REGINA: Final Thoughts

Do we really have to go back?

While I’ve been missing the conveniences of home, and missing the people that I’m close to, there’s a big part of me that is not looking forward to going back to the United States. I feel as though, having had this experience, that when I go back there, the people will seem incredibly uncultured and just inferior to the people in Germany. I kind of wish that I had been born in Germany and grown up here speaking German as my first language, instead of having been raised in South Carolina and speaking English.

I just… after having been here, I fail to see why America thinks itself so superior to everybody else in the world. While America has a lot of benefits, I feel that the way that its set up is incredibly backwards and inferior to how countries like Germany have set themselves up to be.

I guess that while you become more worldly and independent when you travel, it makes you see the negative aspects of where you come from (although, to be honest, I have already doubted for a long time how great America claims itself to be). In all, I’ve been very happy with my experience here, although now I worry that I will find America lacking as compared to all that Germany has to offer. Not to say that Germany doesn’t have its bad points. It’s incredibly expensive to buy things over here (clothes and shoes, for instance). In the school system, you don’t have as much of an ability to change your mind about what you want to do and what you want to study as you do in America. Overall, though, I’ve enjoyed Germany a lot more than I’ve ever enjoyed America.

I think that studying abroad is incredibly beneficial, and that if given the opportunity to do so, everyone should give it a try. This has been a life-changing experience for me, and it’s one that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It’s allowed me to see things on more of a global perspective instead of just worrying about what’s going on locally. I think that a lot of the world’s problems would be eliminated if people were given the opportunity to study abroad and observe a different culture for an extended amount of time. If everyone thought on a global perspective, I think that countries would be able to work out existing issues and many potential issues that could come up later could be prevented.