I relate, Heebie. Most of the time, I don't get all weak in the knees about just being someplace else.
I do wish I'd lived abroad earlier, when it wouldn't have been so disruptive career and life-wise.
I was too scared to when I was younger, and I don't think the answer would have been to force myself to do it anyway - I would have just spent the time period being a hermit. By the time I got the peace of mind to enjoy an adventure like living abroad, I was already knee-deep in the job track.
If language is the only issue, you could spend a lifetime visiting the Anglosphere. And of course, if you haven't been to all fifty states, why not?
can only comment intermittenly
You should take your mittens off during office hours. Even ruder than a hat, you know.
you could spend a lifetime visiting the Anglosphere
When we were in Rome, nearly everybody spoke at least passable English. Not so much outside of Rome, though.
if you haven't been to all fifty states, why not?
I really do love visiting America, in some Simon and Garfunkel beatnik sense. Because I know America well enough to find its very existence funny.
People who enjoy traveling wouldn't get to be so snooty about it if everyone liked it too. It's okay not to want to uproot yourself, especially if you feel obliged to appreciate the experience.
I quite like travelling -- although I've never travelled outside Europe -- but I understand some of that. The language thing isn't really a problem, but travelling can be a frustrating and annoying experience, too.
Of the last 5 or 6 trips I've taken, two have been good to great, and the other three or four merely adequate. Touristy places have too many people, too many queues, and too many fuckers who don't understand how to queue.
too many fuckers who don't understand how to queue
By which I mean, too many people who don't understand just how close to sudden violence they've come ...
too many fuckers who don't understand how to queue.
Don't go to Asia, then. Completely different sense of personal space.
It's hard to appreciate someplace else in a hurry, as on vacation. Definitely nice to take one's time if possible, that's the real luxury. Travel can be used for a status token, definitely. It's irritating, but so are people who are stupid about good food or nice machines.
Old buildings are quite nice. Chichen Itza and the Pont du Gard are both worth the trip.
IME, for every 10 obvious conversations about big topics with poor throughput, there's one that is somehow very nice, and leaves a sense of communication and of novelty.
Nothing wrong with not wanting to travel -- it's a pleasure first and foremost , and people who see it as an educational necessity are usually vastly overestimating how much they learned from their trip.
But -- to me -- the best part of traveling is "I never thought I would see something as fucking bizarro as that" element, which can be fun and exciting, and, at least for me, can open up an agreeable feeling that the world is bigger and more interesting than I'd thought before.
11: Yes, several instances from a China trip immediately came to mind when I read 9. M/tch could probably tell you a thing or two about that, I hear.
Part of the fun of traveling is the challenges of it. If you don't enjoy those (i.e. trying to get your point across to someone who doesn't share a language with you), it makes sense why you wouldn't particularly enjoy traveling abroad.
I have strange feelings about going abroad. When it gets to be about 8-12 months since I've left the country, I start to feel kind of crazy and begin obsessing over my next trip. But no matter how long a trip I go on, I'm always eager to go home at the end of it. Anticipation and expectation are funny things.
I wonder how much of this is the fact that many Americans have very limited and precious vacation time. I like traveling, but if I have a rare few days off I also really, really love to enjoy being home. If I had 6 weeks of paid vacation a year I might be more ambitious about traveling.
Actually, one of the first Chinese phrases I really mastered (in both Mandarin and Shanghainese) so that I sounded almost native saying it (except for the fact that is expressed a very foreign sentiment) was, "Comrade, we are all standing in line here. Please join us."
This was said in a very polite and humble tone, which helped to disarm the person being addressed so that they would say something like "oh, sorry, I didn't see that" instead of becoming indignant.
Do people in China seriously call each other "comrade" (super ignorance alert)?
I really do love visiting America
Ok, now we are exactly reversed. Traveling in America for me means all the difficulties and disruptions associated with travel with very little payoff. (Exceptions: wilderness areas, Alaska, Hawaii.)
I thought I liked visiting America when I was in college, precisely because of the Simon and Garfunkle sense of it, but now I've decided that the whole image is a pretentious myth.
No need to travel internationally if you aren't interested.
Personally I much prefer living in a nother country for a time to a whirlwind visit. If you are still interested in living abroad sometime I'd recommend waiting until the kids are a bit grown and you're a bit established career-wise and then applying to do Fulbright. There are plenty of places that would love to have a good math instructor come and teach their students for a year, and then you'd have the experience of really getting to know a place, plus an experience for your kids that could change the way they viewed the world from a young age.
except for the fact that is expressed a very foreign sentiment
I have never felt sharper elbows than queuing for a bus in Korea. I looked down as three little old ladies pushed past me. I was in no hurry, and the bus wasn't crowded, so I found it an interesting cultural moment.
"Comrade, we are all standing in line here. Please join us."
This is just wonderful. I am going to try to start saying this everywhere.
Touristy places have too many people, too many queues, and too many fuckers who don't understand how to queue.
This was one of the great things about the road trip Magpie and I took across Europe last year: because we had a car, we got to see places we'd never have been able to go otherwise, which also cut down on the number of (other) tourists there. Travelling not in the high season also helps tremendously; other than Florence, I can't think of anywhere we went that was overrun.
17 makes an excellent point.
It's funny - about the US, I'm very provincial/homer - I like the Northeast, and other parts of the US are novelties at best. But when I'm in Europe, I don't feel any need to compare/defend. Of course, I've really only been to the parts of Europe that are basically like the Northeast (climate- and geography-wise). When I was in SoAmerica, I definitely dug Buenos Aires over Brazil.
Mostly, tho, I travel with the eyes of an architect, so I'm always interested to see/be someplace new. When AB & I were courting, we'd just bike around town, checking out neighborhoods and streets that were new to us (I still have a dream of biking every block in the City). To me the human aspect of travel is distinctly secondary: I enjoy it, but I don't mind at all going an entire day without interacting with anyone beyond getting some food from a stand.
Do people in China seriously call each other "comrade" (super ignorance alert)?
Not as much now that it's a slang term for 'homosexual'.
If I had 6 weeks of paid vacation a year I might be more ambitious about traveling.
We tend to deal with this by taking big vacations only every other year. Not feeling like you have to cram everything into a week definitely makes a difference.
I've become blase about traveling at the same time that I look down on people who travel for exotic thrills. (I call those people "slugs and iguanas" travelers, because when they dined with druglords in this totally unspoiled village in Laos, man, they were served slugs and iguanas.) It leaves me walking a kinda fine line.
But, I have found that I do enjoy 1) completely relaxing travel where one enjoys other scenary but doesn't pretend to be part of local authenticity (tip well, don't try to make friends.) or 2) travel with an esoteric mission. Going to visit water projects, or tracking down a type of textile, or doing something that involves some interest or expertise will probably also get you out into strange places without the same icky feeling of being a voyeur.
My guess is that traveling, or living abroad with a baby or small child would have the same effect. You have a genuine reason to go out into the streets and relate to people. I don't know whether your career path would allow it, but it strikes me that the pre-school years would be a pretty good time to go live in a child-friendly country.
Another fun way to travel: Bicycle. Molly and I rode from Seattle to Chicago shortly before getting married. That was fun. I'd love to do something like again. Maybe the pacific coast when the kids are older.
Not as much now that it's a slang term for 'homosexual'.
Well, it's a term used ironically by gay men to refer to each other (as opposed to an epithet hurled by straights at gay people, which I know you didn't say, just trying to be clear).
You still hear very old people use the term "comrade". One time while climbing Tai Mountain (which, like most famous Chinese mountains, has stairs all the way to the top) an old man came up to me and said "Comrade, what time is it?" Then he noticed that I was a whiteboy (he may have had bad eyes, but it was also very cold so I was all bundled up and behooded) and stepped away quickly.
The other people you hear use the term are foreigners who studied Chinese from textbooks printed in China. So lots of whiteys use it, although often in an ironic or tongue-in-cheek way, and many Chinese are used to hearing foreigners use it.
I used it to ask people to not cut in line because it added to the earnest "we're all in this together, do your civic duty!" tone I was going for.
Foreign films, I think, show you stuff about alien cultures that I would suspect are very hard to see without some kind of deeply immersive traveling.
You do have to watch a lot of films, of varied styles & subjects.
Been to California & NYC. Realized quite soon I would not really understand these places or people unless I was committed to living my life there. It is like visiting a condition of being very poor or very rich, or cross-dressing for just one night.
So I have always been frustrated and humbled by traveling.
Well you're in Texas, so are you talking about visiting places like Arkansas and points further?
I tend to get overwhelmed easily, so I like to travel with as narrow a focus as possible. I'd rather stick to one place rather than do the kulturkram bus binge. I like the small points of difference. If I can read the local paper, then it's fun to get a sense of the issues in town. Those scandals that have been reduced to a place name. "Companytown Inc: another Chatham Hill?"
2) travel with an esoteric mission.
This sounds suspiciously like m-fun. It belongs in a class with themed parties.
That said, I can really see the appeal.
I really do love visiting America
See, to my eye, just Inland California is a freakish and odd place. Did you know there are bullfights? And cockfights? Right here! There are! And you can still find messages on birch trees from Basque sheepherders? And I drive through Parlier and think that I could never possibly understand why the teenage girls are so put together and made up. (No, they aren't prostitutes.) Where could they possibly be going in this town? Who are they showing off for? There's only a thousand people here, and they remember you from birth. And I drive around Chico, where farmers nail dead coyotes to fences and feel just as much an outsider. I haven't figured out Avenal, at all, except that I know that that is one eerie valley. The whole place is creepy. And this is without going to the deserts in the south and east or the mountains. There's so much here.
I have never felt sharper elbows than queuing for a bus in Korea. I looked down as three little old ladies pushed past me.
Dude! They're at my Sacramento Farmers' Market and they hurt! You don't see them, either, because they're, like, four feet tall. I don't fuck with them. I just yield.
Something about the Peace Corps put me off travel to poorer countries. When I was a kid, we did a lot of resort vacations because Mom was a flight attendant and there were always weird insider discount deals, so there were a lot of Giant Hotel Complex On The Beach Surrounded By White Stucco Walls vacations.
And then I did the Peace Corps thing, and it's not like I was totally integrated into the local culture; not at all. But people traveling to Samoa as a vacation really looked like overprivileged idiots (like, you'd see them doing something desperately unimpressive, and know that it was going to turn into a 'slugs and iguanas' story.) And then after I got married, Buck and I did a honeymoon trip to Mexico, and stayed in a G.H.C.O.T.B.S.B.W.S.W., and it kind of turned my stomach. This is an esthetic reaction, not a moral one, but it kind of spoiled it for me.
I like European travel (mostly on a Pulp Fiction "You know they call a Quarter Pounder a Royale?" level. I'm endlessly entertained by breakfast, or buying aspirin, or public transportation, being different. And I also like looking at touristy stuff.) but it's awfully expensive; the last time I went anywhere was a trip to Florence when Sally was a little over a year old. She got chickenpox, but it was still a good trip.
Oh, and a question for heebie: one thing I don't see in your post (and that's a very important part of travel for me) is food. Does culinary tourism just not appeal to you?
IMX being somewhere different can be fun. Getting there is at best barely okay and most times just terrible and I've thought that from well before air travel went to hell.
I've had the most fun just walking around, striking up conversations, looking in shop windows, reading plaques on statues, etc.
Re queues: Near as I can tell, Scandinavians have the same approach as Hong Kong Chinese It's get there first and to hell with grandma. So, international harmony has a head start.
a trip to Florence when Sally was a little over a year old. She got chickenpox
She got varicella
It's like they have a different word for everything!
I got all righteous and indignant about the trekking to mountain villages in Thailand. "People are not exhibits!" I announced. "I will have no part of this!"
But I have to admit that I am completely delighted that there is a large hill people population here in town. I stare shamelessly when I see them on the streets here carrying stuff in old-style yolk and buckets. I wish they had livestock, so I could gawk even harder.
Those are pretty much the reasons that nowadays I always try to make sure I've got someone else to visit a country with, and especially someone who knows the local language. I love exploring a new place with no real sense of purpose, hitting a few of the more beautiful sights, but it's kind of a pain and feels really half-assed if I can't interact with locals in any way.
