenty minutes of guess work.

“There isn’t one.”

Their frustration only becomes greater as I throw out verbs like remember, which uses the gerund when recalling an event already experienced (I remember meeting him yesterday) and the infinitive when acting as a reminder (I must remember to call him this afternoon).

I am always surprised to see anyone return after this act of linguistic waterboarding, but they do. Perhaps it is one of the residual effects of WWII guilt, but they still try to tell me that English is easier than German.

You can lecture me on the absurdity of German cases or noun genders all you want, but these problems are trifles in comparison to the English system of tenses, where we constantly nitpick an action’s exact relevance and length. We not only differentiate between the past (I worked), actions relevant in the present that occurred in the past (I have worked) and things that began in the past that are still on-going (I have been working), we also draw a line between short term and long term actions in the present (I am living vs. I live), and the amount of planning that has gone into actions in the future (I will meet, I am going to meet, or I am meeting).

For the most part German is simple. The German expression ich gehe, for example, has six English options, depending on the context: I go, I am going, I have gone, I have been going, I will go, or I am going to go. I don’t blame my students when they create the sentence I am living in Hamburg for the last five years.

“But I’m living here now!” they cry.

“Yes, but you started the action in the past, so you have to say I have lived or I have been living. Besides, you could only say I am living if you plan to leave at some point. Normally living is a permanent situation which requires us to say I live.”

It’s not only the grammar that is often senseless. The English system of spelling is also a problem. Anyone who has tried to write English vocabulary on a white board without a spell checker will tell you what an impossible task this is. This spelling test will be sure to remove all doubt.

Pronunciation is no better. As Mark Twain pointed out with the word bow, “Nobody can tell what it spells when you set it off by itself; you can only tell by referring to the context and finding out what it signifies.” The same is true of read and tear.

Then come words like boot, blood, and foot. All three contain oo, yet the two o’s in boot are long like hoot, blood sounds more like mud, and the o’s in foot take the same pronunciation as the u in put. How can this possibly be? For non-native speakers it is beyond comprehension, making my days full of fewt and blewd.

My life as a grammar teacher was proving pointless; so I decided to move to translation, where I only ran into more problems. While I always believed commas to be an art form (sorry Nick and Kevin), the absence of editors or proofreaders to fix my ignorant mistakes forced me to take them more seriously. I turned to William Strunk:

…clauses introduced by which, when, and where are non-restrictive; they do not limit the application of the words on which they depend, but add, parenthetically, statements supplementing those in the principal clauses. Each sentence is a combination of two statements, which might have been made independently.

Restrictive relative clauses are not set off by commas… [which means] the relative clause restricts the application of the word to a single person.

Despite the examples he provides, I had to read these lines five times to understand this one point correctly, and I was only on the third rule of the book! Thank god Strunk believed in brevity, which is not an easy thing to accomplish when focused on the English language. With helping verbs and noun-preposition combinations prevailing, concise sentence formulations are near non-existent.

In the most recent translation I did, I came across the word sportrechtshandel. This single German word requires seven in English.

“There was a reason that German was the language of philosophy before WWII,” said Peter, a retired German teacher. “Our vocabulary is exact.”

When the correct term doesn’t exist, German has the flexibility to combine words in order to create it. These new words illuminate the page with an exactness I could only dream of in English, leading me on twenty-minute expeditions to find a comparable English counterpart. Despite our Germanic and Latin roots, we can rarely compete with German’s brevity. Looking back on sportrechtshandel, we can see that the buying and selling of sports rights is hardly as graceful.

While most languages initially seem impossible and only begin making sense much later, my experiences have taught me that English actually becomes more confusing. We have a mongrel language that has taken on words and rules unnecessarily, adding bits and pieces of whatever we like until there is no sense of order at all. Our language is slowly dissolving into nonsense. Poets and creatives should be appalled. It isn’t good for anything but business and politics, the only sectors where the more cryptically you talk, the better your chances of striking a deal.

I hope my German gets better soon.

I am privately celebrating, because I was finally the reason we got picked up, which is normally my girlfriend’s trump card when we hitchhike.

Four hours and two car rides after arriving at the exit ramp in Berlin, we are back in Hamburg. The mother/daughter combo lets us off at a train stop near the university, gives a fleeting wink and wave, and drives off.

The more I hitchhike, the more I realize how much I misunderstood hitchhiking before. It’s not reserved exclusively for the road warriors and ex-cons. The whole process is incredibly easy, and relatively safe (depending on where you are). Why don’t more people do this?

Well, the inherent danger of getting rides from strangers is the major deterrent.

“One friend did it every day for months between San Francisco and Berkeley,” said Matt, a UC Berkeley graduate I managed to connect with about his experiences hitchhiking. “She’s an anarchist and knows self-defense and so she usually doesn’t mind taking rides from lone men, but scopes them out, and has asked to be let out before. Thank goodness nothing bad’s ever happened.”

Hitchhiking can be risky, but there are methods for mitigating that risk. According to Veit Kühne, founder the Hospitality Club travel network, the best way to find a secure ride is to ask people directly. Don’t stand on the side of the road. Talk to people at gas stations and rest stops. Ask them where they’re going. Then you have an idea of who the person is before you get in their car.

There will always be some level of risk, but most hitchhikers will tell you that if you have any common sense your biggest danger is getting in a car accident.

In my case, the prowling cougar that gave my girlfriend and me a ride was about the scariest predator I’ve encountered.

All dangers aside, there are plenty of other good reasons hitchhiking is not the preferred method of transportation. There are different laws in every country, state, and county, making you prone to police harassment if you don’t know your rights. There are no planned departure and arrival times, nor a guarantee that you will get the place you want to go.

To get the short distance from Hamburg to Berlin, there are a number of more reliable possibilities that cost €15 or less. With the many hang-ups hitching presents, one would think only the poorest of the poor would choose to do so. Surprisingly, many of the people I have talked to rarely see hitchhiking in terms of expense.

“I primarily do it is because it’s really lovely to meet strangers,” said Matt. “I’ve found it very easy to talk to people, even if they’re from disparate backgrounds.  I got picked up by a truck driver (off-duty, he said he’d never risk his job doing it with a company truck), who told me a fascinating story about why he beat his ex-wife, very soberly, you know, his side of the story, although he of course admitted he regretted it.”

I create a vivid memory every time I step into someone else’s car. On one trip my girlfriend and I rode with a guy that we were both convinced was a member of the former Eastern German Secret Police (Stasi). He adamantly defended the governmental agency, saying that all the stuff they tell you at the Stasi Museum is biased and inaccurate. He also had a curious amount of information about the secret bunkers along the autobahn where they used to spy on civilians. At the end of the trip, we were happy to get away from him, but we will never forget the experience.

