21 & 1/2 Hours.

I'm bursting with excitement. My plane has finally landed after 11 hours. 11 hours where I had to smell the old guy next to me (who was coincidentally wearing a Hublot watch - my least favorite). Where the person in front of me thrust their seat back into my knees every once in a while. I'm going to be setting foot in Germany, the first foreign country I've ever set foot in, in about ten minutes.

I've got my bags, I'm getting off the plane. "Tschüss!" The cute stewardess with big grampa glasses says melodiously, giving me a big, toothy smile. I laugh to myself because my friends who did a semester here in college told me that's how people say goodbye here, and that means I'm here!

And then I step off the plane. And the first thing I hear is fucking Miley Cyrus, "singing" Wrecking Ball. I immediately started punching myself in the temple. I couldn't believe how naive I was, to think that there was a place I could go where I could outrun the slow, cancerous death of culture. But no, there she is, death incarnate, crooning "I never hit so hard in love" (whatever in fuck's name that even means).

I'm being sardonic, I know. I didn't start punching myself. Really, I just kind of grinned. It was just so fitting that this would be the first song I'd hear in another country. I didn't know exactly what I'd been expecting, a bunch of people wearing lederhosen and dirndl dresses, handing me pitchers of Weihenstephaner hefe weissbier? I was amused by my own ignorance in expecting things to be immediately observably different a western European country.

I think people are usually pretty similar, once you get under the culture differences. People want to belong, to be loved, to have a purpose. The way those things play out may be different, of course. But I think understanding that little bit of the universal human experience will always make it easier to understand where a person is coming from.

I asked a guy wear the baggage claim was, in English of course, and he got super nervous, like I was giving him a foreign language exam. He started rubbing his forehead and blinking a lot. To his credit, he spoke pretty damn near perfectly. As it turns out, I didn't actually have to go to baggage claim, but still, it was a nice experience. I felt bad for the guy, after I talked to him. He wasn't even like a customer service employee or anything, or even an employee of Lufthansa, the airline we'd come in on. He was just some poor guy that worked at the airport. But after I'd said something, all of the Americans on my flight started coming up to guy and demanding answers to their own questions. I saw beads of sweat forming on his brow before I was sucked away on the escalator, by the horde of impatient Germans who already knew where they were going. We made eye contact and I'm pretty sure he was trying to say "fuck you" with his eyes.

After all the boring shit of figuring out where I was going, which I'll skip for your sake, I had a couple of other interesting observances. At the gate for my connecting flight to Prague, there was a woman with overly tanned skin, or rather, hide. She had enormous, bolt-on boobs. A nose chiseled by the Gods out of the finest plastic known to man. Bright blue eyes. I said to myself: "I know this girl is dating a douche bag. And I know he will look exactly the same as they do in America."

Getting off the plane in Prague, she was greeted by her boyfriend in the middle of the walkway, so that everyone could be inconvenienced by their beauty. He was huge, and he had tribal tattoos, and spiky hair, he was wearing a rosary like a necklace, and he was wearing sunglasses in the airport. He was a douche bag.

Are there just universal rules that must be followed, acting out through people? You could've taken this couple and put them in Jersey Shore, and the entire universe would've been none the wiser. And yet they were halfway around the world.

Although, I must say, they reeked of inauthenticity. To be fair, these types of people always seem inauthentic. But this especially felt weird. Like they were trying to tap into some American culture they they'd not experienced enough of to understand that the worship of people who looked and acted like that was mostly satirical. Perhaps it's ethnocentric of me to think that just because two people in the Czech Republic looked like two douchey Americans because they were trying to copy that culture.

The other thing I noticed was how much more patient people were at the airport in Munich. The line to get through security took much longer there than in LA, and yet no one was scoffing, or impatiently checking their watches, or stamping their feet, or looking to others in line with commiseration as if to say: "can you believe this is taking more than four seconds??"

Regardless, after 21 and a half hours of flying and waiting to fly, I finally got to Prague. And for the one hundred thousandth time in my life, I realized that wherever you go, there are gonna be patient people and douche bags. Thankfully all the douche bags tend to pair up.

Tschüss, Munich. I hardly knew ye. Ahoj, Prague.