Then there's travel to see nature and sights that just don't exist anywhere else, and that's its own awe-inspiring deal. Shit like hiking through tropical rainforests in small groups, going to Machu Picchu, scuba diving off Sipadan, climbing the ruins of Tikal at dawn, seeing the savannahs of east Africa or hiking to see gorillas in the central highlands... That's stuff you just can't experience any other way, and which doesn't need a translator. Cultural vacations can easily become artificial attempts to "understand" another way of life, which is an impossible task in such a brief time. That never happens to experiential vacations, though traveling with a larger tour group can royally foul it up.
Sadly, many have adapted to modern ways. They push supermarket carts, which isn't nearly so picturesque for me.
LB: G.H.C.O.T.B.S.B.W.S.W? Whazzat?
Travelling not in the high season also helps tremendously; other than Florence, I can't think of anywhere we went that was overrun.
Would you happen to know if Florence is overrun in October? I've been there before, for just a few days in July a few years ago, and crammed in all the must-see art-seeing, but the crowds and the heat were oppressive. I'm pondering going back this fall, mostly to work, but also to have a more leisurely chance to explore the city.
Well you're in Texas, so are you talking about visiting places like Arkansas and points further?
Fort Worth. Denton.
There is an infinte amount of beauty in the world, and privileging the sounds of the surf at Waikiki over the cycling of my window fan has always struck me as a kind of laziness.
The one thing to remember is that, despite what many people with backpacks will tell you, there is no valid distinction between a "traveler" and a "tourist."
38: Oh, we knew from varicella. She wasn't sick enough to be unhappy, so we took her out to restaurants anyway, but spent a lot of time explaining to waiters that she had varicella in case they wanted to tell us not to spread disease in their restaurants (I figure most people are vaccinated, right? We weren't being crazy obnoxious by not keeping her in the room?) And she was a remarkably pretty baby -- she still is pretty, but at about a year she looked exactly like this, except with better hair. So the waiter at one place we kept coming back to started calling her "la bella varicella", which was fun.
See, my fear is that I'll get a bunch of comments explaining to me how I'm a small-minded hobbit who typifies what's wrong with America.
Well, I personally have no interest in the sandy beaches next to the giant white hotel vacations. And I've had my ass dragged all over hell (in cars) and creation too many times to think, 'Well, gosh, I'd like to spend some quality time on an airplane, spend some more quality time with the trots, buy some souveniers and then leave to spend even more quality time on an airplane.' I'm too busy traveling in my head, dammit.
My ex- spent a lot of time traveling around as child because her family could afford it because he was an oil company exec who flew all over the place anyways. So she always had to have The Vacation, which always seemed like way too much work to me. If I wanted to work that much I could stay home and get paid for it.
Now, if I were going to, say, spend six months living next to Troy, or Athens, or Ur (after they stop shooting at Americans), that would seem cool to me. Then at least you get the weather and lots of the local food.
43: Dunno (I've only ever been there in April and late May/early June), but my default assumption is that it's always overrun; I don't think the weather ever gets bad enough in Tuscany to really deter tourism.
The thing I didn't like about Florence was that there didn't seem to be much there to explore. Once you get outside of the old city, it's just a rather anonymous, sprawling city. We got to see more of it on this last trip, and nothing that I saw made me change my opinion of the place.
The Lonely Planet says that McManus' window fan is overrated.
I got all righteous and indignant about the trekking to mountain villages in Thailand. "People are not exhibits!" I announced. "I will have no part of this!"
I took students to China a few summers ago. One of our pedagogical goals was to induce cognitive dissonance by simultaneously getting them to gawk at foreigners and see that gawking at foreigners is wrong.
Further to 49.2: Oh yeah, and the food sucks. Bologna FTW.
I may have said this before, but the Lonely Planet guide to Samoa had at least one suggested hike that had a serious shot at killing you if you took their advice.
Re queues: Near as I can tell, Scandinavians have the same approach as Hong Kong Chinese It's get there first and to hell with grandma.
No, see, in China, it's the grandmas who you have to watch out for. Tiny little things, but they will take you out.
The first place that comes to mind where the behavior and lifestyle of the people seemed so foreign to me as to be almost incomprehensible? Aspen.
One of our pedagogical goals was to induce cognitive dissonance by simultaneously getting them to gawk at foreigners and see that gawking at foreigners is wrong.
What about gawking at dumbass American tourists? Is that okay?
I don't think there's anything wrong at all with not enjoying traveling. It can be amazingly stressful. Why spend your vacation doing something you dislike?
I think I'm like Megan; I like deep travel in my own place - it is amazing what you can find within a hundred or two hundred miles of your own town, and I find it fascinating to watch the change of seasons on the landscape. I take a day nearly every week to go out and explore; sometimes it is old favorite hiking spots to see again and again in different months, other times it is a trip that involves more time in the car, spent looking (like driving around some of the abandoned rural/suburban developments on the recent "economic downturn" outing).
I can get a little overwhelmed with foreign travel when it must be done quickly; living abroad in Scotland was by far the best experience I've had outside of America. But that being said, I feel like I'm starting to piece together a deeper knowledge of France through short visits - I think it is possible, through repeated travel to a spot you quite enjoy (and perhaps where you speak the language; I think it helps a lot), to get to know it deeply.
And I love traveling America! Driving cross-country is fantastic, particularly if you get off the interstates or have family to visit to give you a better look into the areas. I'm working on all fifty states; I think I'm up to 39 now. I really need to plan a trip to like, Oklahoma and Arkansas. And North Dakota. Hm.
My parents' last vacation was 1981. Growing up, we never went anywhere on vacations, so they're really still not on my radar as something that people do. I'm not quite the crochety old grandma griping about why you want to spend all that money to go and look, but I don't think I'd miss not traveling.
I've thought about doing a trip post-PhD but I really have no idea what for.
I'm hardly an international travel maven, having only been to the great socialist republics of Canada and China (plus a very disappointing layover in Narita, where I did not have any yen, and thus could not buy tiny overpriced convenience foods from the vending machines.) But I do like intra-US travel quite a lot, actually. Even boring places have weird little cultural quirks, and most places in the US aren't really that boring. A friend who interviewed the Monk magazine guys asked where they got all of their crazy travel stories. Apparently it was their practice to stop in at groceries and coops as soon as they got to a new town and scan the bulletin boards for interesting fliers. Worked pretty well apparently.
In terms of having a travel "mission", I do try to use as many different kinds of public transportation in each place that I visit. Since I don't have a car, this is, to some extent, making a virtue out of a necessity, but I'm also genuinely interested in how other places do transit. YMMV, as it were.
49, 52: Thanks. Unfortunately, I can't make up any reason to go to Bologna and have my employer pay for it.
re: 11
Actually, the closest I've come recently was in Paris, a few weeks back. Massive, and I mean massive, queue at the Louvre, and a party of about 20 Chinese tourists just physically pushed in. People were going crazy around them. I said something, a couple of British guys in front of me said something, the two Cypriot gay guys beside us said something. It was so blatant and aggressive that it was almost beyond belief. It wasn't just queue jumping, it was a straight up challenge -- stop us if you can.
The guy leading the party basically straight up told everyone that they could fuck off, they were pushing in ,and tough shit. If it wasn't for the fact that Parisian police aren't known for being nice, I'd have hurt him. I've not been so close to physical violence in years, and I wasn't the only one. Maybe half a dozen people round about them were really enraged. If it'd been the UK, someone would have done something, I'm fairly sure.
I would very much love to walk or bike across the country. Or live in another country with a young child. It remains unclear where the money for this would come from.
The Lonely Planet says that gawking at Josh is overrated.
One of our pedagogical goals was to induce cognitive dissonance by simultaneously getting them to gawk at foreigners and see that gawking at foreigners is wrong.
Didn't they get gawked at themselves? It didn't happen so much in the big cities, but especially travelling in the less-commonly-travelled-by-foreigners places, most Chinese would stare at white folk wide-eyed and open-mouthed in wonder. They would literally stop in their tracks, or wander out into traffic with their eyes fixed on the foreigner. We called them Revolutionary People's Staring Squads.
Black friends got the same treatment but with visible hostility and suspicion added in.
Revolutionary People's Staring Squads
I'm going to laugh about this all day long.
54: No, see, in China, it's the grandmas who you have to watch out for. Tiny little things, but they will take you out.
Well, anyone that old in China has lived through a world war, a revolution, the big CR and the ongoing counter-revolution, so I guess that would tend to toughen you up a bit.
Also, if you're out back of beyond in China or Thailand or Brazil or wherever, then you're the exhibit.
Asian peasants took it upon themselves to show me with hand gestures that I am VERY LARGE ALL OVER but especially my BREASTS. I did not enjoy their charming native ways.
The great international traveller here hasn't spoken up yet: Read.
Dammit, should've figured someone else would get there first.
(I call those people "slugs and iguanas" travelers, because when they dined with druglords in this totally unspoiled village in Laos, man, they were served slugs and iguanas.)
You mock, Megan, but that's just straight-up cool! I mean, the notion of ending up in random places in little-known parts of the world that happened to have unusually cheap airfare on a given weekend, and running into someone who has a random connection, then ending up in a jungle somewhere eating unusual foods... Isn't this precisely the sort of M-fun to which your name is attached?
Yes, a lot of people delude themselves about the sort of connections that they made. But I've met some of my best friends through equally ephemeral initial connections such as going to the same afterparty from a concert, or selling a dude a jacket when I worked as a store clerk. There's a very real chance that people can actually have those Slugs And Iguanas experiences, and that's just some cool-as-hell shit that the rest of us are in no position to mock.
(Though drug runners in Laos would be no laughing matter. Heroin producers aren't known for their happy-go-lucky ways.)
Didn't they get gawked at themselves?
Oh yeah. Especially when we traveled to the relocation cities built to house people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam. White people never went there. Old people glared at us with infinite hostility. Small children swarmed around us to practice their English and have their picture taken.
I have have no problem being a dumbass american tourist. I do wish I had studied abroad and done some more traveling before I had kids. At some point I want to do the house swap thing in some other countries.
The one thing to remember is that, despite what many people with backpacks will tell you, there is no valid distinction between a "traveler" and a "tourist."
You can't be be a traveler at home
I would very much love to walk or bike across the country
My very crackpot idea is that when my dog dies, hopefully not for another 8 years or so, I want to sell my house and spend about a year cycling around the US. I figure if I mostly camped and lived otherwise like a hobo I could pull it off.
Also, if you're out back of beyond in China or Thailand or Brazil or wherever, then you're the exhibit
I think it was one of those Reader's Digest stories about the lady who had been a happy shutterbug on her foreign travels taking pictures of the colorful locals. Back at home, she dashes to the market with her hair in curlers and bandana. When she heard the telltale "click" she turned to find her self the subject of a Japanese tourist's photo. Irony for the Ugly American.
71: I especially thought it was funny when people would yell "HELL-oh!" or "o-KAY!" out the bus window at us. Basically in the same manner that people go "moooOOOO!" to cows.
Some of them would get very upset that we didn't respond by saying "hello" or "okay" back to them, and would continue to shout it, louder and angrier each time.
There's a very real chance that people can actually have those Slugs And Iguanas experiences, and that's just some cool-as-hell shit that the rest of us are in no position to mock.
Thing is, though, I spent a couple of years in Samoa watching the occasional backpackers drifting through have what they thought were 'slugs and iguanas' experiences, and they were mostly self-deluded about it. They didn't know from 'unspoiled', they didn't know from 'authentic', they'd drone on about the beauty of Samoan culture after they'd been in the country for a week -- I'm sure they thought it was cool-as-hell, and I wasn't mocking them to their faces, because why spoil someone fun, but I was in a position to mock them. Not, I must add again, as an insider in Samoan society, but as someone who knew how far from being an insider she was, and who knew how much farther some goofball backpacker was.
Small children swarmed around us to practice their English and have their picture taken.
A friend of mine had an experience while visiting a temple in Korea (I think.) Imagine a Buddha-bellied white guy, climbing the stairs, being trailed by hordes of schoolchildren shouting "Hello! Nice to meet you!!"
