While in Germany and the Czech Republic, I met only one other American: a college student who told me he'd once gone swimming with Michael Phelps. It seemed that the rest of America had stayed home, or at the very least, were avoiding the shadowy bars and clubs where I'd been spending all my time.
As soon as I started making my way towards France, however, I began encountering Americans. I think most of them had been hired by Al-Qaeda to damage America's reputation abroad.
At the airport in Prague, I sat next to two young American businessmen. They wore identical black suits and were talking loudly about Nintendo Wii, which quickly turned into an equally loud conversation about a sexual parlor game involving a group of men and a baked good. Before I boarded my flight to Paris, the last words I heard were, "Sure, I'd play. But eat that cookie? No way, bro. No way."
A few days later, while visiting the Musee d'Orsay, I was joined in a gallery by an American family. I was looking at paintings and statues and nodding meaningfully; they were involved in a lengthy discussion about the merits of the "he who smelt it, dealt it" theory of flatulence.
That evening, I found some Europeans. First, I had a forty-dollar drink at the Hotel Plaza Athenee; then, I went to a club where young Parisians were dancing to Kanye West. One Frenchman was standing on a banquette, waving a bottle of champagne, and rapping poorly; his shirt was almost completely unbuttoned and even though I couldn't smell him, I knew in my heart he was wearing a lot of cologne.
But soon enough I was back among my countrymen. On the train from Paris to Marseille, I saw a American woman point to her group of rowdy friends and say to an elderly Frenchwoman, "Uh...we...va...etre...annoying? So I think you might want to move." I looked at her friends. They were all in their forties.
Between Marseille and Nice, this same woman described the Cote d'Azur with a common barnyard epithet and the observation that "San Diego is nicer." Then she and her friends began shouting out euphemisms for male genitalia. They seemed particularly fond of the term "skin flute." They finally got off the train at Cannes, or as they called it, "cans."
As soon as they were gone, there was a burst of applause. Children celebrated; couples kissed; someone pulled out a trumpet and played "La Marseillaise."
Later on, in Antibes, on the French Riviera, I met an American woman who introduced herself as a political exile. She told me she'd thought about moving to France after George Bush was reelected but didn't pull the trigger until Barack Obama became President.
My summer of European adventures finally drew to a close with Negronis on the terrace of the Hotel Cap in Cap d'Antibes. As I gazed out on the Mediterranean, I imagined my own expatriate fantasy: become an outlandishly famous writer, marry a flighty woman prone to intense psychiatric episodes, and then move to France and befriend Ernest Hemingway, who would write about me in A Moveable Feast. When you have four gin-based cocktails before noon, anything seems possible.
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