Bubble To Bubble

So, as you may have expected, I think I may have bigged up my trip to Walmart a tad. It wasn’t very exciting, in fact by the end I had completely lost the will to live. I mean for starters there was barely anyyy peanut butter on the shelves, what’s with that?! Me, a peanut butter connoisseur (if I may say so myself) obviously bee lined straight to the aisle labled ‘PEANUT BUTTER’ but no, one measly jar of Peter Pan and a couple of Skippys. So that was a bad start to the trip and it culminated in eventually having to wait about an hour for our brand new American Phones for the bargain price of $10. Yes you heard me, that’s about £6. It truly is a beauty, the tiny screen and quaint little buttons... what am I saying, it’s a horrific brick. But I have a phone!

Anyways, now that I have covered Walmart as previously promised, I thought I should take the time to explain the URL name of my blog ‘bubble-to-bubble’; well, ‘across the pond’ was taken! I jest. In reality when I sat down and had to think about what this monumental move meant in my life and how it could be summed up into a short phrase I realised that, other than location, my life hasn’t actually changed that much. I have been moving, since about the age of 12 between various different bubbles. St Mary’s, my all girls Catholic boarding school in the middle of Dorset was of course the first, and with 27 girls in my year, the bubble was about as small as it could get; then to Warwick, a campus university in the middle of Coventry where busses and taxis to Leamington were a necessity, and now UCONN, the largest of all the bubbles, but a bubble nonetheless.

While my UCONN bubble is beginning to feel slightly smaller as I’m steadily learning to make my way around without a map, I realised the other day that America is really just one great, big, massive, world dominating bubble. In Immigration when asked where I was born, I replied ‘Berlin’. I’ve never seen a look of complete and utter confusion on a man’s face; he needed the country I was born in and not the city and either he had no clue Berlin existed or that it was the capital of Germany! I mean come on, I was born in an American Hospital in Germany; the American’s practically ran half of Germany for the last century! Similarly, when given some talks by UCONN international professors, Academics, from Australia and England and the likes who had immigrated over in the past 20 years or so, it was interesting hearing their perception of the American bubble. In fact, one of them even told us not to judge them for their ignorance if (she might have even said ‘when’) they can’t understand our accent or don’t know where our home country is on a map.

For most people this is shocking. How can they not know where England or France is? But how many of you reading this blog can name more than 10 states, or place them on a map? In the same way that Americans don’t really know European countries, neither do Europeans really know Americans states. Of course I’m making a lot of sweeping generalisations but I think it’s easy to forget that although America is one massive country, one big bubble, its split into multiple little bubbles (well 50 to be exact) in the same way that Europe is. I think what I’m trying to say is that yes Americans can seem ignorant about the world outside of the United States but no more so than most people. America is such a vast and diverse country, that they have enough to keep them occupied.