I would very much love to walk or bike across the country
A common route goes right through Wobegon.
The sad truth is that the "ugly American" stereotype is outdated, as Americans are no longer the ugliest of all tourists. In this, as in so much else, we have suffered a long national decline since the 1950s. 1st place now goes to the Germans, second place involves a multi-national tie of France, Italy, Britain, and the USA, and coming up with a very strong showing in third place are young Israeli backpackers. Canadians get a special demerit for wearing those infuriating maple leaf patches just so that they can pretend that they aren't basically cultural Americans.
I like vacation travel, but living somewhere for a time is more fun, I've found. It's nice to have a base of operations, as it were, so one doesn't have to lug luggage around on a daily basis. When I lived in Cambridge, it was easy to day trip to somewhere in England, or hit the continent for a weekend. When I lived in Oxford, I was too young to drive or wander about on my own, but I vaguely remember being in museum after museum, in London and elsewhere. And, of course, Hamleys. [My late father was an archaeologist; half my youth was spent in museums, the other half amongst pot sherds. Future archaeologists are going to be confused when they get down to the cellar level of his old office building in Princeton and find evidence that the Nabateans once inhabited New Jersey.]
Unlike BioHazard, I don't mind the getting there. As I used to hitch all over as a youth, just getting to sit on a plane is fine with me. And we have enough Virgin Atlantic miles to fly first class, so...
I met a German traveller in Hong Kong whose mission was to liberate as many Asian girls as possible from their sexual hangups.
most Chinese would stare at white folk wide-eyed and open-mouthed in wonder
Heh. When I was in Shanghai, I really never went into the same areas where white people go because I was staying with my then girlfriend and her family out there. On one of the escalators going downstairs in a mall where I was the only foreigner, we were behind a mother holding her toddler, and he was just staring at me wide-eyed over her shoulder. She quietly asked him what he was looking at, and he leaned over to whisper conspiratorially in her ear while never once taking his eyes off me. She gave him a little slap and said "Well don't stare, it's not polite!"
I didn't even realize what had happened, but my girlfriend was cracking up.
When I was first going to Vietnam in the early-to-mid 90s, I was young enough to still be nearly blond. Apparently that was cause for pictures to be taken with me in a number of the smaller villages.
The sad truth is that the "ugly American" stereotype is outdated, as Americans are no longer the ugliest of all tourists.
I am afraid that as in ttaM's 61 the world will miss the Ugly American tourist as he is replaced by the Ugly Chinese tourist. Go to some of the finer shops in LA and you see quite a bit of it.
1st place now goes to the Germans
I got that feeling during my only trip to Europe as well. They were also the tourists most likely to outweigh the Americans.
71: The relocation cities? What are they like? Say more!
(I haven't been back to China since 2002 and I pine, I pine. It would be so awesome to get a teaching job in some second-tier city and really work on my Mandarin again.) Also, I love second-tier, weird cities anywhere--my big road trips were to Cleveland and Butte, my favorite travel within China to Dalian right before the boom.)
a question for heebie: one thing I don't see in your post (and that's a very important part of travel for me) is food. Does culinary tourism just not appeal to you?
I like trying new foods, but it's not a huge thrill. I find almost all food delicious. Even poorly made commercial crap and cafeteria food.
1st place now goes to the Germans
OMG, yes. I was in Florida on the beach a few years ago next to a drunk German couple (very, very tanned plastic-surgeried woman of indeterminate age with aging leering dude), and the woman spent the whole afternoon shouting loudly in German about how she things she got a rash on her pussy it's so itchy and she scratches it all the time but it just makes it hurt more and there's pus and ooze and she doesn't know how she got it. Yelling. Loudly. The man never responded except with a few grunts.
I get that not many people in Florida probably know German, but it still seems absurdly rude and gross.
1st place now goes to the Germans
Maybe it's time we split their country again. That'd lern 'em.
76: Well, you'll always remember the seemingly self-delusional ones. They're the noisiest about it, and they're a lot funnier than people who are genuinely enjoying themselves and experiencing something new while retaining a sense of perspective about it. That's the reason all of us remember the kid who was really annoying about their "incredible" semester abroad where they kicked around Rome with a bunch of other American kids from their college, while we forget the person who remembered some funny stories about the local government in 2003-2004 and whose local fling taught them how to make some damn fine regional delicacies.
Far fewer people are pathetic than we think, but the confirmation bias and vividness bias work against our better natures on this.
90. Except this time north south, instead of east west. Just to mix it up some.
80: The Australians I've encountered were pretty bad--like the one on our school-sponsored foreign-teacher trip to Nanjing who started talking very loudly about how awful the Japanese were for the Nanjing Massacre right in front of the very very nice Japanese couple who could have been born no earlier than 1950. Or the dude who said to the whole table of teachers that I was ugly like Deng Xiaoping, just to pay me out for not sleeping with him even though I was the plainest girl teacher (he'd tried all the pretty ones already; I'd heard from them) and he'd bought me dinner. (I thought I was doing him a favor to go to dinner since he didn't speak Mandarin.)
Or, or, or...I kind of liked the Australians because they took attention away from us United Statesmen.
71: The relocation cities? What are they like? Say more!
One place we visited had a huge, three story shopping mall built into a mountainside. It was full of high end shops fully staffed and open. There were no customers whatsoever. On the bottom floor there were young people playing pool and old people playing Mahjong.
Meanwhile, all the real commerce was taking place in an improvised open air-style market in the basement of a high rise government housing building.
91 should have been to 89. To 90: I guess what I think is that the 'cool as hell' experience probably isn't as available as you ('you' the notional traveler) think it is -- if you think you did something really wildly unspoiled and authentic and unusual, you're probably wrong. You can have a good time travelling, but there's likely to be a strong correlation between how totally blown away you were by the awesomeness of your trip and how delusional you were about what was actually going on.
93: That's very cool. I'd love to go back and see more of China someday since I've never been outside of Hong Kong or Shanghai. It's near the top of my list once I can secure a Mandarin-speaking travelmate.
92: Also, prone to wearing really unfortunately tiny shorts. Fashions are different in different countries, but Australian/NZ men's shorts were often unsightly.
You can have a good time travelling, but there's likely to be a strong correlation between how totally blown away you were by the awesomeness of your trip and how delusional you were about what was actually going on.
I don't think I'm following you at all.
I've never been much of a traveller. I think I would enjoy it (I've mostly enjoyed what little travel I've done), but just haven't ever had much opportunity.
The German who sexually liberated me when I was 19 used to say that the only reason people in non-touristy US cities have such a weirdly high opinion of Europeans are that the only ones they meet tend to be the ones who are interested in second-tier American cities, and therefore a bit more curious and respectful (or often academics or artists, rather than tourists). He held that once I moved to NYC, I would lose any lingering romanticism about intellectual Europeans, and if I visited rural Germany, I'd be shocked by how provincial, racist, and dumb people are there, as much as they are anywhere.
This makes some sense to me. At least, I sort of imagine that the kind of American who, say, only goes to Mexico for drugs and hookers in bordertowns would represent the US in a lot different light from the ones who travel through rural Oaxaca. But maybe the popularity of off-the-beaten-path-type travel guides has made even non-standard tourism obnoxious.
I can't claim to be cool in any such way. I don't even have a passport. (I picked up an application yesterday. Don't scold me. I'm poor.)
I get that not many people in Florida probably know German, but it still seems absurdly rude and gross.
It seems pretty generic that people who think they will not be understood by the people around them will talk more loudly and openly than one normally would in a public place. And then will inevitably be heard and understood by someone.
Like that time those people in front of me in a line in some museum in Italy were talking about hyperbolic geometry. They didn't think anyone would be listening in, but boy were they wrong!
94 is true and worth remembering, but also kind of besides the point. The search for "authenticity" is nonsense, but it's perfectly OK to be a tourist and to have a good time doing so, while keeping a reasonable sense of perspective. An "authentic," non-delusional Italian experience? Living in a smallish house in a suburb built in the 1980s, driving to work every morning to a decently paid professional job where you sit in front of a computer screen, coming home at night to cook a dinner that you bought at a supermarket while worrying about paying the bills and watching TV. That doesn't mean it's not fun to visit Italy, eat different food, notice differences, look at sights of historic interest/natural beauty/architectural significance, etc.
97: Oh, I'm being grumpy about backpackers in Samoa. It wasn't a big vacation destination, so there weren't all that many of them, but the ones that did get there were all blown away by how adventurous they were. And they'd meet some locals hanging out at the beach, and maybe get invited home for dinner or to spend the weekend, and would get incredibly impressed with the authentic awesomeness of it all and the insight into Polynesian culture they were getting. And for real they weren't learning anything significant about Samoa at all -- they'd come hang out with the PCV's in the bar where we hung out, and talk nonsense about Samoan culture, and how they felt really at home here, man, when they didn't know jack and would get a real sense of how little they felt at home if they were going to have to spend more than a week in the country, rather than leaving for the Cook Islands in a couple of days.
If 101 reads 94 correctly (i.e., "the awesomeness of your trip" was meant to convey "the awesome authenticity of your trip"), then I retract 97. That makes sense. But of course, as 101 says, there are plenty of other reasons people travel.
a strong correlation between how totally blown away you were by the awesomeness of your trip and how delusional you were about what was actually going on.
Here's my "No really, it was so unique and I'm not delusional!" story:
My friend had been working in Kenya for a year and was fluent in Kiswahili, and I went to visit her. (Fits criteria for a good trip!) We went on a safari for two of the days.
At night at the camp, we wandered off and hung out with the local boys who worked at the camp, who were Masai. They gave us a drug to chew (I'm sure people here have heard of it, but I forget what it's called. It's like long blades of grassy stuff,) and we asked them all the questions we could think of, like "What's circumcision like?" (This weird braiding technique) and how many girls they've slept with, and what are the double standards for girls who have sex before marriage vs. boys, and female circumcision (they'd consider it for a wife who they felt was in danger of straying), and on and on.
re: 101
Yeah, I think that's right. Enjoy the stuff that's different, don't fetishize it, don't worry about 'authenticity', don't worry too much about looking like a tourist.
103 before I saw 102, which seems to support 101/103.
Stand firm, LB! You were wrong about the bee-comb this morning, but you are totally right about the backpackers and penetrating cultures and what you can get out of traveling.
101 does read me correctly. And there's nothing wrong with enjoying travelling -- Po-mo's 70 ("some cool-as-hell shit that the rest of us are in no position to mock") just set me off. Who says we're not in a position to mock it?
94: Eh, I mean, it's somewhat true. But that's also because of the problem I talked about in 90, which is that people who claim to be incredibly blown away are the noisiest people, the most remembered, and the most likely to be obnoxious individuals who would find it difficult to actually make friends or deferentially try to experience a new place.
Basically, though, I feel that it's as impossible to know what's going on inside someone else's vacation as it is to know what's going on in their marriage. I've gotten to do some incredibly cool shit and to know some fantastic people through fairly random circumstances. Claiming that others don't get to experience similarly wonderful serendipity would pretty presumptuous, though admittedly there are some people where I'd mark the odds far lower.
I dunno, by-and-large, I like to see the best in people. I feel like I've been making nothing but whiny comments lately about how "people aren't necessarily that delusional/asshole-ish/inauthentic-in-their-bacon-love, really!". But it's true! Sometimes people really do love their goddamn bacon, and it's easier to get at the supermarket than cured pork cheek! And sometimes people meet some random cool local in a new place or have a friend-of-a-friend or they just get lost and see something amazing! Isn't it better to give people on the whole (I'm not speaking for specific blowhard individuals) the benefit of the doubt?
109.last makes me feel like those annoying fucking stoners AWB was complaining about lately who act like they're the only ones happy enough to appreciate sunlight or rainbows. Sorry, it just feels like there's been a lot of "people = ugly Americans" sentiment here lately (not that I'm immune from the feeling, certainly).
104: See, that sounds like fun, and a good trip, and all that. But if you started going off on how much insight you had into Kenya on that basis (which you wouldn't, I'm sure) I'd mock you, regardless of the fact that I know even less.
"What's circumcision like?" (This weird braiding technique)
Wait, what?
