The students—24 in all, from 9 different countries—just arrived this weekend; today is their first day of classes. I’ve not spoken with all of them one-on-one yet, but the few that I have I’ve already made a great connection with. I’m looking forward to this.

I agreed to do it again this summer at the behest of the program coordinator, who said that they could use someone with veterancy on this year. Last year I didn’t have classes to take, as I do now, so I initially declined, then was persuaded at the promise of money and meeting new friends—though not necessarily in that order.

The group last year was largely inconsequential to me, but I met one guy with whom I’ve kept in very close contact, and consider him a true friend of mine. I don’t think I’ll be lucky enough to have that experience two years running, but I’ll try to keep an open mind.

And as repayment to that friend I met, Cihan, I shall blog incessantly about how racist and curmugdeonly all these news kids are, just like I did last year.

More to come.

This is likely foresight speaking, as the ones I connected well with I’ll be seeing soon enough in Germany. I’ve what I consider to be honest invitations to The Netherlands, Spain, and Norway, too. I must make it to Denmark to visit those guys, which is something I can accomplish easily enough if I spend a weekend in Berlin, I should think. Or maybe the Norway weekend I’ll do a little island-hopping. Never did get in with the French. I’m still modestly surprised I didn’t want to.

I’ve been promised a phone call around 5 or 6AM Sunday morning, when planes touch down in Germany. I said I’d likely be up, drinking the last bottles of German beer from the party, and even if I’m not, well, it’s awesome to see a phone number with about 4000 digits on your missed calls list.

I do miss them. A lot.

What I find so fascinating is that the only Caucasian male of lengthy European lineage revels in your-mom jokes. He understands the art. He and I became cornered one day at dinner, the others warning us with clenched jaws that lines were about to be crossed. Jovially he and I proceeded to make fun of each other’s mothers, which certainly seemed fair game, as neither of us had been getting offended. In response to the question, “Doesn’t anyone in America ever get punched in the face from a your-mother joke like this?” our resident Northern Irelander explained the situation thus:

Of course not! You don’t get offended from this stuff anymore. I mean, maybe in the 1950s something would have happened, but today? No, you don’t let it get to you. It’s a sign of weakness if someone pisses you off. You have to be invulnerable.

He later explained to me what he had felt as he watched the others grow angry at your-mom joke: he said it was like watching barbarians doing a wardance. It seemed so incomprehensibly primitive to him, this kind of bloodline loyalty. It’s interesting that although the man has ostensibly little devotion to the respect paid his family, he is fervently nationalistic, and never misses a chance to rip on the British (who does?). My final thought on the matter is merely that he can take a joke, which perhaps is the natural byproduct of life in society whose economy rests so importantly on a massive entertainment industry.

Yes, I’m aware that I am here generalizing the Northern Ireland economic culture and conflating it with that of an equally generalized Western economic paradigm. But accepting this premise as true for the sake of argument, how should theories of integration in European societies be developed, revised, discarded?

Today I went to a local beer distributor and picked up a couple cases of the good stuff for the big party tomorrow (after the kids are gone, you’ll notice). I had the wherewithal and magnanimity to purchase a case of Yuengling specifically for these guys, as it was our last night together, and I thought it would be nice to down a couple American—and Pennsylvanian, at that—beers with the lot of them. But the way this evening is shaping up, I might just drag the case over to Jim’s place and kill it there. Sure beats getting hugged by one more teary-eyed European girl.

Maybe I’ll take this opportunity to stir up some fun, sow some seeds of discontent. I’ve got about a thousand iterations of your-mom jokes which need to be unleashed. Here goes nothing.

During a conversation discussing this, I was told by one of the kids that he thought I was faking the whole “I don’t get racist jokes” thing in order to sound more tolerant, thereby giving them a better impression of Americans. I retorted that perhaps his English just sucked, and that’s why I didn’t get the jokes. Then another student piped in with this very telling axiom:

Everybody’s a closet racist. Except, you know, for those who aren’t—the people who are just openly racist.

So perhaps I am trying too hard to sound cultured and not bigoted when around these kids. But it’s also a possibility that their societies are, for the most part, in a similar position to where the U.S. was a century ago. Immigration is at an all-time high in Europe, and I don’t think their traditionally monolithic cultures have adapted to the sudden influx yet. This is pretty much the only advantage American mainstream culture has over the European mindset. I hope Americans make the most of this distinction.

My American accent in German is embarrassing, but at least I don’t sound like I’m from Freiburg (like Dureid). Dureid did compliment me on my excellent sentence construction, though, which I take to heart. Now I just have to work on sounding angrier and less n00bly. As ever.

I’ll be listening to Mikael Åkerfeldt nonstop in order to accomplish this.

I should link to the scads of pictures I’ve posted of these kids. More to come soon, certainly, as I’m still catching up with posting old ones, and there are many more to be taken this week (their last).