September 3rd, 2006, 8:56 am

I’m not leaving.

[Editor's Note: This is a long one. Since I'm posting less frequently, I'm posting longer.]

I’m sitting in a bikini in a laundry room in Berlin, Germany, and I’m not sure I ever want to leave.

Europe, that is.

(I’m fine with leaving the laundry room.)

My heart has been beating too fast all day, as I contemplated writing this entry. How to explain something so complicated, so charged? How not to make Mom freak out? (Don’t freak out, Mom.)

I’m 25, so it’s easy to say … “Ah, yes … the romance of youth. She visits Europe and doesn’t ever want to come back. Why, when I was her age I felt the same …”

True, perhaps.

But America in 2006 is not the America I was born into. And I’m not sure it’s a country I want to return to.

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Everywhere we’ve gone, I’ve seen countries more equipped than ours to make the transition into the 21st century.

Recycling, useful public transit, and clean streets - these basic amenities are light years away for most American cities.

Did you know that 98 percent of Finnish bottles are recycled? That you can go to college for free in the EU - even getting your masters degree? You don’t need to own a car - you can take mass transit home, stopping at markets to pick up fresh vegetables and bread for dinner. The standard of living for the things I care about seems ridiculously high.

I’ve been reading selections from Alexis de Toqueville’s Democracy in America, the classic political science volume, written by a French man visiting America in the mid 1800s. He describes what he sees - a powerful democracy, where a confederation of independent states are bound together for political purposes by a loose federal government. In the year 2006, I wonder now if the European Union isn’t a better example of such an organization. Does the democracy that de Toqueville saw in America still exist?

Everywhere we go in Europe, we see SMART cars - tiny creatures so small they can park perpendicular to the curb. Automakers who sell cars in America manufacture more fuel-efficient cars for the European market - why don’t they sell those back home?

We could go on forever - I could point out something I’ve seen in a European country, ask why it doesn’t exist in America, and then point to the cause - powerful corporations that use lobbyists to promote their economic interests in our legislature and society. Economic interests which don’t take into account any of the things I think a society should value: the environment, education, health care, and other moral values.

I’m writing this in 2006, which means it’s crunch time.

The environment is about to blow.

Point to all the government hoopla you want to - scientists freaking agree that the world is getting warmer, and that we’re going to have a lot more natural disasters as a result.

I don’t think the American civil infrastructure can handle it.

It’s 2006, which also means that global economics are changing. The Internet is good for a lot more than porn - workers can be based anywhere, and industries that were based on physical properties or mediums (the media, notably), are going to have to shift fast if they want to survive.

I don’t think that American industry is moving fast enough.

As a web journalist, I look back home and wonder - why go back? What’s there for me?

I want to go to grad school, which in America would cost me a darn pretty penny. If I was a citizen of the EU, I could go for free in Europe; as an American, I’m looking at tuition of $11,000 a year.

I want to work as an online journalist - (though really, the word “online” should be dropped, since all journalists should work online) - but American papers are downsizing their staffs, and those who do have the will to innovate rarely have the resources.

So here’s the general plan; formulated exactly one month into my three month backpacking journey. (We’ll see how much it shifts.)

I want to go to grad school in Europe.

Here’s the argument:

• It’s a two-year commitment - if I find that I hate it, I can always move on back home. At least I’ll have some education under my belt.
• Grad school in Europe is about a fifth of the cost of a comparable American degree, which means I won’t be in debt for the rest of my life.
• Being in another society is in and of itself educational. My lazy American brain woke up, and started paying attention to life again.
• The Internet has made the world very small. I IM and email my friends all the time; VOIP and Skype means I’ll be able to call internationally at very low rates.
• I live apart from most of my friends and family anyways; being in Munich isn’t really that much different than being in Manchester, NJ.
• Learning to live in and respect another culture just might be good for sassy LauraFries.com, who does (ahem) occasionally have a hard time getting along with other people. (In person; it’s all dandy on the Internet :).

So yeah. That’s the idea.

I’ve looked into one program at Aarhus University in Aarhus, Denmark, which is in English. “European studies” is the name of the program, which is a combination of history, sociology, and poli-sci. The approach seems similar to examining the EU like a social organism - learning about the history and the culture of all the individual cultures, and learning how they interplay.

I’m hoping to find a school that would allow me to use my skills as a journalist to write my master’s thesis - one that would be open to me living in other cultures and writing about them.

“Wait, how does that get you a job in America?” asks my Dad.

Well, there is no easy answer for that one. But I do know that the idea of working my ass off to get into Columbia so I can work at the New York Times someday makes every cell in my body cringe.

I do think that the best way to think critically about one’s own culture is to learn about others; so who knows, I might return to America and work as a newspaper reporter. Maybe my writing will take its own path; maybe I’ll branch into books or write long-form pieces for magazines. Or maybe I’ll just learn a lot of things, fall in love, and stay home and pop out Danish babies and cheese Danishes.

At any rate, I think that I could benefit from a little higher education right about now - and I’m eyeing Europe as the place to make it happen.

Please freak out in the comments below.