104 - Itself a cliched experience. I did something very similar with a couple local guys in Uzbekistan. (But that was back when I was in undergrad, so I was still sincere about traveling.)
(It is fine to have a Russian girlfriend, but you'd want an Uzbek virgin for a wife. If you just need to fuck, you find a Tartar girl. Their pants come off if you touch their shoulder. One time, they saw some lesbians kissing, so they raped them. See? Cultural exchange!)
LB, what's wrong with just wanting to see interesting things one has never seen before? It doesn't have to happen under the pretence that doing so makes one an authentic participant in some foreign culture. I'm not even sure I understand why one would be seeking such a thing, much less believing that one could obtain it on a short vacation. It sounds incredibly toolish, even as an abstract goal divorced from the inevitably ridiculous particulars.
112: I was wondering about that one too.
111: Oh, I'm being a big grump, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying off-the-beaten-path travel. I'm just saying that if you're traveling through someplace, you've got no idea of how your experience would look from a local perspective.
I've never been too enthusiastic about traveling, but this post kind of makes me more interested in it. It's making me think of some time I spent traveling by myself for a few days this past summer. It wasn't even a new place to me, but a city I used to live in and hadn't been to for seven years. Nostalgic stuff, and dealing with a lot of stuff in the city that had changed, and reconnecting with a couple friends, and also not having to run my every move past a committee. Even if it's just one other person, there's still always a lot of time that goes into "I don't know, what do you want to do?" "I've already done that, how about this?"
if I visited rural Germany, I'd be shocked by how provincial, racist, and dumb people are there
I lived there for a year! Diminished my urge for foreign travel a bit, I can tell you! Bretzenheim, I do not miss you.
They gave us a drug to chew (I'm sure people here have heard of it, but I forget what it's called. It's like long blades of grassy stuff,)
Qat, probably. Mild stimulant with a short shelf life, which is why it hasn't spread globally like all the other drugs. Accepted and very handy word for Scrabble.
Itself a cliched experience.
Yeah, probably. But it felt so real!
112: Yeah, the underside of the penis was braided, or an awful lot was lost in my friend's translation. But she says she felt it, as the second half of the cliche unfolded into the night.
114: That's pretty much exactly it -- nothing against the travelling, I just want to reserve the right to mock people being toolish about it.
the underside of the penis was braided
So, they cut the foreskin into strips and braided it? Did they suture the foreskin strips onto the penis? Are there pictures of this?
Of course, there are always counter-examples to AWB's the only ones they meet tend to be the ones who are interested in second-tier American cities, and therefore a bit more curious and respectful from 98. Perhaps I've mentioned before that when I lived in Omaha (really a third-tier US city, if that), there was an Englishman who would show up every 8 or 10 months for awhile and hang out with some of the artsy/theater/bohemian people I knew. He'd come over originially on an exchange program and become smitten with (an admittedly rather attractive) Omaha girl, and now used his entire vacation every year to fly to Omaha and inexpertly woo her. His crush was totally unrequited, and frankly, he just wasn't that interesting (worked in the dole office in Birmingham or something like that). It was really pathetic. It makes you wonder how much of a wanker you might seem to people in other places, all apart from the Ugly American thing.
So, LB would not be happy with this approach?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064471/
And lots and lots of people are toolish about it! Nearly all of them, including me, on their first couple trips.
I'm just saying that if you're traveling through someplace, you've got no idea of how your experience would look from a local perspective.
Also, if you're staying at a hostel, you've got no idea how thoroughly you are despised by everyone working there. I know this from living in a hostel in SLO my first year at CalPoly.
114: I don't think it's that strange (though it is certainly toolish.) Quite a lot of people put a lot of stock in being cultured, and seem to think that one way to get culture is to travel somewhere, eat street food, and get drunk with locals authentically.
And that this makes you a better person than someone who went to the Grand Canyon. I know the sort of tool LB means.
120: I did not take a photo, but maybe there are some out there? I found the whole thing confusing.
It doesn't have to happen under the pretence that doing so makes one an authentic participant in some foreign culture. I'm not even sure I understand why one would be seeking such a thing, much less believing that one could obtain it on a short vacation.
This is amazingly common in the twenty-something upper middle class set. I can name a dozen friends who have gone off on such an adventure, and I resented them at the time as I was neither rich nor adventurous enough (as in, I aspired to such things as well so I think I understand a bit of the mind-set). They weren't tools, but the way they approached traveling had enough of the toolish in it to make my reaction much the same as LB's once I aged a bit.
I agree with 101. There are a lot of fun inauthentic things to do while touristing. I always liked this part of "rules of attraction":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVaSCBzTCIE&feature=related
118: That's not a cliche, that's the start of a porno movie.
Huh. Maasai circumcision is known as the "buttonhole technique." Pretty odd. SFW Descriptions here (scroll down), and NSFW pictures here.
On the other hand, toolish backpackers fed me and bought me beer when I was stranded in Fiji with no money. (I'd been on vacation in Japan, and was down to my last 30 bucks. I was supposed to change planes in Fiji, but when I got to Fiji it turned out the airport in Samoa was closed for a week because a Tongan convict had stowed away in the wheel-well of a flight to Samoa and had jammed the landing gear, making the plane land on its belly on the only runway in the country. I had enough money for a cheap room for the week, but no food money. People are really nice about feeding you if you tell them you're a PCV.) So I shouldn't say only bad things about them as a class.
117: Qat, probably. Mild stimulant with a short shelf life, which is why it hasn't spread globally like all the other drugs.
Au contraire, I bet I could go out right now and have half a pound of khat for you within the hour. It's bulky, it deteriorates fast, and nobody within 7,000 miles grows it, but where there's a market, there's a supply. Kinda underscores the stupidity of our drug laws really. Especially since the buzz is pretty minor, comparable to a serious caffeine high according to most informants.
if I visited rural Germany, I'd be shocked by how provincial, racist, and dumb people are there
Eh, no more so than in may rural (or suburban, or urban, or especially suburban) parts of America. UNG's folks have a home in an extremely rural part of Germany -- like cows living next door and sheep across the road rural. Most of the people I met in that area were really rather delightful, especially his best friend's parents. Really, the only major problem I found in the rural regions was that the old people were under this grave misapprehension that the language they were speaking was German.
I spent a lot of time in Japan, a large proportion of it unaccompanied. There was a lot to go see in Kyoto, and I loved it, but it does get rather sterile that way (especially for an Asoziale like me).
I may be turning this around, though: whereas all my international travel to date has been to the first world, I may be in a position soon to go to a fourth-tier city in India for a frightfully interesting internship. Having something you're actually doing makes it a very different experience.
104: You see! That's fucking awesome!
As for "sense of deep understanding / insight", eh, whatever. A lot of people like to believe they understand Protean concepts like "culture". It makes us feel better about ourselves, even though I would be hard pressed to even have a good understanding of US culture. Or even Chicago culture.
And if people felt they garnered a deep insight, who cares? They learned something new. It doesn't matter if you've learned much more, deep insights are an inherently relative thing. I don't mock someone who feels smart for understanding calculus I. And you have to bear in mind, LB, that you are:
A) An exceptionally bright person
B) With a major modesty streak
C) Who got a once-in-a-lifetime chance to live in another place and work with locals on a daily basis for a very prolonged period
You've gotten the equivalent of a PhD in Samoa compared to pretty much everyone else on the planet who isn't one of 200k particular Polynesians. Those people who backpacked through there? They are being adventurous. They are learning cool new shit about an exotic place. They're doing something just as worthy as the first generation of kids going to university, even if it may not seem that impressive to those for whom college was an expectation.
I mean, yes, people can be really tiresome about how amazing their life or experiences are. And when it comes to travel epiphanies, I don't much care for exoticism and prefer revelations of the "They're so like us!" type, but that's partially just my bias (and own self-delusion) toward thinking people are really alike deep down.
I've just been in a really non-mocking mood lately, and it's been brought out very strongly by a few recent threads.
Oh my God, that circumcision website is weird. Whole pages of men adoring the smallest bumps on their genitalia.
Anyway, about khat, qat: yes, it's travelled, but not anywhere near like coffee or cocaine or even ephedra. There's some market for it, but not a lot of money in it. It's like betel in that sense: local drugs that really haven't crossed over.
After reading the messages after about 90, my post looks on the pretentious side.
IME,and not to be too zen about it, the only important "educational" part of foreign tourism is that you can be forced to confront exactly how little you do understand the world. That's a valuable lesson, too.
I once observed someone tilting through opposite epiphanies regarding Japan: "It seems so weird at first but behind all that they're a lot like us... well, but really I think they're completely different... no, wait..."
Sure, I understand the "let's experience a little local culture" sentiment. Of course, there are different possible mindsets behind the sentiment, as I suggested in 114: you could want to experience some "local culture" because your vacation will be so authentic that way or you could want to experience some "local culture" because it's going to be something interestingly different from your everyday life. The latter desire is not seeking local culture under any pretense that it's going to give you more authentic experiences, but just meaning you aren't interested in an ultra-commercial tourist-haven G.H.C.O.T.B.S.B.W.S.W., because your vacation goal is seeing new and interesting things, not paying exorbitant prices to relax (or, similarly, to be sold some foreign Disneyworld experience that you could have had more chealy in Floirda). The first seems incredibly toolish, or just ignornant, likely both. The latter seems like a legitimate vacation goal, and indeed closer to what I'm interested in when travelling.
I was mostly set off by LB's "[y]ou can have a good time travelling, but there's likely to be a strong correlation between how totally blown away you were by the awesomeness of your trip and how delusional you were about what was actually going on." Which seemed wildly overbroad.
139: That sounds about right for Samoa too.
A very common question I've gotten from the Kenya trip is whether or not it opened my eyes to see all that poverty. I'm always like, "Uh...no, not really. I think I left with about the same impression that I had ahead of time."
139. No, the Japanese are definitely weird, by any standard.
140: I think it would have been clearer if this were a spoken conversation in which I could have done a mocking voice on the 'totally blown away' bit, making it clear that I was only intending to make fun of people actually being toolish or ignorant. Written sarcasm is hard.
And lots and lots of people are toolish about it! Nearly all of them, including me, on their first couple trips.
This is because they are Young. Forgive the twenty-somethings their wide-eyed toolishness.
Written sarcasm is hard
That's what scare quotes are for, silly.
145: Forgive, but mock. Without mockery, how will they learn?
Although I think LB is being a bit toolish*, I think she is highlighting some of why most thinking people are somewhat conflicted by travel in a manner similar to what heebie describes. One of the endearing aspects for me of The Thought Gang is one of the protagonists repeated insistence that "We are not tourists!"
*Just in that I think Po-Mo has some good points on"remembering the obnoxious ones" and 135. We all peel the onion to various depths. Those current Samoans don't actually know shit about how it was when it was really Samoan culture. Its turtles toolishness all the way down.
I ate slugs and iguanas (or spotted dick, at any rate) in the UK once. Saw Stonehenge, too, from like way over there behind a fence and about two hundred people from either Milwaukee or Sapporo attempting to catch just the right photo. Couldn't understand a word the natives were saying, though, I see where you're coming from about the language barrier.
Re: G.H.C.O.T.B.S.B.W.S.W,
I don't find it aesthically revolting, but I do find it incredibly stressful to be spending that much money, especially on accomodation. Sucks all the pleasure out of the luxury.
This is because they are Young.
Or as my grandma would say, "There's a saying which describes how young people have the health and vitality that older people miss, and yet the young people do not realize how wonderful this is because of their age and inexperience, and so one cannot appreciate being young until one is old."
121: A guy with an authentic English accent and he wasn't irresistible to a Nebraska girl?
139: I think what I got out of living in China was 1. Everything I knew about Chinese history was, except in the dullest sense, wrong; 2. Perceptions are far more powerfully conditioned by culture than most people think, and you can't just compensate for that by saying "oh, and my perceptions are conditioned, but knowing that I can arrive at the truth"; 3. I am horribly American--a weird American, a provincial American, a self-loathing American--but it's not like my spiritual home is somewhere cultured in Europe or anything.
I also learned that I really like lotus root, plus a lot of stuff about bicycling boldly and the importance of staying warm enough.