Perhaps that is why Kühne differentiates between those that “just wanna get cheaply from A to B,” and those that “love to meet other people, love the stories, the interaction, and the freedom.”

There is certainly a difference, but the two groups are not mutually exclusive, and I don’t think that hitchhiking is the only way to achieve the latter.

On a trip to the Ukraine last March, a friend and I began with our thumbs, but found much more of our adventure took place on a train: the army guy who picked us up at the highway exit talked on his phone the entire way. The only thing I learned about him was that he was selling a car. On the train from Berlin to Warsaw, however, we shared our cabin with a timid Polish man who could speak a little German and no English. By the end of the trip, he had shared his thermos of coffee, given us his phone number, and invited us to come visit him in his hometown of Poznan.

The idea that hitchhiking is always the most enlightening form of transportation is a misguided yet pervasive notion.

The American-based hitchhiking website Digihitch completely over-romanticizes this basic concept. In the Digihitch forums, one finds questions like, “What was it that drove you to go out into the world with nothing but yourself, a pack, and your thumb?”

In response came equally passé answers. “I wasn’t able to really understand my life. Had to get out of my own way, see things from another perspective. Couldn’t see the forest for the trees — and it seems to me that there are a lot out there who can’t either… I’m traveling, moving and my reason is that I have to.”

These comments aren’t helpful or informative. They are the inklings of twenty year olds wishing they lived in a time they don’t understand or adults clinging to the dissipating nostalgia of their debunked youth. Getting in a car with a stranger isn’t going to help you fix your crumbling life any more than you’ll find enlightenment on a fingernail-sized piece of blotter paper. Even Hunter S. Thompson knew this, and he was bathing in the shit.

In the end, people take drugs to get fucked up, and people hitchhike because they either want to get from point A or get to point B. Why so many have decided to contrive a higher purpose behind this actions is beyond me. All it does is push hitching toward the cultural periphery, making it inaccessible to the mainstream.

Hitchhiking doesn’t have to be relegated to the community of Jack Kerouac wannabes, ex-cons, and vagrants. There are plenty of very practical opportunities to try it.

Matt said he has picked up a ride simply because his bike broke down and he needed to get to a repair shop before it closed.

Kühne says, “You’ll learn some skills that will help you throughout your life.”

I do it because it’s cheap and has the potential to be culturally interesting. Because of that, I would encourage everyone to try it (although safely), but I also don’t want to glorify it as something it’s not.

I asked my uncle about hitchhiking, and his response surprised me. Ultimately, I think his perspective embodies what hitchhiking should be.

“When I was a kid, I lived about nine miles from town. Walking wasn’t very fun, so sometimes I would just stick out my thumb. I didn’t really think anything of it. I just didn’t like walking alone.”

De Garre, a small locally owned bar with table space for no more than 30, offers over 130 different Belgian beers. A short walk away, Brugs Beertje features a list of over 300. You sit down and scan a beer menu reminiscent of a high-end wine list. At times, you have the opportunity to try the same beer of different years. My travel partner and I did a taste comparison of the Oer Brewery’s 2008 and 2009 winter beer, Stille Nacht. While the 2009 was smoother, the 2008 unquestionably won out, bearing a stronger hop character and a fine yet excitable carbonation not as present in the newer version.

With over 135 breweries producing more than 700 different beers — some of which are impossible to reproduce elsewhere — Belgium presents some of the most complex beers in the world. Much of a beer’s individuality stems from the character of the local ingredients — water, grains, and hops, etc. Hence, the Becks brewed in America tastes significantly different (read: worse) than that brewed in Germany. Considering the entire country of Belgium is the size of Massachusetts, it baffles me how they have managed to create so many different and complex brews.

Compared to the conservative German market, Belgium is a melting pot of beer diversity. One of the main factors of the beer’s complexity is Belgium’s open-mindedness when it comes to ingredients. Inge Verniere is a beer sommelier and employee of De Halve Maan Brewery, and she says, “We’ll put anything in beer as long as it’s natural.”

This has earned Belgian beer worldwide praise.

“I’m a very big fan of Belgian beer,” said Lars Seyfrid, leader of the German Campaign for Good Beer. “They put all kinds of different spices in their beer that provide an excellent flavor palette.”

In a conversation I had with Dick Haggerty, head brewer at New Holland Brewing Company, he seconded Seyfrid. “Belgians do whatever they want. They have specific notions of flavor. They will do whatever they have to do to get that flavor.”

Needless to say, my tongue was already tingling with excitement when I walked down the quaint, medieval lanes of Bruges’s inner city. I checked into my hostel as quickly as possible and made my way to the streets. My first stop was the local grocery store.

The beer aisle was the first thing I saw when I walked in: Leff, Hoegaarden, Kwak, Kriek, Brugse Zot, Chimay, and a handful of other assortments comprised what I assumed to be a relatively modest beer selection (the store was, after all, more of a market). Wanting to save my taste buds for the bars, I bought a pen and notebook and went to the checkout counter.

While standing in line, I noticed that the two Belgians in front of me were buying a beer I didn’t recognize: Jupiler. To my right, I also noticed a fridge almost a big as the whole beer aisle packed full of the red and white Jupiler cans.

Intrigued, I bought the smallest one they had (.2 liters). Outside on the street, I cracked it open and took a sip. It was like drinking a Bud Light without the Bud. What the hell was this piss water? Thankful that I only had half the can left to go, I slammed the rest and made my way to little pub called Joey’s Café.

It was around 6:00 p.m. and Joey’s was full of men and women in their mid-twenties who looked like they had all just gotten off of work. Except for one man sitting alone at a table, each one of them was drinking Jupiler.

Here I was, in quite possibly the most highly regarded beer brewing country in the world, and everyone was drinking watered-down light beer. I decided to find out what was going on.

“The lager beer is what the locals drink,” said the owner of Joey’s. When I asked him what he would recommend for me, he told me there were a number of choices. “If you drink something strong, like Duvel, though, you’re not going to get more than five in you.”

His message seemed to be that I wasn’t going to be able to drink all night on high quality beer. At the next bar, De Garre, we sat next to a very talkative Belgian man, François, who had a similar theory.

“The lager beer is what we drink when we’re thirsty. You drink the strong beer when you’re talking or watching TV. Then you want a good beer.”

It was similar to American drinking culture. Drink a couple of good beers when you are doing so for the taste, but buy a $70 keg of Miller High Life when you want to have a party.

