Most people dream of traveling the world. Seeing new places, meeting new people, and diving into new cultures. However, few get to live out this dream and even fewer get to experience this while still in school.
Sophomore Parker Lyon is a different story, his family has moved many times and have been to many different countries. Most recently they lived in Hohenfels, Germany, “We lived in Germany but I [also] took a cruise to Spain. I got to go to Disneyland Paris. I’ve been to Belgium, Switzerland, Poland, Sweden, and Czech. I’ve actually seen more of Europe than I have of America,” said Lyon.
The reason the Lyon family has been able to travel is, “[Because of] my dad’s job,” said Lyon, “some people are in the military and they hate traveling but it would drive me crazy not to move. I am just so used to it.
As expected there are a multitude of differences between the United States and Germany. “It’s a completely different country,” said Lyon, “and if you think about it in the span of like 80 years they went through World War II and they had the wall put up in their national capitol. It’s small but there is so much more history than in the US because we are only 200 years old and they had a whole 100 years before we were even thought about, I got to go see some museums about that which was really cool.”
“Obviously the language it’s completely different. Just learning stuff and not being able to understand it, I picked up a lot of it just by listening but I’m not bilingual,” said Lyon, “[also] they love soccer like we love football. The World Cup was in 2014, we kinda pay attention to it in America because of national pride, but they get into it like we get into the super bowl so it was cool to experience that,” said Lyon.
“My least favorite part was living in a very small village,” said Parker’s mom Lisa Lyon, “We either had to go to the base or travel about 45 minutes to get to a larger city to shop. Also, most things were closed on Sunday which is hard to get used to.”
However, not everything was different as one would expect, “They are very proud to be German like we are proud to be American, Like how we say ‘Merica and all of those references, they do that in Germany [too], national pride is just a universal thing,”said Parker, “They do like a lot of our movies, they like our music. A bunch of their media is influenced by us, like they have Disney Channel and it’s all of our shows in German.”
“My favorite part about living there was learning about a new culture and getting to travel to several European countries as well as within Germany,” said Lisa who has traveled to Strasbourg, Paris, France, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Prague, and Poland in addition to living to Germany.”
The Parker and his mom enjoy traveling and would both like to revisit Germany one day, “I like traveling,” said Parker “and I’m very lucky to have been so many places.”