151: Being young is a form of tourism in and of itself. As is being old.
re: 152
Everyone knows the really successful accent originates north of the English border ...
Everything I knew about Chinese history was, except in the dullest sense, wrong
Example?
In my childhood I had once studied the French grammar, and I could imperfectly understand the easy prose of a familiar subject. But when I was thus suddenly cast on a foreign land, I found myself deprived of the use of speech and of hearing, and during some weeks incapable not only of enjoying the pleasures of conversation, but even of asking or answering a question in the common intercourse of life. To an home-bred Englishman every object, every custom was offensive; but the native of any country might have been disgusted with the general aspect of his lodging and entertainment. The appetite of a young man might have overlooked the badness of the materials and cookery, but his appetite was far from being satisfied with the scantiness of our daily meals, and more than one sense was offended by the appearance of the table, which during eight successive days was regularly covered with the same linen. I had now exchanged my elegant apartment in Magdalen College for a narrow gloomy street, the most unfrequented of an unhandsome town, for an old inconvenient house, and for a small chamber ill-contrived and ill-furnished, which on the approach of winter instead of a companionable fire, must be warmed by the dull invisible heat of a stove.
. . .
My condition seemed as destitute of hope as it was devoid of pleasure.
But it is the peculiar felicity of youth that the most unpleasing objects and events seldom make a deep or lasting impression. At the flexible age of sixteen I soon learned to endure, and gradually to adopt, the new forms of arbitrary manners; the real hardships of my situation, the house, the table, and the mistress, were alleviated by time. And to this coarse and scanty fare I am perhaps indebted for the establishment of my constitution. Had I been sent abroad in a more splendid style, such as the fortune and bounty of my father might have supplied, I might have returned home with the same stock of language and science as our countrymen usually import from the continent. An exile and a prisoner as I was, their example betrayed me into some irregularities of wine, of play, and of idle excursions; but I soon felt the impossibility of associating with them on equal terms, and after the departure of my first acquaintance, I held a cold and civil correspondence with their successors. This seclusion from English society was attended with the most solid benefits. In the Pays de Vaud, the French language is used with less imperfection than in most of the distant provinces of France. In Pavilliard's family, necessity compelled me to listen and to speak, and if I was at first disheartened by the apparent slowness, in a few months I was astonished by the rapidity of my progress. My pronunciation was formed by the constant repetition of the same sounds; the variety of words and idioms, the rules of grammar, and distinctions of genders, were impressed in my memory. Ease and freedom were obtained by practice; correctness and elegance by labor; and before I was recalled home, French, in which I spontaneously thought, was more familiar than English to my ear, my tongue, and my pen. The first effect of this opening knowledge was the revival of my love of reading, which had been chilled at Oxford, and I soon turned over without much choice almost all the French books in my tutor's library. Even these amusements were productive of real advantage ; my taste and judgment were now somewhat riper. I was introduced to a new mode of style and literature. By the comparison of manners and opinions, my views were enlarged, my prejudices were corrected, and a copious voluntary abstract of the Histoire de /' Eglise et de I' Empire by Lesueur, may be placed in a middle line between my childish and my manly studies. As soon as I was able to converse with the natives, I began to feel some satisfaction in their company. My awkward timidity was polished and emboldened, and I frequented for the first time assemblies of men and women. The acquaintance of the Pavilliards prepared me by degrees for more elegant society. I was received with kindness and indulgence in the best families of Lausanne, and it was in one of these that I formed an intimate, lasting connection with M. Deyverdun, a young man of an amiable temper and excellent understanding.
88: AWB missed a beautiful chance for an ethnomethodological intervention there. She could have just starting making recommendations on pussy care. But no!
Its turtles toolishness all the way down.
Yeah, this is my thinking on "authenticity": there ain't no such thing. (Cf. The Invention of Tradition.) I'm also reminded of a comment in an article I read recently about Indian food in the UK and multiculturalism: concern with authenticity is a second-wave phenomenon. When something's really new and unknown, simply being aware of it is sufficient. It's only once things become accepted and mundane that people start to worry about authenticity.
I'm curious (and I'm sure this will highlight my decidedly-not-UMC background): How did so many of you live abroad? Was it all study-abroad programs in college or grad school? Or student-exchange programs in grade school? Or did your families, like, up and move to a foreign country for a few years when you were young? (How does that work? I could understand a temporary job relocation for an international company, but that can't be very many people, right?) Or did you just up and do it youself after college? (Or before?) If that, how did you support yourself?
I'm amazed a the number of people who've spent time living abroad (that I've met generally, not just here), and never quite understood how exactly that happens.
157: It was, like, so raw. Like, practically savage, only, like, in a gross little apartment. And, like, they totally fed me slugs and iguanas, but, like, not enough! God and they don't even HEAT THEIR HOUSES. Like, they're in tune with nature, so they just accept winter and they don't feel cold.
158: But, like, then I started to really get them. Like, get them get them. I mean, I like, could totally speak the language but it was so much more than that. We were just friends in a totally deeper way than you get here at home, you know?
160: Every experience is authentic. The only question is: authentic what?
157 & 158 are wonderful.
English teaching abroad used to be an easy way to live overseas and come out a little ahead. You need credentials now, I think; it's a multi-billion-dollar biz.
re: 160
I think some UK 'Indian' dishes have been exported back to India, and the Indian chefs bringing 'authentic' Indian cuisine to the UK (now) often seem influenced by French and modern British cuisine. Wheels within wheels, etc.
156: Oh, it's not even specific events, or that I could give a "correct" description of Chinese history--mostly what I learned was that (especially without super-duper Mandarin plus a lot of dialects, but more generally too) I couldn't get at the meaning of anything--what people really thought they were doing when they smashed opium chests or were horrible to their daughters-in-law or started anarchist journals or wrote for Western publications about Chinese culture. On a crude level, yeah, I can say that people were trying to acquire power, or destroy the opium trade to maintain national sovereignty or, or, or...
I had a little epiphany when looking at a particular (undistinguished) Renaissance painting....Now, a lot of Chinese art had always looked a bit thin to me, just some rocks and clouds or tigers or whatever, a little ink and a few splatters of color. Nothing much there compared to, say, your average Italian renaissance painting. I looked closely at the painting and realized that it too was kind of thin--I don't know quite how to say it, but I could see little oddnesses of technique and perspective, little irregularities of drawing, flatnesses, that I had hitherto edited out. It occurred to me that the renaissance paining had to do less work for me--that I had a whole very very detailed narrative about Western painting that filled in the background already, like perhaps an underlying coat of paint might, adding a richness and depth to the surface of the thing.
Even as an Asian studies major who had lived in China for a couple of years, I didn't have that very very detailed narrative and probably couldn't; every Chinese thing was surface for me.
Oh my God, that circumcision website is weird. Whole pages of men adoring the smallest bumps on their genitalia.
Yeah, that is weird. I only adore the really giant bumps on my genitalia. The smallest ones were cool when I was a teenager and all, but I guess I'm just old and jaded.
For all it takes it gives a humped return
Exchequering from piebald fiscs unkeyed.
The poem hit me so hard at 22 I always felt guilty about traveling, or dreaming of travels, or dreaming, everafter. I did most of the bottom half of the US by backpack anyway, but I was always aware, and those who knew me were aware, that it was about the journey and not any particular destination. But the meadowgrass was turning brown, and I had the urge for going, so I guess I had to go. But no matter where I went , there I was. So I followed my heart back home, and enjoyed the simple gifts of walking thru the woods with my panting bloodymouthed dogs.
104: That was pretty much Margaret Mead's research technique. People BSed her, or answered inaccurately so as not to be rude.
161. Well, growing up I went on a family vacation to France and Switzerland, then in between high school and college I went to school in England for a year. I was stationed in Okinawa, and I've been to the Korean DMZ while in the service. I was called up for the Gulf War. I have been to Hong Kong, Taiwan and the PRC on business, and Bali on vacation. I still feel pretty provincial.
161: In my case, I did a semester abroad. One of the attractions of potentially going to grad school was definitely the opportunity to live abroad again.
161: I just went to college in England the typical way, I applied. It wasn't too hard to get the paperwork done, and they were pretty flexible about taking my American high school grades and test scores. But the flight over for the interview would've been painful for most families to spring for.
My friends who've lived in multiple countries fall into one (or more) of the following buckets:
- Study abroad, typically just one semester, frequently traveled with a bunch of other Americans
- Children of immigrants, lived in the old country and the new
- Children of peripatetic parents, who lived in a number of countries as their homes moved with the jobs/whimsy of their folks.
161: Four ways I know - trust fund (wanderjahr after college), exchange program (where the tuition that would be paid to the uni goes to the exchange program) + extra funding, teach English somewhere, missions/service trip. Most of these require being quite well off.
169: Hey, I told you that story. Not that it isn't true, except for the bits about not being rude; it was mostly all straight-up BS. (Funny thing is that she was an excellent reporter; if you read "Coming of Age In Samoa" there's a chapter of 'A day in the life of some village' which is dead on -- anything she saw, she reported accurately. The problem is that anything anyone told her, she reported unquestioningly.)
I think that someone hit on what makes the description of such an authentic amazing experience so and so had eating slugs and iguanas (do they taste like chicken? they must) is that there often comes with it the indication that because they've done so, they're better than you for it. (I think this maybe what Heebie is getting at in the main post, too?) That's what makes it toolish, not having sought out something authentic or inauthentic.
And to answer Brock's question, it was a study abroad, undergrad, and I am under no illusions that studying abroad is equivalent to the full experience of living somewhere.
Oh, and I also spent a summer in France when I was 15 on a kind of informal exchange program.
Uncle Sam paid me to live abroad. And bought me condoms!
How did so many of you live abroad?
Join the Army, see the world. Six years living in Germany; two years in Korea. Seven sand-filled months in Saudia Arabia and Iraq (for a week or two). A month-long deployment to the Phillipines. Of course, the last two did not provide many opportunities for sightseeing or learning about local culture.
LB, did you have to dig a well or something?
I, myself, am totally conflicted on travel. I want both, a place to go back to every year and to experience "everyplace". I once had a goal of visiting every county in the US*. And somewhere I have a 1960s base map of counties the US colored in to show where I visited up to some point when I quit keeping track**. Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
*I once picked up the impression that Nabokov had done so, but that is almost certainly wrong although he did travel extensively in the US in pursuit of butterflies (Megan's travel plan #2 from 28). This is a great on-topic interview of his (after the first several questions) where he discusses both his butterfly-chasing motor-court-staying trips in America and train travel from Russia to France in pre-revolutionary times.
The then great and glamorous Nord-Express (it was never the same after World War I when its elegant brown became a nouveau-riche blue), consisting solely of such international cars and running but twice a week, connected St. Petersburg with Paris.
**I had also used it to handcolor the results of the 1968 presidential election by county (fuck you Texas and Georgia and your million, billion counties). Also a problem for the travel goal.
175.1: Well, yes. But the lesson from that is "Don't think you're better than other people just because you did one particular thing*." I try really hard to avoid people who are toolish like that, or to steer conversation to a new topic, or if all that fails, to buy them a meal or drink that'll shut them up. It really helps maintain my faith in humanity.
* Limited exceptions may be allowed for curing cancer or ending a major war/occupation
Spent a year enrolled in a Swiss university, which cut my college tuition by some but not much, and then research trips to France in grad school.
the last two did not provide many opportunities for sightseeing or learning about local culture.
Sure they did, Idealist. Just a different kind of "interaction" with the locals.
I haven't lived outside California. A friend who did just up-and-decided. Saved up money, enrolled in an intense language program there and moved for a year or so.
My mom has a sweet deal where she is hired by a university abroad to advise their professors on research design. They pay her to live there three months a year. I think she found out about it by word of mouth. It suggests cushy end-of-career options.
Yeah, I should have also mentioned Peace Corps/Military. I'm aware of those two options.
173 seems to cover what I thought were the other possibilities. I guess I'm just always surprised by how many people seem to have taken advantage of them. In my (status-y) law school, it seemed like very nearly all my classmates had spent at least a semester abroad at some point. At my (state) college, I literally didn't know anyone who had studied abroad (or lived abroad, other than immigrants).
