Why You Should Date A Foreign Chick

...I only used the word "chick" to irritate any 'Jezebel' cross-over readers that might be reading this.

By

ana
Zora Iuga Imagery
  1. …Why you should date a foreign chick.
  2. This here is a list about why you should date a foreign chick.
  3. I generally hate lists, but I’ll write one in this case.
  4. Sorry to get so meta-textual so early on in the list. …I think I need more coffee. Wait! I’ll be back.
  5. Okays.
  6. By the way, I only used the word “chick” in the title of this essay to piss off any ‘Jezebel’ cross-over readers that we might be getting. You are welcome, ladiez.
  7. I currently date a foreign chick, and I highly recommend it.
  8. The girl in the photo above is not the foreign lady that I date. The girl in the photo above is my friend Ana.
  9. Ana is Romanian, as is my girlfriend, “Sylvia” (not actually her actual name; she’s shy like that). In fact I moved to Romania to date Sylvia. Sylvia and I broke up for a second or two, but now we’re back on.
  10. We should really start by talking about Sylvia, but let’s talk about Ana first, because Sylvia is my girlfriend, and thus is decidedly off the market.
  11. Ana speaks excellent English, better than most Americans, because Romanians aren’t dumb as shit like most Americans, which is a thing you can say about most European girls (I’m not advising you to solely date Romanian girls, although I like them).
  12. So, Ana speaks perfect English, but with a Romanian accent, which sounds like a mix of a Slavic and a French accent. She also has a photo-realistic tattoo of a kitten on her right butt-cheek.
  13. So, to briefly encapsulate, you could be dating a foreign girl with a kitten on her butt who speaks in a half-French, half-awesome Eastern-European accent. But you’re not; you’re not doing that. Instead you live someplace shitty… like Kansas or Missouri or some place like that. Good luck with that.
  14. Now, let’s move on to my actual girlfriend.
  15. My actual girlfriend comes from the Moldavian section of Romania. So her accent isn’t like French or anything, it’s more like almost-evil Russian, like the Baroness from G.I. Joe, or Natasha from Rocky and Bullwinkle. Hot. Hot as fuck.
  16. This is what Bucharest looks like, by the way.  …Nice, huh?
  17. I see that I haven’t really gotten to the actual “why you should date a foreign chick” part of this essay. This is mostly because I hate lists; lists and their stupidity. Nonetheless, let’s get down to it.
  18. So; why should you date a foreign girl?
  19. Even though my girlfriend speaks excellent English, we often have an impossible time understanding what the other one is saying, due to bizarre accents, utterly different life experiences (she grew up under a Communist dictator, I… hung out at the mall a lot), and random intrinsic differences in language. For example: I tried to use the phrase “too many cooks spoil the soup” in conversation the other day. There is no such expression in Romanian. In Romanian, the equivalent saying is: “Too many midwives fail to cut the umbilical cord” — which, what? We both stared at each other as though the other person was insane.
  20. With stuff like this, you always have stuff to talk about. With my past American girlfriends, I was always running out of conversation. This never happens if you date a foreign girl. There are always bizarre differences to discuss.
  21. For example, yesterday, Sylvia was trying to tell me about Romanian folk-traditions. She told me about the belief — in the Romanian countryside — involving “dangerous spiritual beans.” These beans would murder children, carry off livestock and sheep.
  22. “Beans?” I said. “Beans?” I held my fingers this far apart — (…..) — to indicate the size of a bean. “And they carry off sheep?” I said, visualizing a huge sheep being toted off through the countryside by an adorable tiny bean.
  23. Seriously, it took at least ten minutes of discussion after that — involving her extremely mangled pronunciation of English vowels and consonants — at least ten minutes for me to get that she was saying “beings.” Not beans; spiritual beings.
  24. I was sort of very saddened by the idea of the loss of tiny beans carrying away sheep; but still, hilarious.
  25. For everything like this, there is a parallel for my foreign girl — any foreign girl — and American-related stuff. Example; I have a friend named “Wally.” I mentioned this in passing one day, and my girlfriend couldn’t stop laughing for like five minutes. Why?! She couldn’t explain. Granted, the name “Wally” is sort of a goofy name if you pause and think about it for a second, but still — why was that so funny? We’ll never know.
  26. Final bizarre Romanian thing anecdote; and again, this can stand in for any foreign girl whatsoever: so in Romania, Sylvia told me, an Easter tradition is to drop a hard-boiled egg that has been painted red into some holy water, along with some pennies. (Romanians also drink holy water, which is another thing I learned, but let’s not even get into that.)
  27. So, why, I asked — ignoring all the other bizarre aspects of this whole thing — why is the egg painted red in particular?
  28. Because, she explained. There were eggs at the crucifixion. Jesus’s mom, Mary, had some eggs, and when Jesus was crucified, his blood dropped onto them and painted them red.
  29. So many questions were occurring to me at this point.
  30. “Why were there eggs at the crucifixion? Did his mom bring them in case Jesus got hungry while being nailed to the cross?”
  31. No, Sylvia said.
  32. “…In case she got hungry.”
  33. …No, Sylvia said. (The amount of confusion taking place on both our sides at this point was still massive.)
  34. I really had to pause and think at this point. Why would there be hard-boiled eggs present at the death of the Son of God, the anointed one, the Lamb of God Who Cometh to Take Away All Our Sins. …I really had to think, and then it finally came to me.
