Welcome to Eastern Europe. Enjoy your stay.

Welcome to Eastern Europe, the homeland of vodka-drunk Russian-alike fighting bears empty-handed kind of people...NOT so much. You might not know a lot about history or politics, but if you are a citizen of Europe and the European Union you probably heard about this West-East denomination used to differentiate the people living in rich countries of the European Union such as Germany, France, Denmark and the poorer "cousins" aka Poland, Romania, Bulgaria etc. Just to brief you in on what this West-East thing is all about, allow me to develop a bit on the matter. Some decades ago, around 1945, Europe was at the end of the Second World War. USSR army had successfully marched into Germany and bombed the shit out of Berlin, well not exactly the entire shit out of it, but it was quite a thing that made that spooky guy you heard about -H- kill his own freaking dog. (oh, yes,he also killed himself, less important and his girlfriend -also less important).  Then this spooky other guy -S, now the single holder of the prom queen crown- decided that well, if he and his army bothered to go all the way to Germany, might as well just stick around for few decades. And this is briefly -really briefly- what happened when the Second World War ended. So, all the countries to where the Red Army (USSR) reached were cut off from their fellow French, English & co people. This whole situation lasted until the lady from Goodbye Lenin (movie) decided to wake up from her coma, meaning around 1990ish. During this timespan, few interferance existed between the people of Western Europe and the people of Eastern Europe. Whilst the people of Western Europe enjoyed their American movies and wore the coolest jeans in the world and showered with Coca-Cola, the people in the East thought it was a thing to eat oranges and bananas for Christmas. This whole story might have you thinking: Why do I care about some things that happened before Internet was a thing? Well, because after communism fell in Eastern Europe, the countries there switched to a phase called transition to democracy and some of them are still experiencing the transition phase, in terms of people's mentality and nostalgia about the past. Which is connected to a lot of things, which I will partially try to explain. Today, most of these countries (we don't care about you, Belarus, anyways and some other ones) are part of the European Union and you, dear reader, have the opportunity to go study there for half a year or an entire year, if you want to. While your grandparents and parents might try to give you the talk about: oh, you are going to Lithuania, you should pick up a Russian dictionary and learn Russian kind of speech, that is definitely not the case anymore. The truth is people are different. Countries are different. Your life will probably be different there too. But the thing is, you have more in common than you possibly imagine. Eastern European people eat the same Mc Donalds and co. that you eat, drink the same Starbucks coffee, shop for the exactly same clothes as you wear at H&M and go to the cinema to the exact same movies which are airing in your hometown cinema. They drive the same cars as the one you have at home, listen to pretty much the same music on the radio, own the exact same smartphones you and your friends own, they are facebooking, instagramming,snapchatting and catching Pokemons just like you do. But there are some differences. You can actually see how successfuly a country was in switching from totalitarianism to democracy by how strong the people's respect for the rule of law is. You might see people crossing the street or getting off their cars whenever they feel like doing that, disregarding circulation laws or such in Eastern Europe (more than you would see that in Western Europe). That is not because there are no rules saying you shouldn't be doing that, but because people just don't care about those rules. This is a very simple and poor example but I used it to make my point. The more you see people not littering and not breaking the laws every other second, the more that means that the country you are into is making steps towards a stronger civilized state. But it is nevertheless, interesting to observe how crazy globalization is and how you can keep up with your lifestyle wherever you choose to go, away from home.