I think some UK 'Indian' dishes have been exported back to India, and the Indian chefs bringing 'authentic' Indian cuisine to the UK (now) often seem influenced by French and modern British cuisine. Wheels within wheels, etc.
The point I found most interesting in the article was that the vast majority of "Indian" restaurants in the UK are run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, yet the ones that stress "authenticity" never focus on those cuisines, but on ones from places like Goa and Kerala (which get far more British tourism but far less immigration to the UK).
I grew up lmc/mc, but my folks (who had lived in Germany when they were first married and my dad was stationed there) saved up for a family trip to Sweden when I was 12. I spent a semester in Ghana in undergrad (which cost me just a bit more in loans than a normal semester) and then lived there while doing PhD research (thank you Sen. Fulbright).
So I shouldn't say only bad things about them as a class.
Yeah, can't generalize; I met many wonderful, interesting people backpacking, and I met many ignorant bigots who were all the worse for their smug, superior attitude (because they were, like, travelers, not tourists, and they were so enlightened because they were traveling in the third world, and they were so adventurous, even though they dutifully went wherever fucking Lonely Planet told them to go).
161: Needed to split when I dropped out of college (I guess there was still some possibility that I might go back and do that last semester, but it never happened), and I had a place to stay in Tokyo for a couple of weeks; picked up teaching work when I got there.
I spend a semester of college in Sweden. I got authentically drunk with authentic Europeans.
Also spent a year in Tanzania, working at the International School of Tanganyika. If you work in K-12 education, the network of international schools has pretty awesome opportunities to get paid to live in exotic places and teach the children of other expats.
We were supposed to go to Finland for a year. My wife got a Fulbright to do a teacher exchange, only to be informed by district officials (after we'd gone through the entire process, including getting documentation and recs from her school) that they didn't do exchanges. Major disappointment, but we got pregnant instead.
166 -- That's a very apt and moving description of what it's like to be looking at a cultural barrier.
There's a lot of French-Vietnamese cuisine, but Vietnamese restaurants mostly serve vietnamese and Thai in Portland, IIRC.
The backpacker types I knew in Asia went from festival to festival, so they never saw any everyday life at all. It was like going from Thanksgiving to Christmas to Super Bowl Sunday to the Fourth of July with no breaks between.
185: From my college visit experience of the last few years (I know them intimately, I've walked through their libraries!) this has become almost a given at many liberal arts college. (Most douchey question* from a parent I've heard on a tour was, "Why do only 50/60 (something like that)% of your juniors study abroad?" I would have paid good money for the tour guide to simply answer, "Don't send your child here.")
*Nothing wrong with the practice, just the expectation applied broadly beyond your own little smurfette.
It was like going from Thanksgiving to Christmas to Super Bowl Sunday to the Fourth of July with no breaks between.
See, that sounds just perfect to me, especially since the amount of fireworks and booze at many East Asian festivals ensures that you won't miss out on NYE either.
It was like going from Thanksgiving to Christmas to Super Bowl Sunday to the Fourth of July with no breaks between.
I know a really great song about this, except it's sung by children and encourages shopping at big box stores.
193: Indeed, at certain schools this is definitely the case, at liberal arts AND state schools (in California at any rate). At my liberal arts college, it was actually cheaper for me to study abroad than not (well, beyond the fact that I couldn't work in a foreign country and was enticed to spend more money). That was the one year that I didn't have to take out any student loans because my scholarships covered all of it. I always find it amusing that the State of California paid Britain to school me. Out sourcing!
192: they might as well just spend the whole summer in Montreal.
166: great description.
I will always think of Parenthetical as Ouzel, the name he or she rejected despite my pleas.
161: I know a lot of people who took postdoc jobs abroad for two to three years. Not nearly as common as people from elsewhere in the world taking such jobs in the U.S., though.
198: I could start signing my name DL/Parenthetical/Ouzel. But for now I'll be happy to have a nickname for my nickname. (And she, thank you).
Would Heebie and/or LB please read your Unfogged email?
Actually, just LB, because the email to Heebie just got returned by the mailbot.
Speaking of travel, does anyone want to advise me on the purchase of a musical instrument? First, should I buy a guitar that is too expensive for me to comfortably afford? Supposing the answer to that question is yes, which guitar should I buy? I particularly solicit the input of those who can share their experiences playing an Esteve or a Guild nylon string guitar.
Are you sure you got my address right? (I'm trying to double check my Unfogged address, because I can't remember it at the moment. But it's a little unintuitive. But my regular address is heebie dot geebie at gmail.)
I always have a nice time some of the time when I travel; sometimes it's even amazing. To me.
I understand the grump instinct -- I've been to Venice and seen 20-something Americans too -- but one really has to resist. Everybody gets to have their own honest naive voyage of discovery.
Life's too short for me to go everywhere I'd like to go, eat everything I'd like to eat, kiss everyone I'd like to kiss, see everything I'd like to see. I have a hard time finding that the use of any of that limited time for mocking people making their own effort worthwhile.
[meta-grump trumps!]
I look down on all you slugs and iguanas. I've been traveling for 2 years in Austin, TX, and I've had some of the most amazing, authentic experiences. You couldn't even imagine.
Without reading the thread: I just turned in a big pile of change at the bank, and one of the coins rejected was a Zimbabwe 5 cent piece from a trip there in 1998. I just calculated the current value as being approximately as 4E-18 dollars. Laydeez.
['Six digit inflation really adds up']
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Ugh, I hate my thesis. I probably need to be done ~end of the week for a scheduled defense in mid March. I'm not doing so great. Started with a bang, but man, am I dragging.
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Well, after all, I just wanted to relate.
204: Heebie - I'm just trying to get our LA meet-up accorded its own post, so we can get the info out there. We're meeting at Versailles
restaurant, 1415 La Cienega Blvd [just south of Pico], at 6pm on Saturday. Cuban food.
210: It's never finished. It just reaches a point of diminishing returns. This close to deadline, if you're worrying about more than getting the footnotes and references in order you're misallocating resources. Now's the time to look over your institution's style guide and formatting requirements and make damn sure you meet the spec. Get the fiddly bits right and the rest will take care of itself.
203: Absolutely buy a quality guitar. they're pretty good for holding their value. I bought a cheap second-hand guitar for my son which had problems making it hard to play, and it almost made him quit.
There may be cheap guitars that are good for learners, but just being frugal can be a big mistake.
Yeah, well. Frankly the notion of proper allocation of resources is out the window at this point!
Just bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona: $275. That's a little less than it cost (less than half a round trip) first time I paid to fly to Europe in 1981.
Just bought a one-way ticket to Barcelona
Already that disappointed by someone new, huh?
I should have posted this before:
Well, I've seen all there is to see
And I've heard all they have to say
I've done everything I wanted to do . . .
I've done that too
And it ain't that pretty at all
Ain't that pretty at all
So I'm going to hurl myself against the wall
'Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
You know, I just had a short vacation, Roy
Spent it getting a root canal
"Oh, how'd you like it?"
Well, it ain't that pretty at all
So I'm going to hurl myself against the wall
'Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
Gonna get a good running start and throw myself at the wall as hard as I can man
I've been to Paris
And it ain't that pretty at all
I've been to Rome
Guess what?
I'd like to go back to Paris someday and visit the Louvre Museum
Get a good running start and hurl myself at the wall
Going to hurl myself against the wall
'Cause I'd rather feel bad than feel nothing at all
And it ain't that pretty at all
Ain't that pretty at all
215: About par for the course. Freaking out a bit at this stage is normal. It's the people who have all their ducks in a row who are freaks. And we hates them, Precious. Tricksy little hobbitses.
You may have to bust ass to get things done in time, but if that's what's called for, I stand by my advice. That persnickety little shit will really bite you in the ass down the line, and the time away from the deep stuff can help you get a bit of perspective.
Good luck.
210: I probably need to be done ~end of the week for a scheduled defense in mid March. I'm not doing so great. Started with a bang, but man, am I dragging.
Road trip!
214: There seems to be a huge variance in guitar types, even within the subset of nylon string acoustics, and it is paralyzing to a person contemplating the outlay of a not-insignificant portion of her savings and afraid of making a mistake. I spent a pleasurable but frustrating Saturday at the guitar store trying out guitar after guitar, and -- I don't know! They're all really nice. Like, there's an Esteve with deep thrummy bottom notes and sparkly top notes, or a Takamine with beautiful consistent sound from top to bottom. There's an Alvarez guitar with extremely low action, which makes it easy to play, but which gets a little buzzy cause I'm not always very clean. There's a Guild which sounds beautiful but is heavy and feels unwieldy.
So how do you pick? I think that if I were a more experienced player, I would have a style, and would find a guitar that suits that style. I'm not there yet. I play a little bit of Spanish classical, a little bit of tango, a little bit a this an that. Does anyone know of a good standard intermediate level learning guitar? And what constitutes cheap vs. expensive? Like, I can't in good conscience spend more than 1000, which seems like a ton of money to me, but I feel like that's still on the low end of what's available.
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Forgive me, OT:
Those in the San Francisco area might want to check out the annual SF Antiquarian Book Festival this weekend.
There are festivities galore leading up to this, not least of which is the highly-feted affair at my friends at Serendipity Books tomorrow in Berkeley. Look at that menu.
I don't see how one can pass this up. Tell 'em I sent you on behalf of MJT, and they will know you.
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152: I know, right? He was just that much of a drip.
Re: How do people travel?
A friend of mine has taken virtually every opportunity to travel that's come his way -- exchange year in Glasgow, honeymoon in Cambodia (yes, yes), grant-funded time in Nepal doing some research project, FLAS grants to India, conference in Mexico, plus virtually everywhere in the US besides the Deep South on tour with his band. And he's not rich or anything, and his parents didn't travel inordinately much (he turned down an offer from his mother to go on a G.H.C.O.T.B.S.B.W.S.W. vacation to Jamaica because he felt it was politically problematic, although he's stayed in her Canadian cabin). He's just incredibly good at talking his way into things.
Four ways I know [...] Most of these require being quite well off.
You forgot #5: Work stateside for several months while living really cheaply (including living in a house with six roommates). Buy a ticket to chosen foreign country. Work your ass off at various under-the-table jobs* there.
*Such jobs might include tour guide, bartender, translator of press releases, girl friday at a design studio. (Scanning for 8 hours a day! Woo!)
And then you have to pick the right strings, JMS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
221: try to catch ttaM. There are a few other serious or ex-serious players here, and some beginners too.
I should have posted this before:
Or this.
In answer to Brock -- don't forget that the unfoggedetariat is large and that, for almost any topic, there will be at least 4-5 people who are intimately familiar with it and will talk about it.
I appreciate the entire thread. Personally I've never left the continent (and barely left the region) and always felt somewhat guilty about it.
After reading the thread, I still feel guilty about my distaste for travel, but less so.
221: I'm a sucker for high tech materials, so I've recently been drooling over guitars made out of carbon fiber. The "Cargo" model from Composite Acoustics comes in at a little over $800. I haven't actually played one; mostly I'm fascinated by how light weight the thing has got to be.
Hopelessly on topic, but I'm afraid I'm a toolish backpacker. I'm not in the habit of claiming any special insights to any particular culture, but I can attest to my particular variety of tooldom: I can get on a plane and after three bus trips become utterly and decadently confused. Language, social assumptions, bus routes, whatever; they all conspire to induce a cognitive overload. Alienation allows an environment to present itself with a peculiar aesthetic force, and I get a kick out of it. I can't say that backpackers aren't toolish, but I can say they're willing to put up with a great deal of shit for their kick, and I've got a respect for that.
re: 221
1000 would be plenty here in the UK for a nylon string. You'd be able to get into the serious 'intermediate' level instruments for that sort of money. By which I mean intermediate between good beginner's guitars and the top end factory made guitars [decent hand made nylon strings run to several thousand, of course]. Unless you are planning a concert career, an instrument in that sort of price range might well be the only nylon string guitar you ever need.