  35. “Wait,” I said. “Was Jesus’ mom taken by surprise that her son was being crucified and shit, and she already had eggs with her at the time, and so she just rushed there, along with the eggs, and then the eggs got stained with red… blood?”
  36. “Yes,” Sylvia said. “Yes; that’s it. Exactly.”
  37. It is impossible to explain how funny all of this was.
  38. And every day is like that. You just never run out of conversation.
  39. …What else?
  40. And foreign girls are good at sex too.
  41. And they smoke cigarettes, which I personally find to be incredibly sexy. (Your own opinion on this matter may differ, though.)
  42. And I smoke, and you can smoke anywhere in this part of Europe. …I went to the doctor’s office the other day, and there was an ashtray in his office. Still being very Americanized, I very tentatively, very nervously asked if I could smoke in his office, since I hate going to the doctor’s, and I want to smoke cigarettes when I’m nervous.
  43. Not only did he let me smoke, but he chain-smoked too, throughout the entire session. If you don’t smoke cigarettes too, then you’ll never understand, but this was one of the most awesome things that had happened to me in years.
  44. …Make sure you move to the right part of Europe if you’re going to date/bang a foreign chick. This is just some friendly advice at this point. I chose Romania on purpose. Romania is beautiful, but poor, thanks to years of Communism. So poor that no one comes to like visit or vacation here as an expat, so being an American here is actually cool, because there are only, like, five of us.
  45. …Years before this, I lived in Prague. Being American there was not cool, because Prague was trendy and thousands and thousands of Americans lived there, and so the Czechs hated us, as anyone naturally would — the way you would if a giant annoying frat party of thousands of foreign young people moved to your hometown.
  46. So make sure that you move to the right place. Romania is incredibly cheap, too; due to the years of awful Communism that fucked over their whole country. A loaf of bread costs twenty-five cents here. A beer is sixty cents. This is helpful if you’re, say, an insanely poor freelance writer like I am. Just saying.
  47. …I mean, let’s remember the original reason for being an expat in the first place. Like; example: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway and James Joyce and everyone else moved to Paris in the 1920s. They didn’t do this because they were hipster-y hipsters wearing scarves and trying to be hipsters. They moved there because France was cheap as fuck compared to America at the time. So there are actual good reasons to be an expat, is what I’m saying; legit reasons. Like if you’re trying to make art and you barely make any money; that’s not a bad reason. I didn’t move to, say, swanky London; because London costs $100,000 a year to live in. I moved to a real country for a real reason.
  48. But I digress. …Where was I?
  49. …A final note: I have trouble understanding what my foreign girl is saying sometimes, and she has the same problem with me. This is not necessarily an awful thing.
  50. (Here, by the way, is a complete list of the things that I can say in Romanian: “Hello, yes, thank you, goodbye, okay, bee, fox, eye, wolf, the ocean, kitten, free, sugar, alcohol, there are, and to be.” …None of which combine to make a particularly useful sentence. “Hello! There are free kittens of the ocean!“? So my ability to communicate is limited, is what I’m saying.)
  51. So, but anyway — how many fights have you gotten into with your boyfriend/girlfriend in your life? A lot, right? But they were because you understood what they were saying (and that thing made you mad). If you were just pleased that you could sort of parse five minutes of speech from them, you wouldn’t get in fights, though. You wouldn’t get mad. Much, much harder to fight when a major accomplishment is just understanding the other person.
  52. And so a final final point: It’s much much harder to get annoyed with a foreign person. When my girlfriend acts kind of like a bitch; it’s hard for me to take it personally. I just assume that she’s doing some sort of Romanian natural normal thing that I can’t really “get,” because I come from a totally different culture.
  53. And it works vice-versa-ish with me: When I act in ways that are lame, shallow, neurotic, needy, or intrinsically asshole-ish, she doesn’t really get offended. She just assumes that it’s part of some national American character trait that she doesn’t totally “get” yet. She doesn’t take it personally.
  54. Final very final story.
  55. The other day, I was roaming the streets of Bucharest. Sylvia was still at work, but I had finished my work for the day, being a lame-ass freelance slacker writer and all. As I wandered past crumbling palaces and weird Communist-era fortresses, a tourist stopped me.
  56. He was Polish, and wanted to know the way to Something-Or-Other Park. Naturally I couldn’t tell him, and was possibly the worst person in the entire city that he could have asked for directions — but still, he was asking me, and suddenly, I felt as though I was home, as though I belonged. With his question he had bestowed upon me the causal freedom of the neighborhood.
  57. I mumbled something confusing to him in reply, and then went on my way, walking through the city, until at length I returned to my hot, chain-smoking, Russian-accented girlfriend.
  58. And meanwhile, you drove home to your hovel in Kansas, or Missouri, or your shitty overpriced shoebox apartment in Brooklyn, while I didn’t; I went on my own way, having found my own way. And I don’t mean to sound too proud of this; I’m pretty much a loser — and it took me years, years of failure and rejection, and humiliation and poverty, before I finally realized that hey, maybe I didn’t like America, maybe America wasn’t working so great for me after all, and then years more to do something about it; to move. And then I finally did move. And that night I walked home, in the cooling Bucharest twilight. And that is all; the end. Thought Catalog Logo Mark