Admittedly, I was still surprised. The strong Belgian doubles, triples, and quadruples along with the Lambic have been around for some 400 years. The Rochefort Trappists, for example, have been brewing since 1595. According to Verniere, lager only came to Belgium after the First World War. Now Jupiler alone accounts for over 60% of all Belgian beer consumption.

Whereas the microbrewery movement in the U.S. is now moving in on the traditional lager’s market share, the opposite seemed to be happening in Belgium. It also seemed to be causing a rift in the population that was potentially bigger than the French-Flemish divide.

“I hate bottom-fermented beers!” Verniere, the beer sommelier, exclaimed. “It’s not exciting enough.”

She was waging war, however, against the rest of her countrymen. When I asked Carl, the owner of De Garre, if you could split the population into those that drink strong beers and those that drink lager, he said, “Yes.”

“So does this mean tastes and preferences are changing?” I asked. “Does this mean that Belgium is slowly slipping away from its highly praised brewing traditions?”

“No,” said Carl. “I think you can divide those things in two categories. You have the people from 20 to 35 years and from 35 to 70. Younger people are only going to pubs where they sell lager types of beers, and they aren’t going to drink special types of beer… they don’t like that anymore, the youngsters. There is, however, a new group coming in who like tasting beers, even the bitterer ones. Every year it’s changing with the new generation.”

Things are changing again for the better, he seemed to say. The new generation is much more open to these strong beers than they were before. But Carl suggested that this could be the result of a 40-year-long dark period in Belgium’s brewing culture that has only begun to reverse itself in the last ten.

“Before ten years ago, there was InBev, the largest beer conglomerate in the world.”

How could I have forgotten this? Now known as Anheuser-Busch InBev, this corporate monstrosity was a product of Belgium.

“They bought up a big, huge assortment of beers,” Carl said. “Some beers, which were very good, like Hoegaarden Julius, stopped because the production wasn’t large enough. That means they’re getting rid of very good beers, and that is what has been happening over the last years.”

InBev also owns Jupiler. Just as Bud, Miller, and Coors squashed out all competition during the mid-20th century, InBev slowly destroyed Belgian beer culture over the last 40 years.

“Now there are a lot of smaller guys trying to make their own beer. Microbreweries, like in the United States. Now there are all these small breweries again trying to make beer like they did 30 or 40 years ago.”

Considering the Trappists managed to stay alive through everything, it’s not surprising that we rarely hear about the horrors of corporate brewery takeovers in Belgium. That doesn’t mean that they aren’t fighting the same fight as the rest of us. Just as the U.S. is currently fighting the beer monsters known as Coors, Miller, and Anheuser-Busch, Belgium has its own fight.

According to François, the local brewery, De Halve Maan, receives a police escort as it moves its product from the brewery to the bottling station. This seems like a good sign. The authorities are on the side of the little man.

As Dick Cantwell, head brewer at Elysian Brewing Company, said, “Incredulity is the first response that I’ve gotten from Germans that I’ve told about my pumpkin beer.”

Within the brewing world, people see the German market as a major part of the canon, but never as a source of innovation. Born in 1516, the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot is the oldest attempt to regulate the quality of beer. Almost 500 years later it is still a symbol of quality assurance worldwide. Reinheitsgebot or death was the sort of mentality I had expected.

When I spoke to Thorsten Krüschel, head brewer at Hamburg’s Gröninger Brewhouse, he initially confirmed this belief. We began by discussing the major benefits of working at a small brewery.

“The smaller breweries put much more value on the final product. It is fresh in comparison to what the large conglomerates brew, and we are more flexible. Here, everything is possible.”

I then asked him what exactly that flexibility allowed, and he said, “We have the freedom to make everything a bit differently. We can, for example, think up a new recipe for our Maibock, and do it a bit differently each year.”

His idea of freedom seemed to be: do it differently, but still within the confines of tradition. It sounded like a prisoner saying he had more freedom than his cellmate because he could exercise in the front or back yard of the penitentiary. It wasn’t exactly, what I considered freedom, and I worried that Krüschel had fallen into some sort of blissful ignorance. Then he surprised me.

“It is, however, so that we lack innovation in some ways. Brewing is a bit confined due to the Reinheitsgebot.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I thought it was a sacrilege to criticize the Reinheitsgebot in Germany.

“One could also brew something different and simply not name it beer,” he said. Not only was he saying the Reinheitsgebot was confining, he was proposing that we disregard it altogether!

As I began to pursue this topic further, I realized that Krüschel is not alone. There is a relatively strong movement toward more progressive brewing techniques in Germany, and the heart of this revolution lies in the gasthaus breweries.

“Germany is a very traditional country in terms of beer and brewing,” said Lars Seyfrid, head of the Campaign for Good Beer in Germany. “The fight is less about working to demand something new, and more about getting rid of the large traditional breweries. Right now, we see a noticeable movement in which the large breweries are beginning to disappear and smaller gasthau breweries are developing.”

“It’s a countermovement,” said Krüschel, “The bigger and more impersonal the large breweries become, the better the chances for the small breweries to make contact with the beer drinkers.”

It is a grassroots campaign, where brewers from smaller breweries are working together to spread awareness with consumer organizations like the Campaign for Good Beer and small specialty stores. They offer tastings to expand the palettes of a pilsner-driven culture, and they put on brewery presentations to increase their influence. It is undeniably a start, but the movement is still very, very small.

“Our last tasting was quite big. Well, big for Germany,” said Esther Isaak de Schmidt Bohländer, owner of Bierland, a small specialty store. “We had 30 to 50 people come.”

The problem is that laws, infrastructure, and even consumers hinder development. The Reinheitsgebot, for one, is a strong force within the German brewing system. It is a long-standing tradition that has cultivated very good beer. At this point, even most progressives are torn when it comes to supporting the Reinheitsgebot or not.

“Concerning the Reinheitsgebot,” said Seyfrid, “it is a mark of quality. It means that the consumer does not need to think much about how the product is made.”

“It is a good constant that is also good for worldwide marketing,” said Krüschel.

Although it hinders innovation, it also establishes a certain levels of quality, which means, according to Seyfrid, that it’s worth keeping around. But what does this mean for beer brewing?

“Nothing,” Seyfrid says. “We don’t need to get rid of the Reinheitsgebot, because it hardly even exists anymore.”

Changes to the law over the last 500 years have allowed more and more exceptions into the system, and brewers can produce many different beers that do not fall under the original law.