My nylon string only cost the equivalent of about 700 USD and I've never felt the need to trade up to a better model [or if I did, I'd want to be buying a hand made one]. Not that I, personally, am 'concert level' or nuffink as a classical player, but I did sit the various classical guitar grading exams up to roughly the level needed for music college.*
There's an Alvarez guitar with extremely low action, which makes it easy to play, but which gets a little buzzy cause I'm not always very clean.
That would be a definite no, for me. With nylon string you are often going to want to use techniques that involve pretty heavy right hand plucking/strumming and you want a reasonably high/clean action. It doesn't have to be monstrously high -- flamenco guitars often aren't, but flamenco players also accept a level of 'buzzing' that a classical player would not -- but high enough to remain clean, definitely. I don't know how good your technique is, here.
For nylon string/classical, heavy isn't also usually something that would leap out at me as being good. The general trend in classical manufacturing is to try to find ways to make light resonant tops that can also support the weight/tension of the strings. So the Guild wouldn't be my personal choice [they are also a brand associated with high-end steel rather than nylon strung guitars]. However, I've never played one, so take that advice with a pinch of salt.
I've never heard of Esteve, sorry. Takamine have an excellent reputation for consistency, fwiw.
* actual people applying for music college are a lot better than that, naturally.
I never traveled overseas before age 20, but ever since then, international travel and expatriate experiences have been absolutely central to my life and identity. Perhaps it comes from spending my youth in isolation (of many sorts) in Deep Redstatia; "How you gonna' keep them down on the farm after they seen Par-ee?", and all that.
And yet...there's something about Heebie's post that I can relate to. Having spent so much time in foreign lands where I could speak the language either fluently or very proficiently, where I was deeply immersed in the local culture, where I lived my life approximately as the locals did, it has become that much harder for me to enjoy travel in places where I am the ignorant English-speaking tourist.
In effect, knowing the language in one country sets an impossibly high standard for enjoying a holiday anywhere else.
This is true for me even in a place like South Africa, where there is no reason at all to feel diffident about speaking English (because even non-native English speakers are accustomed to speaking English as the lingua franca of interethnic communication). One can go through daily life in perfect comfort speaking only English, and yet one is denied the privilege of entry into the cultural world of the majority, who speak Afrikaans, Zulu, or some other tribal language amongst themselves.
One exception, I might add, is visiting the home of friends in other countries. Hospitality and friendship have a near magical capacity to transform the eerily foreign into the delightfully exotic.
Way back at 161: First was an exchange program, where my US tuition covered the German expenses.
Second was taking an open-ended trip after three years of work post-college. The savings from having worked two jobs for that period were planned to cover six months between Istanbul and Ireland.
Halfway through the trip I landed a job in Budapest, which lasted a bit more than a year until I left of my own accord to go to grad school.
Fourth was a pair of summer internships (one paid at an affiliate of my Budapest employer, the other unpaid) between the two years of grad school.
Fifth was a job offer from an institute in Munich. That lasted ten years.
Now my better half's job has taken the family to Tbilisi. So I guess our kids will end up in the "peripatetic parents" category and/or the "immigrant parents" category.
I never traveled overseas before age 20, but ever since then, international travel and expatriate experiences have been absolutely central to my life and identity. Perhaps it comes from spending my youth in isolation (of many sorts) in Deep Redstatia; "How you gonna' keep them down on the farm after they seen Par-ee?", and all that.
And yet...there's something about Heebie's post that I can relate to. Having spent so much time in foreign lands where I could speak the language either fluently or very proficiently, where I was deeply immersed in the local culture, where I lived my life approximately as the locals did, it has become that much harder for me to enjoy travel in places where I am the ignorant English-speaking tourist.
In effect, knowing the language in one country sets an impossibly high standard for enjoying a holiday anywhere else.
This is true for me even in a place like South Africa, where there is no reason at all to feel diffident about speaking English (because even non-native English speakers are accustomed to speaking English as the lingua franca of interethnic communication). One can go through daily life in perfect comfort speaking only English, and yet one is denied the privilege of entry into the cultural world of the majority, who speak Afrikaans, Zulu, or some other tribal language amongst themselves.
One exception, I might add, is visiting the home of friends in other countries. Hospitality and friendship have a near magical capacity to transform the eerily foreign into the delightfully exotic.
This one's for Emerson, at 218:
He went to Paris lookin' for answers
To questions that bothered him so
He was impressive, young and aggressive
Savin' the world on his own
But the warm summer breezes
The French wines and cheeses
Put his ambition at bay
The summers and winters
Scattered like splinters
And four or five years slipped away
Then he went to England, played the piano
And married an actress named Kim
They had a fine life, she was a good wife
And bore him a young son named Jim
And all of the answers and all of the questions
Locked in his attic one day
'Cause he liked the quiet clean country livin'
And twenty more years slipped away
Well the war took his baby, the bombs killed his lady
And left him with only one eye
His body was battered, his whole world was shattered
And all he could do was just cry
While the tears were a-fallin' he was recallin'
Answers he never found
So he hopped on a freighter, skidded the ocean
And left England without a sound
Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin's
And drinks his Green Label each day
Writing his memoirs, losin' his hearin'
But he don't care what most people say
Through eighty-six years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he'll smile and he'll say
"Jimmy, some of it's magic, some of it's tragic
But I had a good life all the way"
104: That was pretty much Margaret Mead's research technique. People BSed her, or answered inaccurately so as not to be rude.
Careful now! Less of this sort of thing!
The considered opinion of anthropologists is that much of what Mead wrote was dead right (and very good anthropology). There are some mistakes, and "Coming of Age in Samoa" was a popular book (about coming of age in Samoa, not just about sex) rather than an academic one and written appropriately for this task.
But there's much more bullshit in the Derek Freeman line (and even more in his third-generation repeater stations like Steven Pinker). It's not true that Mead just wrote things down uncritically; Freeman, however, took the word of 60 year old church ladies about whether they had premarital sex, completely at face value, and "verified" it by asking them to swear on a Bible.
In unrelated news, PMP is right and further, there probably is a difference which roughly corresponds to "travellers" and "tourists". You can't "truly know" what another culture's like, but only in a sense in which you probably can't really know what your home country is like - I certainly couldn't tell you what it's like to live in London and I've been here twenty years. What you can do, if you're interested in doing so, is learn how to operate in a foreign environment and deal with things outside a small cocoon created by the tourism and hospitality industry. Which is an entertainment consumption choice rather than a moral attribute, but one certainly can have a high old time in foreign places, and learning to organise a cake-baking competition in Hanoi (as my missus once did) is no more obviously a waste of time than learning to play darts.
I mean, the reductio ad absurdum of this is that if we're going to say that there's no distinction between a tourist and a traveller, then would we say that there's no distinction between a tourist, a traveller and a business traveller? I've been to Tokyo; my experience of it was having eight meetings with English speaking financial professionals, then going back to the Hilton hotel (in a chauffured car) and drinking beer. If it's clear that there's a distinction between this (a normal business trip) and someone going there to experience the place, then surely there could be similar distinctions further along the scale, based on consumption of packaged tours, or similar.
237 seems fair enough.
There clearly are different levels of experience of places. I have nothing like the knowledge of Prague that a local Czech has, but I have quite a bit 'deeper/wider' experience of the place than someone who spends a week there in a youth hostel and does nothing but drink with their fellow English-speakers and leer at Czech girls.
The big target for mockery surely, though, are the people who have the bog standard tourist experience -- or differently packaged but equally standard backpaper/traveller experience -- but kid themselves that their insight into some place or other is deep/special?
The big target for mockery surely, though, are the people who have the bog standard tourist experience -- or differently packaged but equally standard backpaper/traveller experience -- but kid themselves that their insight into some place or other is deep/special?
I'll come to the defense of the bog standard tourist experience and say that, as consumption choices go, bog standard tourist experiences are preferable to a lot of other choices (notwithstanding the environmental costs associated with mass tourism), inasmuch as they open up at least the possibility of people having their horizons broadened, as the cliche goes.
"What know they of England, who only England know?" contains real wisdom. A mark of maturity is to understand that much of what one always took to be universal is in fact contingent. And to the extent that the bog standard tourist comes to sympathize a little bit with the host country and its people, and to realize the contingency of much of their own lived experience, and to not automatically assume the inate superiority of their own culture's ways, a small-scale social good has been created.
To cite a concrete example, I'm quite convinced that the reason that German public opinion weighed so strongly in favor of international intervention against Serbia on the side of Croatia, but was comparatively indifferent to the Serbian aggression against Kosovo, was that so many Germans had vacationed on the Croatian Adriatic coast.
But tourism is OK, whether you stay in hostels or 5* hotels. If you're a tourist you go to tourist places and the people there don't mind if you only speak phrasebook because they want your money. And I recommend people who have the opportunity to go and gawp at the Alhambra, or the old library at Coimbra, or Herculaneum, because it's a fine aesthetic experience, although it'll teach you nothing about living in Granada or Naples. (substitute convenient equivalents for those living on other continents.)
Tourism is neither a virtue nor a vice, but it can be a simple pleasure. And those who cling to "the farther one travels, the less one knows" end up with all the sophisticated insight of George Harrison.
Hi, Knecht. Meet you in a hotel halfway (Azores?).
re: 239
Oh I like the bog standard tourist experience. I've been to Paris and Rome in the past year [OFE: an Granada the year before that], and don't kid myself that the experience I had was anything other than a nice tourist visit. It was fun, too, and I have another couple of similar trips planned for the next few months. I just wouldn't make any deeper claims for it than that.
Exactly. From Heebie's post:
When I've been abroad, I like to go to the famous gardens and see them, and take a book and read there. I like to go to the bustling center of commerce. I like to talk with people from other countries, but I get really frustrated by the language barrier, and it doesn't matter which of us is trying to speak the other person's language - I miss jokes and innuendoes and get bored of conversations about big obvious topics. Museums are okay.
180: (fuck you Texas and Georgia and your million, billion counties).
I have been to almost all of the 254 of them! I wouldn't recommend Midland-Odessa to anybody. (On the other hand, the people in Van Horn are very nice.)
186:The point I found most interesting in the article was that the vast majority of "Indian" restaurants in the UK are run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis,
Well... they were part of India.
yet the ones that stress "authenticity" never focus on those cuisines, but on ones from places like Goa and Kerala (which get far more British tourism but far less immigration to the UK).
Goa is half-Portugese (the cuisine) anyways, innit? Methinks the Brits got used to Goa-style long before and the new immigrants had to stick to old style, which of course, isn't authentic. The term I heard used was 'Indian restaurant cuisine', which apparently forms a worldwide diasporic archipelego, and is a world unto itself.
I'm not sure that destroys the notion of authenticity, anymore that the existence of 100% genuine artificial leather negates the existence of actual leather.
[Backpacking]
Muh? You have a backpack. And then you walk up a hill, and then you walk down again. What's the problem?
max
['My hiking she is, how you say, bogus.']
The considered opinion of anthropologists is that much of what Mead wrote was dead right (and very good anthropology). There are some mistakes, and "Coming of Age in Samoa" was a popular book (about coming of age in Samoa, not just about sex) rather than an academic one and written appropriately for this task.
But there's much more bullshit in the Derek Freeman line (and even more in his third-generation repeater stations like Steven Pinker). It's not true that Mead just wrote things down uncritically; Freeman, however, took the word of 60 year old church ladies about whether they had premarital sex, completely at face value, and "verified" it by asking them to swear on a Bible.
I claim local knowledge, and while Freeman wasn't totally right about everything, he was righter than Mead. To the extent there's an easily summarizable thesis of "Coming of Age In Samoa" it's along the lines of "American adolescence is emotionally stormy and wracked with sexual guilt and shame; Samoan adolescence, on the other hand, is peaceful and stress free, with sex particularly as something that's just fun, with no undue importance that would make it stressful." And that is straight up bullshit.
While there's plenty of premarital sex in Samoa (and was, I'm sure, when Mead was there) because there's plenty of premarital sex everywhere, no matter how repressed the culture is about it, it was a big, stressful, negative, deal that led to unhappiness, anger, lots of violence, and shotgun weddings. If you read "Coming of Age in Samoa" carefully, the fact that Mead really is a very good reporter makes the inconsistency show through -- I don't have a copy around, but she mentions in passing a woman who had her children taken away by the village for being a slut. Which really makes the "Casual easy sex is simple and joyous for Samoans, leading to no important consequences" bit look very weird.
