Being socialized as a good Western/Southern European from a left-leaning family, I grew up knowing that happiness in the US was impossible. I mean, how could anyone be happy in a country with no public healthcare, no social safety net worth of that name, a place that supported up South American dictators left and right? A country where the food was McDonnalds, high schools and colleges were straight out of Beverly Hills, 90210, everyone had a gun, and life was all about money and work. The opposite of the Southern European idea of a good life.

Eventually, I met plenty of Americans who didn’t fit into that picture, but if I thought about it at all at the time, I must have thought that they were just the only exceptions. Still, after my Ph.D. I played briefly with the idea of going to the US for a postdoc. I wanted to talk to Yair Minsky, the demigod. At the time he was in Stony Brook. I asked him how life was there and his description of the place, something along the lines of “There is a Starbucks in the mall 2 miles off campus”, followed by the discovery that the local attraction is a carriage museum, delayed my arrival to the US for 3 years.

My advisor, who was still my boss because I basically didn’t consider the possiblity of leaving Bonn after graduating, basically forced me to apply for a grant to go to the US for a year. I didn’t want to, so I asked for just six months and tried to sabotage the whole thing by not sending a CV or anything. In fact, I’d aleady managed to stall for so long that the letter Jeff had written—saying I was welcome in Chicago—was already outdated: by the time I applied, and he’d already left. Somehow, I still got the money, probably because the world of German math professors is tiny. So, I was told I had a week to send a CV and whatever else I’d “forgotten”. It was clear that I had a problem, the money was there and I had to go.

At some point I realized that I needed a visa. After listening to some US embassy recording for 20 minutes, paying something like €3.50 per minute, I decided I wasn’t financing the Iraq War and refused to deal with them anymore. So, I’d just go for three months, spend the other three in France, or something like that. Amazingly, I didn’t get in trouble with the funding people.

Of those three months, I spent the first in Austin, where Jeff had moved. I liked it, but the idea of going to Chicago for the remaining two months filled me with about as much excitement as being sent to the gulag. I arrived in the middle of winter, to a shitty basement apartment in Chicago—and I had a blast. I loved it. Even though I got a permanent job at the CNRS a couple of months later, I decided to blow it all off and move to the US. So, after a year at CNRS (or two weeks, depending on who you ask), I was off to America. Consistency has never been my forte.

I loved the US. The math scene was incredible, but what really fascinated me were the non-math aspects. I loved the people I met. I was blown away by the things people knew, the books they’d read. I knew things, too, and I’d read a bit, but people talked about stuff I’d never encountered, about writers I had never heard anything about, about food I had never tasted. I loved how nice regular people were, how easy it was to talk to them. I loved the duct-tape approach to solving problems. I loved that “Yankee can-do” attitude—suggest something, and people would often just agree. Things felt possible, which was different from what I’d seen in Europe. I remember an Italian friend in Barcelona saying his friends from Pisa wouldn’t visit despite cheap direct flights. In the US people found less issues with things, less reasons not to do something. I loved the energy and how easy it was to belong. I felt at home, free, and welcome.

I also loved how weird the place was. From a European perspective, the US is really weird. There’s the liter-sized margaritas, steam coming out of manholes, people waking up at 5 a.m. to go do yoga or learning Serbo-Croatan, the pumpkin obsession in the fall, the bizarre coffee drinks, the phase where nobody ate carbs, the surprising number of raw vegans. There was Café Gratitude, a chain of vegan places where all the dishes had names like “I Am Fulfilled,” and the staff asked, “What are you grateful for today?”. At some point in the one in the Mission there was a Mexican guy playing for customers, dressed like a Mexican, and it was evident that the second he was out of there he was going to get the least vegan burrito in town. There’s the weirdness of the Corn Palace. You drive often really far to see nothing. As a German friend in Chicago put it, he had just come back from one of these places who aim to have a statue of the world’s largest donut. When you go to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, they take you to the Chicken Institute. And if you go during Easter you can see plenty of students carrying huge crosses—crosses with litte trolley wheels at the bottom to lighten the penance, I guess. Where other than in the US is it imaginable that someone could get tendinitis from playing too much pool. Since I don’t know the phonetic alphabet, I can’t tell you how people in Chicago pronounce Goethe or Valois but take my word: it is priceless.

But the weirdest thing was the US itself. Laws changed in ways that they don’t changere here. In Ann Arbor, getting caught with pot meant a $50 fine—unless you were on campus, where federal law applied, and you were theoretically in three-strike territory. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the next county over punished possession with hard labor. Prostitution in Utah meant jail time, gambling was banned, but cross into Nevada, and the first building was a casino, with the nearest brothel an hour away. In Chicago, guns were basically impossible to get legally, but drive outside the city, and billboards proclaimed “Jesus loves guns”. Here, the law is the same on campus and in front of my house, and it doesn’t change if I go to the countryside or Normandy. In spite of every strip mall looking exactly like the next one, sometimes the US didn’t feel like a real country.

Despite all the weirdness, or maybe because of them, the US made it easy to feel at home. It felt like a country made of bubbles—you could find or create one that fit you perfectly. I used to say I’d believe that 60% of Americans thought all French people had three arms, but I would never meet any of them. I think these bubbles come from an individualism that doesn’t exist in Europe, at least not like that. This, along with America’s myths—that it’s a young country of immigrants, open to anyone willing to make the best of themselves—made it easy to belong.

I loved living in the US. I moved to Canada because I’d had enough of snow and saw it as a more social version of America. Vancouver was too far. And if the selling point was that it was more European, Europe was the way to go. There is no way I would move to the US, and not only because of politics, but also because I would now have a much harder time dealing with American consumerism. But going to the US was one of the best things I have ever done. Maybe the best.