“It’s a very complicated thing, because beer is taxed,” said Seyfrid. “It was a long debate, where the brewer said, ‘We cannot call our beer beer, but we still have to pay beer tax. What’s this about?’… So now it’s possible to produce a product similar to beer, but which according to the Reinheitsgebot is not beer, and call it beer regardless.”

This seemed like the key to freedom, but most brewers still seem to be keeping this key in their pockets rather than using it to unlock the door. I asked Seyfrid why people weren’t experimenting more. He told me that the brewers want to, but the owners of the brewery and the equipment do not.

“What is really highly developed here is the industry that caters to the breweries: the manufacturers of brewing equipment,” said Seyfrid. “Often times people come back from visits to the U.S. and say, ‘This is all very crafty and very quality oriented, but the gear that is used is just too un-automated, and not modern enough.’ They are completely surprised how a craft brewer in the U.S. works under such primitive conditions.”

When the brewing infrastructure itself is highly developed and expensive, the brewers can’t do anything without permission from their financiers.

“Those that control the money are often skeptical,” said Seyfrid.

Even with financial backing, it’s questionable whether the market would accept what the brewer produced. When I asked Krüschel how Germans see beer, he responded, “There is a lot of trust in the Reinheitsgebot.”

“That is the problem with a traditional brewing culture,” said Seyfrid.

Beer has been brewed the same way for a long time, the beer Germany produces is very good, and therefore people do not question it. Due to protectionist governmental policies, it is also relatively difficult to import beer from other countries.

“Our importer is in Berlin,” said Isaak de Schmidt-Bohländer, noting that Berlin is 3 hours away. “There are only about 6 or 7 importers Germany-wide.”

Isaak de Schmidt Bohländer owns a small specialty store that offers over a hundred different beers from all over the world.

“People come in and get overwhelmed. At the end of a discussion, many simply say, ‘Oh, I think I’ll just go get a Holsten.’” (Holsten is the local branch of the Carlsberg beer conglomerate.)

With all of these social strictures in place, is there hope for the future of German beer? Undoubtedly. First, there is nothing wrong with Germany’s traditional beers. Whereas U.S. brewers are concerned with experimentation, German brewers concentrate on perfection. It’s unlikely that anyone could outdo the Germans at brewing pilsner.

Second, not a single one of the people I spoke to about German beer culture was worried it would stagnate. I asked Krüschel if people would accept more experimental brews.

“There is a market for every product,” he said. “You just have to find it.”

“People come in and are initially skeptical,” said Isaak de Schmidt Bohländer, “but it’s all about taking baby steps.”

My conversation with Cantwell has been a refreshing one. It reminded me why American beer culture is so unique. It is open to everything — even the absurd — and is therefore growing in directions that traditional beer enthusiasts seldom consider. While drinkers and brewers around the world find pale ales, pilsners, and even Belgian Tripels to be acceptable varieties of beer, many wouldn’t feel the same about the beverages that appear at Elysian’s Pumpkin Ale Festival.

According to Cantwell’s tally, their festival has featured sour pumpkin ales, barrel aged pumpkin ales, Belgian styles, lager styles, pumpkin aged pumpkin ales (yes, that’s beer aged inside of a pumpkin), spontaneously fermented pumpkin ales, and even a smoked pumpkin ale. When Cantwell told German brewers about the beers he has experimented with, he was met with laughter.

Upon contacting Dick, I too was skeptical about the legitimacy of the more extreme craft brews. One of my first evenings back in the United States this October, a friend bought me Screamin’ Pumpkin Spiced Ale from the Michigan Brewing Company.

“This is a great fall beer,” he said.

I didn’t agree, but I was curious. The first sip was like a mouthful of pumpkin pie. It was thick with heavy vanilla notes and a nutmeg-cinnamon spice. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought I was drinking over-sweetened, under-spiked liqueur. It certainly wasn’t ale, but what the hell was it? Before I went any further, I decided to do a tasting.

I sat down with three other people and ran through the five different pumpkin ales. Along with the Screamin’ Pumpkin, we tried Ichabod by New Holland Brewing, Punkin by Dogfish Head, Jaw Jacker by Arcadia Brewing Company, and Pumking Imperial Pumpkin Ale by Southern Trer Brewing Company. We had two questions in mind: 1) Do you like it? 2) Does it taste like beer?

Though none of our selections was as exotic as a smoked pumpkin beer, the flavor palette was diverse. At one end Dogfish Head’s Punkin presented a solid, malt-based ale with a mild pumpkin finish to compliment the malt. On the other side, Southern Trier’s Pumking Imperial was like drinking a vanilla-pumpkin milkshake. The results were scattered when it came to quality. Most people found the more traditional tasting Dogfish Head more appealing than the sweeter varieties, but we all also prefer traditional IPAs and Lagers for normal drinking. When we discussed whether each beer met our qualifications for being beer, the results were unanimous. Pumking Imperial and Screamin’ Pumpkin simply weren’t real beer. They were too sweet and too spiced. Liqueur, yes. Beer, no.

When I asked Cantwell if he had ever tried a pumpkin ale too radical to consider beer, he said, “I don’t think I have really encountered one that has crossed that line.”

But one of the beers we tested was like a milkshake! How could that possibly be beer? I was incredulous, which is sad, considering I get the same doubtful reaction when I bring American beers to Germany. I have my German friends taste my favorite java stout or IPA from the U.S., and they either gag or scoff. Sometimes they do both. Now I was doing the same thing. As Cantwell pointed out, our American standards for beer often tend to stem from our European forefathers rather from our colonial roots.

“I think it is a valid standard to keep in mind, that is, wanting it to still be beer. But beer has been made out of so many different things besides just barley malt… Pumpkins were used in colonial brewing, as were other adjuncts, simply because of the availability of imported malt or reluctance to import from Britain.”

Not only is pumpkin ale beer; this is American beer at its finest. At our inception, we refused let Europe control us, and beer brewing was no exception. Although these traditions may have died for a couple hundred years, the craft brewing movement has rekindled our passion for unconventional varieties of beer.

“Ten years ago pumpkin ales were almost universally spiced like pumpkin pie, and I think people have gotten beyond that… When we first started doing the pumpkin festival for example, it wasn’t that the beer was not good, but it was sort of like ‘Whoa, look at this, everyone brewed a pumpkin ale.’ I think you can see that in the quality of American brewers now. It used to be enough of a novelty to just do it, but now it’s gotta be top notch.”

The craft brewing movement is maturing quickly, and festivals like Cantwell’s are an important part of that maturation process.

“What we’ll do out here is contact people a few months in advance and say, ‘hey, do you want to brew something for this?’”

Together the brewers show off what they can do and also pressure each other to do it right.

