Every year foreign exchange students enroll at Imagine Prep. Clearly, cultural differences between these exchange students and the rest of the student body will exist. But every year the exchange students get asked lots of strange questions. I am also an exchange student from Germany. Therefore, I already know that you get asked funny questions every now and then. So far, I’ve also been able to meet other exchange students who could confirm that Americans have a different image of our home country than it actually is.

Alba Fernandez is a sophomore from Madrid, Spain said her host brother has asked her strange questions.

“One time he asked me if I had ever tried chips,” Fernandez said.

Not only Fernandez, but also Vittoria Rho, from Italy, has been asked funny questions by her host family.

“The weirdest thing my host parents asked or told me was if the name of Italian cities was in English,” Rho said. “Like they thought the real name of my city is Milan and that the real name of Rome was Rome. But the real name is in Italian. It was really weird.”

“So, my host mom sometimes asks me some weird things,” Maximilian Beykirch is a German exchange student studying in Cave Creek. “For example, do you have a certain way of eating potatoes or do you have this and that in Germany which is actually quite normal and I think everywhere in the world.”

The exchange students’ classmates also asked weird questions. Fernandez got asked if you could walk to Spain.

“They asked me if I speak French,” Rho said. “Like if French is my first language. Then they asked me if Rome was a country and not the capital city of Italy. And they asked me if Italy is Ireland.”

Me, as an exchange student, I wanted to know more about the other perspective. That’s why I also included the view of an American student. 

First I wanted to know what a question Morgan Stanford from Imagine Prep asked one of the foreign exchange students. 

“Do you guys speak English in your country, or do you speak a different language?” Stanford said. “I wanted to learn and see how different that country is from America because I haven’t been to another country in a long time.”

She also described the reaction of the exchange student. 

“She laughed and then explained that she learned English at school and sometimes speaks English but mostly German.” 

Beykirch said that his classmates haven’t asked him weird questions yet. But he thinks it’s funny that they accept that the European students are more clever and that they say over themselves that they are stupid.

Claudia Carreras is an exchange student from Spain. She was asked if she drank and smoked in Spain or if she was from Mexico. She said that she felt weird after she got asked these questions. 

“I was shocked,” Rho said. “When they asked me about Rome, I was really really shocked. I had no words. Because it is basic knowledge. So it was really weird. When they asked me if I speak French as my first language, you know French France, Italian, Italy. And that was weird. Maybe they didn’t think about it.”

Before I came to the U.S. my organization prepared me for weird questions that Americans would ask me. But did the other exchange students from different organizations get prepared too?

“Yes. I knew that people would ask these questions,” Fernandez said. “But it didn’t help me. I knew that they were going to ask dumb things, but I didn’t know that it would be this dumb. I thought they would be going to ask `Oh, are you Mexican? ´, they always say that or `Do you have cars in Spain.´”

“No,” Rho said. “They didn’t prepare me for this kind of question. More maybe about food, like pizza. More about culture shock.”

The question that I asked myself next was if the prejudices were too harsh. 

“Sometimes yes,” Fernandez said. “Because they ask you things, but they already know the answer, to just make fun of you or something like that. So yes.” 

“So sometimes students and my host brother ask me about “German History” (if you know what I mean),” Beykirch said. “And they sometimes make fun of me, but it is ok.” 

Stanford herself thinks that being an exchange student would be really interesting. 

“I think it would be really cool because I would love to meet new people,” Stanford said. “but I would be scared being so far away from my family.”

Overall, I know why Americans ask foreign exchange students these questions. I know that it is not meant to be rude to us. They just want to get to know more about other countries. I also understood that the geographical knowledge of some people is different than others.