In between junior and senior year of high school, I traveled to Germany with my some of the students in my German class. It was the first time I'd been abroad (and it remains the only time I've used my passport), and I was unbelievably excited about all the opportunities that would come with being in Germany.

While most of my classmates had been smart enough to sleep on the flight across the Atlantic, I hadn't been able to calm down. In fact, rather than even remain at a normal level of excitement, I bounced around in my tiny seat like a puppy on uppers. The feeling of boundless energy finally escaped me at the luggage corral. As one of my classmates pulled out a guitar and started playing, I slipped into a foggy haze in Frankfurt.

From there, things started looking up. I eventually caught up on sleep, and tried to enjoy the perks of being a stranger in a strange land, while not looking entirely strange. I'd been told for most of my life that I looked Slavic, and I fit right in in Deutschland. On our first day in Germany, on a street in Wuerzburg, a passerby asked me where to find the ice cream shop. My trip was off to a great start; I fit in so well that people mistook me for someone I wasn't.

The rest of our group wasn't so lucky. I was blessed to go to a very diverse school, and I graduated with a class that came from a variety of nationalities and heritages. But in Germany, that hodge-podge of skin color gradients gave us away. People assumed immediately that we were Americans. One day, as we were traipsing through an underground train station (probably in Berlin), we were spotted by a group of young Germans with disheveled hair and dirt-stained jeans. For being American, we were the recipients of some selectively-hurled insults. None of us understood much, aside from the fact that Bush had done something to upset these unkempt youth, and we were hearing about it. We kept our heads down, and walked faster to get away from the political speeches. 

As we got further into our journey, people kept asking me questions in German about things they assumed I knew the answer to. In Koeln, I walked up an immense staircase to reach a tower that looked over the whole city. The stairs never seemed to end, on the way up or the way down. As I made my way to the bottom, a group of handsome young German men asked me how far it was to the top. Flustered, I responded it was, "a little bit far." At this, the boys began to snicker, and continued up the stairs so they could find the tower, and a better answer to their question. My girlfriends and I laughed about that for a few minutes, and I still tell the story today.