“Sometimes people will say, ‘Well, can’t I just spice a regular beer and call it a pumpkin ale?’ and I say, ‘No.’ To be in this festival it has to have pumpkin in the brewing process.

“I’ve had a few breweries who have had to call me up and say, ‘Oh, we, we tried just putting some pumpkin into a firkin or a keg of finished beer and it turned to mud,’ and I was like, ‘well, I’m not surprised.’”

As my conversation with Cantwell showed time and again, even the most off-the-wall beers have to be brewed seriously.

This is a challenge for brewers, but it is also a challenge for drinkers. The maturation of American beer culture has to involve the consumer. They are the ones that have to buy the beer. This makes these beer festivals all the more important. They bring people together to talk, laugh,and try some 31 different beers (at least that was the count at Cantwell’s Pumpkin Festival this year). With such a wide variety, they should offer everyone something to fit his/her palette. If not, they should at least promote a better awareness that these beers exist.

“I want to do that other places too, I want to go to Portland next year and call some of my brewing friends down there and have them come up with things.”

The more these things go on, the more the brewers and the drinkers will define a brewing tradition just for them.

A few minutes later, our dirndl-clad waitress is back with a liter of golden, shining beer. It’s October 4, which means that it’s the last day of the three-week-long Oktoberfest in Munich. Though my American friends and I didn’t make it to the actual celebration this year (terrorist threats, etc.), we’ve managed to spend the last two days hunched inside of the embarrassingly kitschy Hofbräuhaus restaurant in downtown Hamburg, pretending it’s the real thing.

“Why would I go to Oktoberfest?” is the response I normally get from Northern Germans (or any German from outside of Bavaria) when I mention my interest in going. Full of sausage stands, Ferris wheels, and screaming children, the German Volksfest is a state fair-type tradition that many Germans and I dislike. The event is probably best described as “drunk people and bad music,” yet somehow Oktoberfest still manages to hold my interest.

Before coming to Europe, I had a very specific image of what to expect from this continent. I wanted old buildings, horse-drawn carriages, and big museums full of Renaissance art. Moving to Vienna’s Baroque inner city, that was exactly what I got.

Travel shows about Europe are meant to perpetuate the same depiction to Americans. In an episode about Bruges, Belgium, Rick Steves paints a picture of a romantically preserved medieval city. The recurring images of cobblestone streets, old buildings, fine chocolate, and narrow canals create the illusion that somehow Europe never moved beyond the 19th century.

Compare Mr. Steves’s video to Samantha Brown’s depiction of Barcelona. Although some of the traditions may be different, the underlying emphasis on an antiquated Europe dominates. The images are reminiscent of Cinderella’s Castle at Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

My feelings towards Oktoberfest undoubtedly stem from these nostalgic fantasies. From the moment I heard about the beer tents and people dressed in traditional Bavarian outfits singing on top of tables, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I know now that it isn’t the real Germany, but it was one of the first things that made the country interesting to me. When I got to Hamburg I realized the truth: not only does Bavarian culture only exist in Bavaria, but it is frowned upon in the rest of the country.

Although the sixteen German states are legally bound into a federation, culturally there may as well be oceans dividing them. Along with the former East, Bavaria is one of the most shunned regions of Germany. The Bavarians have their own political party (very conservative), their own heavy accent (they are very proud of it), and a country way of life. No matter how open-minded my German friends are, Bavaria is a place they often have difficulty understanding. Perhaps we could compare this to the difference between the American South and the “Yankees.”

Having lived in Northern Germany for more than two years now, I have slowly noticed these biases developing in me. As an expatriate, I believe it’s a typical way of thinking. We want so badly to adapt to the surrounding culture that we willingly throw away certain interests and opinions to feel assimilated. I remember once hearing a story about an immigrant to America who began chewing gum, a habit he disliked, because it seemed American. Knowing the typical German response to Bavaria, this is exactly what I did with Munich. I shunned it.

So, how did I suddenly end up in a beer hall on Sunday actively promoting Oktoberfest?

While in Bavaria this summer, I re-experienced the specific brand of countryside hospitality, Gemütlichkeit, that I had dismissed as cliché. Eat rich food, drink fine beer, and make sure to invite everyone else to do it with you. I was there two times in two cities with two groups of people, and the Bavarians’ welcoming disposition overwhelmed me. It is their standout feature, and as true as any stereotype can be. Returning to the North I had a fresh understanding of why I liked Bavaria and was ready to re-embrace it.

Through our somewhat overemphasized American excitement, we began to engage in a form of passive diplomacy. Before our plans to go to Munich fell through, my American friends and I were determined that our German friends come too. Going to the beer hall on Sunday, we called them again. They weren’t thrilled about the idea, but they came. They didn’t find Bavarian culture interesting, but they were forced to contemplate why others who didn’t grow up with the same prejudices and biases would.

In this case, our American clichés had their time and place. Every role and stereotype does. While in the United States, I often rail against the Bavarian stereotype to promote a more complete German identity. In Germany, embracing my American instincts is often better for everybody’s international understanding. It’s admittedly hard to do; one stands out when one just wants to blend in, but it’s a part of my role here as an expatriate.

Unfortunately, none of my German friends are any more excited about Bavaria than they were before our Sunday excursion. I guess promoting social awareness isn’t as easy as writing an article or inviting people to a brewery. I can try, but in reality, I went to that brewery to get drunk, and I write these articles for me.

Knowing his ability to mix nostalgia with reality, I was surprised when reading the interview he did with Die Zeit Magzin a few weeks ago. Throughout the interview, Regener gave many prize insights on life in Berlin, but his dialogue ran almost exclusively on the side of sentimentality. His description of Berlin is not one of a long-time inhabitant. He plays into the stereotype everyone wants to believe.

“I always found [the image of people sitting at the window and watching the street] cool. It encompasses something Zen Buddhist…[my first apartment] was in a back courtyard of a building with a bombed-out front. We paid 80 mark for two people. Out the window one saw garbage cans.”

This is the romanticized picture of Berlin: bombed-out, garbage-filled, cheap, and therefore Zen-like.

“Poor, but sexy,” are the words Mayor Klaus Wowereit uses to describe it. For many, this makes Berlin the perfect artist’s city. As Regener later relates:

“[In other cities] the people that do what I do [write and make music] are all ten years younger than me. By my age they had long since transferred into the working world. In Berlin, many people my age and older are still doing what I’m doing.”

Nikolas Kulish, German correspondent to The New York Times, seconds this:

“Those low rents famously have allowed industrial artists to find studios for their massive sculptures, and bands to lease rehearsal spaces for their practice sessions.

