where are you from?

This week people have told me they thought I was from a variety of different places, some of which have made me laugh...

The first was a teacher at my school. He's in the law department and I've been dealing with him quite regularly for the last few months, primarily face to face contact. He asked where in the UK I'm from.

The second - someone who told me I looked south american. The shape of my face is south american to them. They were south american so maybe that had something to do with it.

Someone else told me I was clearly Irish. I forget why but they insisted I was pure Irish.

Yesterday a Romanian thought I was his friend from Moldavia. I'm not. We hadn't met. He was sure we'd met at a party and everyone had been Romanian or Moldavian. I wasn't at the party. Neither am I Moldavian. I actually had to google Moldavia to find out exactly where it is - I had an idea but I was off... I thought it was closer to Montenegro than to the Ukraine. I was wrong.

Why do people try to identify your nationality according to your facial structure? As I pose that question I am also given a little insight in to why I ask it... coming from the US most people are of a mixed heritage. Other than regional identifiers such as Asian or African we don't really have a definite strong identifiable racial identity - and even to our eye we cannot distinguish between Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, etc... We don't' distinguish at all with caucasian.

And yet, here I can meet people with similar delicate features and then discover they're from the same region, the crazy curly haired girls are all Albanian, or from a very close region, the extreme curve to the nose shared by strangers also has a location connection, there are certain things that close inspection will reveal to be shared... yet these are generalizations that I find to be more amusing than something I would choose to base a cultural identity upon. Maybe for some who study this, they could go way overboard with it, but for me, it's just one of those things like - 'oh, you can't roll your tongue? Me neither! Did you know it's hereditary' - type things.