One of the topics I was tasked with writing about for this blog was what it was like to be an American abroad. There have been times where I've expected things to maybe be a little difficult, but in most of my experiences thus far, it hasn't been so bad.
Sure, there's the occasional confusion when interacting with people who only speak German (or other languages that just aren't English), but I haven't yet experienced any negative feelings or notions from anyone. And it's not that I'm good at hiding it, because people can usually tell pretty easily. To them, we're just the same kind of tourists that you'd experience as a tourist in the US. You know that they are probably from a different country, but you don't think any different of it, and it certainly isn't a bad thing. So long as we try and abide by their culture and do our best to fit in, there's no problems or any negative feelings.
The only time that I can think of where being an American was a "problem" was on one of the nights when we had gone out. Not being too familiar with the nightlife, we basically were just looking around at random places to try and get in. One doorman asked if we were German, and when we responded with no, that we're American, the club was suddenly too full for us to enter. It wasn't a big deal to us, but it did strike me as a little strange. Oh well, it's not important. My time in Germany has been excellent so far. For the most part, I've only ever experienced people trying to be as helpful as possible when they could, even if we could barely understand each other.
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