“Applied on the minute scale, that means ultracheap nooks for the aspiring authors who need room only for a laptop (or, in advanced cases of the writing bug, an antique typewriter) and a precarious stack of books.

“There are cheaper places in the world, though one has to go much farther east nowadays than Warsaw to find them, but none that also have the breadth of cultural offering.”

According to these men, Berlin is a place where the poor starving artists of the world can flourish without the mainstreaming oppression of the Bourgeoisie. Sucked into the myth, people come from all over the world to be artists in Berlin.

That seems to be the modern-day dream. And, to be honest, it is one that I want to buy into. I am a fan of the great expatriate authors that lived in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. There is nothing I would love more than to have the new epicenter for such lively activity happening just down the street from me. Anytime I was lacking inspiration, I could simply go get a dose in Berlin.

Unfortunately, as a friend pointed out, this is sentiment and not reality.

“Berlin is cheap, but that doesn’t mean that it is any more artistic than other major cities,” she said. “Look at how much music and art comes out of New York, Paris, and London. What do you know that has come out of modern day Berlin? Art is less developed in Berlin. Berlin is cheap, but cheap just means an excuse for hipsters to hang around and do nothing.”

At first I didn’t want to believe it, but the more I have thought about her words, the more I see what she means.

People often tend to associate art with poverty. This is perhaps because it’s a damn near impossible way to make a living. Berlin’s low cost of living makes it an attractive place for artists to be. In their dreams, they envision themselves sitting in their studios making art all day. The bitter reality is that most people making art still have to work to pay their bills, and there are no jobs in Berlin. With its extraordinarily high unemployment rate, it’s hard for nationals to find work. For expatriates, the figures are even more depressing. The poor starving artists may have plenty of time to work on their art, but the result is that many people actually are poor and starving, often forcing them to leave.

Another problem is that people tend to label cities “creative cities.” The reality is that New York, London, Paris, and now Berlin are simply big Western cities. The fact that a lot of art appealing to Western sentimentalities comes out of those places is as much a statistics game as anything. Traveling to said city will not make one an artist, but it will make you part of the scene.

And Berlin certainly has a scene. Scattered about the hip districts are some of the coolest bars I have been to. Little more than a door with a hand-made sign, these places define the poor-but-sexy Berlin. In the air, one notes the smell of cheap beer and hash, and hears the DJ’s newest beats. On the dance floor the owners of scarves and thick-rimmed glasses shake their hips and speak together in accented tongues. It’s an amazing place to see and be seen, but terrible for productivity.

As Oscar Wilde wrote in The Picture of Dorian Gray:

“A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realize.”

If other forms of art are anything like writing, then they rarely go hand in hand with a good party. A week after their Berlin feature, Die Zeit interviewed three artists from another German city: Munich. When discussing their studios, the overall impression was one of quiet focus. I would argue that this is the atmosphere for many artists who take themselves seriously. Hemingway, who regularly wrote about drinking (and did a damn good job of it too), never mixed his words and drink. Creation requires concentration and patience. It’s the sort of thing that drives man to frustration and drinking.

Perhaps, then, Berlin is a good place to quit creating.

The attacks here have come on two fronts. Commercial freighters have found themselves in constant danger from pirate groups. The pirates have already taken multiple ships hostage and held them for ransom. From the Ukrainians to the Russians to the Finns, no one seems to be safe.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Swedish-founded political party, the Pirate Party, won a seat in the European Parliament during the June 7 European Parliamentary elections. Since that time, the Pirate Party has spread throughout Europe, with cells actively registered in at least eight other countries.

In today’s Europe, pirates seem to be everywhere: on the open oceans, and in the hipster bar talking politics across the street. Although the gun-toting, ship-robbing pirates (mostly from Somalia) seem much different from the anchor-tattooed iPhone users (mostly from well-to-do families) who idolize them, appearances can be deceiving. These pirate groups have both been at the receiving end of the world’s troubles.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Somali government completely collapsed. With no one left to regulate their seas, the Somali people watched as other nations came to their coast, dumped waste into their waters, and destroyed their once lucrative fishing industry with non-sustainable practices. Furthermore, the region was no longer controlled by a central government, but by clans and warlords. A single country became divided and dominated through violence, with very few reaping any benefits.

Taken together, these two forces meant that the Somali were running out of money.

On the political side, the Pirate Party’s constituents (average age: 29) have suffered the most from the financial crisis. First, the business ethics of their parents’ generation caused them to lose their jobs, but that was only the beginning, especially here in Europe. With the national elections set to take place this September, mainstream German politics is at a complete standstill, despite the havoc the financial crisis continues to wreak on the economy.

Yes, the German government has helped sectors of the economy by bailing out failing banks and subsidizing workers’ paychecks within struggling industries (i.e. Opal), but this has only provided safety for the established generation. For those entering the job market, the stagnation these policies have created means they remain jobless. Decisions need to be made and policies changed, but not before the vote.

It is play-it-safe politics rather than help-the-people politics, and the youngest generations are feeling the brunt of this mentality on more than just the job front. Especially since the conservative party, the CDU, has established itself as a dominant force in German politics, there have been a number of policies that have negatively impacted the German youth. Tuition fees for university (something that was not at all common before, and makes university now too expensive for some people), and a proposal which will give the government censorship control on the internet (we are the “technology generation”) are just a few examples.

Considering most Germans see a regime change as highly unlikely this year, there is little hope of having these issues addressed. Faced with such a situation, what can anyone do?

This is what I find so fascinating about both of these groups. Each one has found their own way to reassert themselves. Although neither has money or resources, they have managed to scare their opposition. The modern sea-faring pirates are no longer the same as the medieval thieves we remember, nor are the members of the Pirate Party and their contemporaries the same “highly protected” and “entitled” (Word doc) children, the researchers named them. They are organized and motivated.

In Somalia, piracy has become more than a group of rogue bandits. Through piracy, they have become political, they are businessmen, and in the end they are philanthropists. When overfishing began to decimate their waters, fishing-town locals turned vigilante. They used their little skiffs, an old rusty grappling hook and a couple of guns, and raided the foreign ships. They took fishermen hostage and demanding payment for goods pulled from their waters.

As these groups began to earn more money, they grew more organized. At this point, they have a power not present anywhere else in the country; the pirates are some of the only people in Somalia who are able to reach across clan lines. Although they started small with fishing vessels, now they are even managing to make Europeans nervous (many countries were, after all, dumping waste in Somali waters).

