Leer: We’re not so different after all

As our time in Scotland drew to a close, we needed to decide where to go next. We had planned on hopping over to Ireland, but in the end, we decided we’d rather have a longer time to explore Ireland during a later trip, and we caught a plane to Amsterdam to visit our German relatives one last time before moving on to France. Remembering our nearly disastrous flight from Berlin, we arrived at the airport two hours early—but apparently we swung too far in the opposite extreme, since they wouldn’t let us check our bags for another hour. No matter, we eventually were able to board our flight, arrive in Amsterdam, find our hostel (which was right next door to the famous Red Light District) and catch the next morning train to Leer.

Once again, cousin Ralph picked us up from the station. For the next three days, we hung out with family and saw bits of Leer we hadn’t discovered before: a tiny history museum above a wine shop, a boat tour along the river, a restaurant that doubled as a horse stables with full-blown tournaments and everything. We managed to bake our relatives a cake without all the proper ingredients, without German translations for the ingredients we had and without an English measurement system (it wasn’t half bad, either). We went to a neighborhood potluck where I succeeded in communicating by finding someone who spoke Spanish.

 

It was an extremely dense chocolate-mint cake, but everyone seemed to like it

While all three days were a ton of fun, one evening stands out in my memory more distinctly than all the rest. Some of the younger cousins came to tea with us to try the cake we'd baked and afterwards announced that they were taking us bowling with the family. Now, I don’t particularly like to bowl, but I like my German relatives, and I was willing to put up with some lousy games to hang out with them. So Faeth and I climbed into the back of a cousin’s convertible and headed to the bowling alley. The windows were down and the radio was cranked up. The song lyrics were in German, but I could understand the gist of the message, something about young people having fun. And as I sat in the back of that convertible, wind messing up my hair as we took curves far faster than we should have, I felt a kinship with these German cousins of mine that I hadn’t realized before. They had always been family to me, but now I realized just how similar we were: we were doing the same things on a Friday night that American kids would do on a Friday night: grabbing some friends, blasting music and driving out for a night on the town.

Bowling was a lot more fun than I’d feared. The ally was decked out in a Stargate theme, with giant aliens painted on the walls and glowing neon lights casting weird shades on our skin. And, I’m proud to say, I wasn’t the worst bowler there, even with my final score of a whopping 86 points. A few of the cousins played to win, but most of us just played for fun. And between wildly bouncing balls off bumpers and crazy bowling strokes, it was a lot of fun. It was the sort of fun you can have with any group of goofballs who like each other and decide to go bowling.

It helped to know the Stargate references...

People seem to assume that Europe is such a different place than the United States, that everyone overseas is cultured, cool and trendy. But I contend that Europeans are just people like you and me. They have bad days and good days, plans and fears and mistakes and triumphs. They have friends and family, jobs and hobbies. And at the end of the day, they’re far more similar to us than they are different. That’s something I think we should all remember when we’re tempted to lump people into groups based on their backgrounds and where they grew up. People are people. Let’s celebrate our similarities instead of focusing on differences that aren’t so important after all.