Five things you thought were 'European' but aren't
Sometimes what happens in Tuscany, stays in Tuscany
The title of this post should really be, “Five things I thought were European but aren’t.”
But I don’t think I am the only American to have cobbled together a fantasy pan-European culture in my mind—a Eutopia, if you will. One where everyone has ‘free’ healthcare and takes their lunch daily at the nearest sidewalk cafe.
We Americans can come up with a lot of preconceived notions. We imagine life “in Europe” to be as homogenous as life in the U.S. largely is, just different.1
But Europe is comprised of 50 different countries, 27 of which are in the European Union, each with their own unique culture, language(s) and history.
I got the idea for this post from watching a Paris apartment tour video by another creator. She mentioned something in the kitchen as being “pretty standard for Europe,” only to be quite put out by the number of commenters from different parts of Europe (okay, a lot of them were from Germany) informing her that it wasn’t like that …