Two years ago, pirates were something for the movies and the storybooks, but over the last few months, they have been making weekly appearances in the media. True, what they’re doing is not legal, but few reactionary methods are. The storming of the Bastille wasn’t legal, nor was the Boston Tea Party. In the shadow of the rich nations that have come to dominate and exploit a people, sometimes illegal action is the only way to be heard.

To me, Somali piracy seems acceptable, especially since they are also managing to help their local communities. The pirates are the richest members of their communities, and they are incredibly generous with their money. The locals celebrate when known pirates come back into town. The pirates buy in excess, and thereby give back to the community.

As The New York Times quoted in a piece about piracy a year ago, “If they see a good car that a guy is driving,” he said, “they say, ‘How much? If it’s 30 grand, take 40 and give me the key.’ ”

In my hometown, Grand Rapids, MI, the richest families donate money to build hospitals and venue arenas for the people. The pirates buy lamb and automobiles. Although they spent years being overrun by the strength and greed of other nations (including the warlords of their own), through piracy the Somali people have found their voice.

The same is true of today’s younger generation. The Pirate Party is just one symptom of a threat that did not seem to exist even a year ago: the youth.

In 2007, teens and twenty-somethings in the United States were little more than apathetic brats. In Germany, they were, according to an article in the August 27 edition of weekly newspaper Die Zeit, “pragmatically adapted” to the systems in play. At that point in time, we were more of a vanilla annoyance than a threat to the world order.

But then things changed. As I mentioned before, the current political situation in Germany has stagnated. With the politicians all waiting around for the elections to do anything, more and more people are noticing how ineffective the system is. The ever-growing need to change business as usual has caused a group that once seemed “sensible and adapted” to rebel.

While I use Germany as an example, because they are currently at a crisis point, we have all found our means to do so. As Die Zeit, stated, “Through Facebook and Twitter, the activists of the new revolution communicate world wide.” Small parties like the Pirate Party are now growing by as many as 80 members a day. While Obama exposed the networking capabilities of new media, the Pirate Party has shown that this power this can bestow on every individual.

Technology: it is our own form of piracy. It is our power and the source of our “new revolution.” As big companies and bureaucrats fail to help the little man, going around the system may become the only way to be heard. By finding alternative avenues for gaining power, these groups are already becoming a force that the government — national and international — may actually have to contend with.

I hope they’re starting to shake in their booties.

For that, the Munich Regional Court has finally delivered Scheungraber his sentence. 64 years after the act, those ten dead farmers finally found justice.

Or did they?

Scheungraber’s sentence is just one of three cases dealing with Nazi war crimes that the German Courts are currently processing. Heinrich Boere, 88, will be tried at the end of October for supposedly shooting three Dutch civilians, and John Demjanjuk, an 89-year-old recently deported from the U.S., will face charges for aiding in the extermination of some 27,900 Jews in the Polish Concentration Camp Sobibor.

All three of these men will almost certainly be convicted for the atrocities they committed. If they did the things they have been charged with, then they certainly deserve to be, but I can’t help but wonder if these proceedings are going about things the wrong way.

The idea here is to find justice, correct? Certainly, Germany hasn’t put these men on trial in order to keep them from striking again.

Demjanjuk, who is ailing under kidney and bone-marrow diseases, was so ill at the time of deportation that the U.S. government had trouble getting permission to transport him. The even older (though already sentenced) Josef Scheungraber will remain undetained until they hear his appeal next year, if he is still alive.

For some, this is about hearing the truth about these men’s actions. For others, the proceedings are about judgment and punishment. But from what I have learned about these three cases, I don’t see how either of these goals are being met.

As Thomas Blatt, a Jewish author who was imprisoned in the Sobibor Concentration Camp, said, “I don’t care if [Demjanjuk] is released; I do care about his testimony.”

This argument reminds me of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee hearings that occurred South Africa in the 1990s. In order to put the country back together after Apartheid, the government wanted to start with a clean slate. Putting everyone in jail was not going to solve this problem. Instead, they founded a committee.

The idea was that through repentance one finds truth and justice.

This is how I understand Blatt’s explanation of Nazi trials today. More than half a century after the fact, sentencing a 90-year-old man to life imprisonment doesn’t really accomplish anything. What’s important is admitting one’s crimes. It’s about showing respect to the victims and finding peace for one’s self.

This hasn’t happened. Scheungraber stated that he had “absolutely no knowledge” of the events described. Demjanjuk’s words were similar.

This is, admittedly, a terrible disappointment for the victims, but the implications of their denials are much wider than their lack of piety.

“There are many people right now who say the Holocaust never happened,” says Blatt.

To all those people who claim the Holocaust never existed, these men’s testimonies should have also proved that it did. By refusing to admit to their actions, Scheungraber and his compatriots have in a larger sense denied the Holocaust itself.

The second principle behind these war crime hearings is the notion that these men need to be judged and punished for their actions. Men like Demjanjuk may have assisted in the murder of thousands of innocent people. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung states, “All Nazi criminals must answer for their deeds.”

I have no problem with this statement. Granted, incarceration doesn’t seem like the most logical penalty 64 years after the crime, but if this is the punishment we find most appropriate, then sure, that’s fine. Everyone needs closure somehow. But the way these judgments are being carried out is all wrong.

If there is one thing we cherish in the U.S. in the legal system, it is the idea that every man deserves to be judged by a “jury of his peers.” These peers theoretically live in the same time, place, and culture under which a crime was committed. This means that those people can stand bravely in front of a criminal and say, “If I were in your shoes, I would/would not have done that.”

In this way, they have a right to judge.

As my housemate recently said to me, we live in a different time and different circumstances than those under which these men acted. Having never experienced the extremes of war, we both decided we did not have the right to say, “I would never have done that.”

Take Solomon Perel for example. Perel is a Jew who was captured by Nazis during the Second World War. His memoir, Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (I Was Hitler Youth Salomon), details his survival. Discovered by the Nazis, Perel denied his Jewish roots and went to a Hitler Youth School in Braunschweig. During his time there, he translated work from Russian to German, befriended Nazis (he even had a Nazi girlfriend), and aided in the capture of Joseph Stalin’s son. He maintained his charade until the Nazis were overtaken.

It was war. This was about survival. He wrote that he was ashamed of himself, but he had no choice if he wanted to live. Now he makes tours around Europe speaking about his experiences.

Many of those, including Demjanjuk, who have gone on to be tried for war crimes had changed their identity and were leading relatively normal lives. They had neighbors, families and jobs. Perhaps this means that – in a normal time in a normal world — they were actually normal people, just like you and me.

Just like Solomon Perel, it could have been the war that made them behave differently.

The idea that these men’s condemnation is coming from people born some twenty years after the war’s end doesn’t seem like true justice. It’s symbolic justice, but not much more than that.

I understand that a lot of people may disagree with me on this issue. It’s not hard to imagine why. The things that happened under the Nazi regime are not really to be defended. They are to be punished. End of story.

But these men were not high-ranking officials. They were not decision-makers, thinking up new strategies for mass-extermination and world domination. Their greatest sin was most likely getting caught up in something unimaginable in today’s world.

I simply ask that we think a little harder about what we are doing.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” I say to my friend. “I’m freaking out a little bit.”

I hate large groups of tourists. They completely overwhelm me, and in Barcelona they are everywhere. I don’t know what I expected coming to the fourth most popular tourist destination in Europe (after London, Paris, and Rome). I guess I still hoped to have my own experiences, but everywhere we went, we did so alongside thousands of others.

This is pathetic, I thought to myself. The beautiful Park Güell is useless for reading or enjoying nature, and the Catalonian feel of the historic Barri Gótic is completely lost in the overwhelming screech of English voices.

What has tourism done? Barcelona’s inhabitants are slowly watching their city and culture get taken over. Now even the outsiders (the ones who have taken over) can’t get real feel for the city because they’re the only ones there.

Tourism has destroyed everything in its wake.

Right?

Graffiti in Barcelona.

There are plenty of discussions on the negative effects of tourism on a country and it’s culture. I myself have often accused it of being a form of neocolonialism. A tourist comes in with their rolls of money (read: influence) and runs amok. They buy and demand and spread their influence until the culture adapts to their needs.

But according to Erik Cohen’s essay “The Sociology of Tourism,” this is not necessarily true. Unlike explorers, conquerors, missionaries, or even anthropologists, in a tourist-local situation the locals have the upper hand. A local’s advanced linguistic, geographical, and social knowledge place the tourist at their mercy.

The tourist walks around with a pocketful of money and a map that hardly seems to fit the streets, and the local gets to decide how much he/she wants to exploit this situation.

It is not the locals who are dehumanized and commodified; it’s the tourists.

If we take my time in Vienna — another tourist infested city — as an example, we can see exactly how easily the local population takes advantage of the tourists.

I had to walk directly past St. Stephen’s Cathedral every day. The number of tour groups in this area is uncountable. Besides making the streets noisy and crowded, however, they had no impact on my day. After a while they became no different than the horse droppings I had to walk around.

The men dressed in Mozart costumes, however, preyed on the tourists like hungry lions on antelope.

I think in many ways the ability to ignore tourists is a source of local pride. It differentiates their real city from that of the stupid facade.

“I hate Times Square,” a friend of mine living in New York recently said to me. “It’s so tourist infested. Locals never go there.”

So when a Barcelona travel guide laments the locals’ loss of Las Ramblas — the city’s main promenade leading to the beach — I wonder how much the locals truly feel the same.

Instead of getting used and abused, local society isolates the tourists. I certainly saw this in both Vienna and Barcelona. They have men dress up like Mozart or they put up street performers and tapas restaurants in one area and let the tourists loose. Then they don’t have to be bothered by it.

This then sets up another question: if the tourists are isolated from the locals, how can they learn anything about the city they are visiting? On the artificial island the tourist industry has set up it would seem impossible to have any genuine experiences.

In his essay “The Social Psychology of Tourist Behavior,” P.L. Pearce seems to agree with that statement. He says that tourism is much more about reinforcing what we already know about a city than it is about coming to new understandings.

Sad but true. Most people who visit a city for a week or two without any personal contacts are not going to see much more than the travel channel and guidebooks have already described. And if I’m honest, this is also true for me.

On my first trip to Eastern Europe in 2005, for example, I remember walking around taking pictures of houses with big holes in the roof and missing walls. The whole time I commented on how perfect I thought it was that it was cold and overcast on that particular day. I wasn’t gaining new insights on that day in Bratislava, I was simply seeing what I had expected to see.

One could say that the same is true of my trips to the Ukraine and Paris respectively. In the Ukraine I was more surprised than expected by the extreme poverty, but in seeing a group of people shoveling the streets rather than using a snow plow, I thought to myself, of course.

In Paris I walked through the streets stopping to drink espresso and wine. I meandered most of the day through massive crowds of tourists and stayed in the main tourist districts. In many ways, it was exactly what I expected it to be: the romantic, over-crowded Paris we haven’t gotten to know through books and movies.

Within the short amount of time that I have spent in Barcelona or any of these other cities, it was unrealistic to think I’d discover the true depths of the culture. But although most short trips are laden with preconceived expectations, there are always a few surprises, and these alone were enough to make the trips worth-while.

In Bratislava, for example, there was art everywhere. There were multicolored cows with boobs, a house completely painted in flowery, hippie-esque designs, and beautiful gardens. They may have seemed simple, but they were completely surprising in stark contrast to many of the worn-out buildings and monotonous communist blocks. It showed the city’s growth and its reaction to its past.

The colored cow in Bratislava.

Although the poverty of the Ukraine was striking, my conversation with two wealthier-looking guys from Kiev also defied my expectations. After seeing their new MacBooks and single-lense reflex cameras, I was not surprised when made it clear to us that they spoke Russian (another surprise: most of the Ukrainians we were keen to make distinctions between themselves and their former dictator). My friend and I were surprised, however, when they turned out to be nerdy computer programmers rather than your prototypical Russian mobsters.

In Paris, I must admit that I was surprised by the exact things that I thought would be mundane. The problem with Paris is that it has been featured so often in our media that its image has turned into nothing but kitsch. While visiting I was astounded by how beautiful and noteworthy all of the sights actually were. The tourists still admittedly overwhelmed me, experiencing the city transformed it from something banal to illuminating.

Finally, we come back to Barcelona. While I feel I learned a lot while in the city, the one that struck me the most probably reflects poorly on me:

Spain is nothing like Latin America. This realization is admittedly naïve, but growing up in the United States, I had always associated Spanish-speaking culture with Latin America. This is not true at all. In Spain the people are quite reserved, ride brand new scooters, have beautiful old buildings, and are very wealthy. In every way, the Spanish are European.

These were the things I have learned while abroad. Granted, they are all relatively trivial — sometimes surprisingly so — but that just proves how important it is to visit these places.

I see my visits as a way for me to take a small nibble out of the whole European pie. Each trip has promoted a bit more understanding, and thereby moves each place from the fairy-tale image in my mind to the reality of its inhabitants.

Making these discoveries is a slow process — often times full of tourists — but it is one worth waiting in line for.