I can see pretty easily where she went wrong. First, the Samoan sense of humor is all about the deadpan puton, but to a really incredible extent. Trying to get a straight answer about anything out of a bunch of Samoan teenagers would be like interviewing Jackie Mason about life among elderly Jews without ever having heard or conceived of sarcasm.
Second, and this is subtler; Samoa is a no-privacy at all culture. There are secrets, but only in the "Two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" sense; there aren't any 'open secrets'. So, in the American culture Mead was familiar with, premarital sex was disapproved of, and when it happened it was kept under wraps -- a pregnant girl would disappear for six months and come back without the baby, people might guess what happened but it wouldn't be openly known. In Samoa, there's no place to disappear to, and everyone knows everything. So she would have had a much easier time collecting accounts of premarital sex in Samoa than she would in Iowa. The fact that they were openly known about and discussed didn't mean the girls didn't get the shit beat out of them by their parents when they got caught, though. Still, I can see how Mead could have been confused by an informationally open culture into thinking that it was one without sexual shame.
Politically, I'm generally a big Mead fan, and I don't like the political goals of her debunkers. But she was still very very wrong.
Max, you have know know a bit of history to discover the Portuguese in Goan food. AFAIK, most of the "first wave" of British Indian restaurants came from people displaced by partition, so they were likely to be from Pakistan (East or West). They called them Indian restaurants because the handful that had existed before partition were called that (obviously).
Keralan and Tamil (inc. Goan) food is a recent fashion in Britain, and most neighbourhood restaurants are still firmly "Indian restaurant cuisine", in either sub-Bengali or sub-Kashmiri flavours.
I wouldn't recommend Midland-Odessa to anybody.
Meteor crater where they found fossils from a North American elephant. Confederate Air Force. There's stuff there.
(I had a case there a decade or so back. Had to do with the roof of the new post office getting damaged in a hail storm . . .)
re: 246
Afaik, most of the 'Indian' restaurants in the UK are 'Sylhetti'.
I claim local knowledge
Of Samoa in the 1920s? I had you pegged a bit younger than that.
Seriously, I have absolutely no idea what it would have been like being a teenager in Wales between 1925 and 1927, and I would guess that things have changed in Samoa a hell of a lot more.
And to the extent that I was the one being the grump about toolish backpackers, I've got no argument with 237-243.
249: But that's not true -- I'd bet you've got a better idea than I do about Wales in the 1920s. I had experience talking to locals about the book, I doubt the deadpan puton thing has changed much, I'm certain as I am of anything that the no-privacy thing hasn't changed, and did you read the bit about where Mead mentions in the book about a woman who gets her kids taken away for being a big slut? If that sort of thing happened, her conclusions make no sense.
246. Probably true, but I was including them in Bengali; "Kashmiri" dominates round here (S. Yorks), due to the demographic of the immigration, and I think there are similar local exceptions here and there, but generally you're right. I would defy you to identify the regional origin of any of them from the food though.
Incidentally, in my limited experience "Indian" (Goan) food in Portuguese restaurants is really crap.
re: 251
Yeah, but I think DSquared's point partly stands.
I might have more knowledge of what central Scotland was like in 1925 than Joe-random, but I don't doubt less than someone who spent any time there in 1925.
I think it's generally agreed that CoAiS wasn't very accurate about sexuality and the specific chapters concerned were written up in rather sensationalist terms to help book sales, so no argument about that. But that's a long way from saying that the whole book is wrong about adolescence, and still further from the internet view of Mead's entire research being worthless, which I am distressed to see has even infected Emerson.
I'd bet you've got a better idea than I do about Wales in the 1920s
Not necessarily at all - to take only the example which came quickest to my mind, I have literally no idea of what it might be like to live in a country where people went to church on Sundays. The past is a more foreign place than nearly anywhere you can go with a backpack.
re: 252
Also, Indian food in the SE of England* isn't a patch on the same food in Glasgow. I've no idea why that is.
* ordinary stuff, I mean. I've not been to any of the Michelin-starred places in London.
I have literally no idea of what it might be like to live in a country where people went to church on Sundays.
I understand you can research this by taking a holiday in the United States and venturing outside the metropolitan areas.
I actually lived in Oklahoma City for a year and got no closer to understanding the natives. I did hear from a couple of teenage girls there that they shagged like rabbits though, and they definitely weren't joking.
255. I know. Also in your burg they give you such tiny portions there'd be a rumble if they tried it in Sheffield. I suspect it's to do with customers expecting unreasonably low prices even where overheads and wholesale prices are higher.
I was thinking about this the other day. I think more of my friends growing up went to church on Sunday than didn't. Which, in rertrospect, surprises me.
Split about 50/50 between kaffliks and proddies.
I went to church on Sundays when I was a kid. My dad loved singing, so it was a convenient choir, and he could hardly turn up on his own.
In fact, thinking about it, pretty much all of my friends at primary school went to church on Sundays.
Places I have never been: Spain, England, Heaven, Las Vegas.
Places I have been: Oklahoma, Needles California.
Things I like: Spanish music, the Beatles, insane Spanish women who know how to use it (and don't abuse it).
I do not remember my birth.
I have literally no idea of what it might be like to live in a country where people went to church on Sundays.
Hmmmm. I attended church more faithfully when I lived in London than at any other time in my adult life, and the services were always well attended. Granted, Fleur and I probably pulled the mean age of the parishioners down by a good 10-15 years, but it's not like we were the only people there.
OT, in one of the most improbable coincidences in my life, I learned that the vicar of our London parish had once traveled to my home in Deep Redstatia to attend the burial of my cousin, his erstwhile lover, at the Ruprecht family cemetary (which is faintly visible just southwest of dead center in this photo).
Re: the "ugliest tourists" question. When I was taking French courses in Strasbourg I had a (not-very) interesting conversation with a Spanish and a German guy that went like this:
Spanish guy: in my area of Spain we have a slang word for English and German tourists. It translates as "sandals with socks".
Me (English guy): God Brits abroad are the worst. Giant sunburnt obese alcoholics ruining beautiful islands and mediterranean coastlines [based on jaded personal experience of resort holidays during my childhood].
Spanish guy: Actually I think the Germans are worse in Spain.
German guy: It's true, German people on holiday are horrible. Overweight, poorly-dressed, shouting at each other all the time. Watching football matches on TV in beautiful cities.
Spanish guy: Well, the whole reason I'm hanging out with you guys [about 2/3rds of the language school's intake were fellow Spaniards] is cos I hate Spanish people abroad. The first thing they do is try to find as many Spanish people as possible, make a big paella and pretend they're back in Spain.
I think we all sharply realised two truths:
1 - We were self-loathing self-righteous elitists.
2 - Every country has a segment of the population that goes on resort holidays, creates Little X-villes overseas, get drunk and vomits in a foreigner's front garden, etc. I'm less self-righteous about it these days though I genuinely can't watch those Brits Abroad (Club Reps Uncovered) exposé programmes on TV, where everyone has unprotected sex before vomiting lager over their passed-out sunburnt partner. It hurts.
Meet you in a hotel halfway (Azores?).
More like Southern Chad.
265. If you're willing to go a bit north-west, I've always fancied visiting Timbuktu. I suspect I wouldn't get insurance these days, though. Goin' down slow. It's a bugger.
I think it's generally agreed that CoAiS wasn't very accurate about sexuality and the specific chapters concerned were written up in rather sensationalist terms to help book sales, so no argument about that.
Fair enough.
But that's a long way from saying that the whole book is wrong about adolescence, and still further from the internet view of Mead's entire research being worthless, which I am distressed to see has even infected Emerson.
Even about adolescence generally as a sunny happy stress-free time, though. Maybe Samoa has changed a heck of a lot more than seems likely to me, and what strikes me as weirder, has changed, not to be more like colonial Western culture, but off in its own direction.
But in the 1990s, Samoan adolescence was really, really rough. The society is rigidly hierarchical, and older kids/teenagers/up-until-you're-married-with-your-own-kids are exploited manual labor, who get very little social respect or care. There's a very high suicide rate among teens (favored method while I was there was drinking a pesticide called paraquat (sp?), which destroys your liver so you die slowly over a couple days, allowing for maximum making-people-feel-guilty-that-they-drove-you-to-it.)
Mead's reporting in Coming of Age in Samoa seems to me to be very good, in that the village she describes strongly resembles the villages I was familiar with. It's possible that the role of adolescents in Samoan society changed a great deal from the 20's through the 90's, so that her carefree happygolucky adolescents turned into the stressed out, exploited kids I knew, without changing all that much else about the society. I mean, I suppose it really is possible. But it seems unlikely to me -- I can't figure out what would drive a transition like that.
(I don't have any opinion at all about the accuracy or reliability about the rest of Mead's research.)
161: My first time traveling outside the country (Canada doesn't count) was a trip to France with my school's French club. 10 days of educational tourism with group-rate tickets everywhere, financed 50/50 (very roughly) by parents and by fundraising. My really interesting travel experience came as an exchange student, again in France. After I graduated from high school and was accepted to college, I deferred enrolling and spent a year living with French host families and attending a French high school, organized by the Rotary International exchange program.
There's no fee for that and the Rotary International program picks up a little of your expenses. It still costs something, but not as much as a year of public college in most states. It's mostly an UMC thing, but more culturally - finding out about the option even though it doesn't advertise like commercial exchange programs do, being on good terms with members of your local Rotary club - than financially.
264:
Spanish guy: in my area of Spain we have a slang word for English and German tourists. It translates as "sandals with socks".
Ah, apparently that taboo is international. It bugs me. What's wrong with wearing sandals with socks, anyway? Socks are warmer than no socks and sandals are more comfortable and easier to put on than (some) shoes. It's informal, sure, but sandals are informal whether you have socks under them or not. Why do some people treat wearing sandals with socks as a really horrible fashion mistake?
Everybody point and laugh at Cyrus.
Socks (other than fashiony socks meant to be worn with skirts) are pretty close to being underwear. Not exactly, but conventional dress doesn't make them very visible, and they're usually designed for utility rather than esthetics. So dressing to show them looks weird in a not exactly taboo in any interesting sense, but there's something related going on kind of way.
Honestly, sandals and socks don't look particularly weird to me, but fashion rules are mostly lost on me (fwiw, I don't own any sandals). I don't much notice other people's clothes for good or for ill unless they're wearing something very bright or busy.
270 - like the pants-falling-down fashion that Obama criticized.
I sympathize, Cyrus. It's unfortunate when something practical and comfortable is stigmatized for no good reason. Like wearing a hat to dinner, for example.
269: Well hey, it's not like I'm not used to it... (I don't think I've worn socks under sandals since college. Not that it matters, but just FTR.)
272: Actually, I don't have a problem with the no-hat-to-dinner thing, because at least there are reasons for that, like making it easier to see the faces of people you're talking to and a show of respect in some cultures and general tradition, and there's no reason not to do it as far as I know, except for all the cultural traditions where hats are expected of people.
231: Thanks ttaM! That's tremendously helpful.
161: This guy is my great-great-great-grandfather. Nobody in that line of descent has lived their whole lives inside the US since.
On Mom's side, they're a bunch of slackers; didn't leave the country until some time in the early 20th century.
People who live their whole lives in one country are weird and foreign and I don't understand their folkways.
PS - hey look, I'm mentioned in wikipedia (under fifth generation. They missed that I was a missionary, tho.)!
re: 275
They look like cheap copies of the one true guitar:
http://vintageguitar.co.uk/sb1/gbu0-prodshow/Southwell.html
Somewhat more expensive, though.
This thread is hitting a bunch of almost forgotten feelings of irritation about Americans and their weird attitudes about foreign travel. First of all, it doesn't take that much money to travel to Europe. I'm not saying you can do it if you're broke, given the airfare, but once you're there it can be dirt cheap. Invest in a tent and a sleeping bag, eat breakfast and lunch from the grocery store, make half your meals on a camping stove. And it can be done that way with kids - my parents did and judging from the many campgrounds I've seen around Europe, plenty of Europeans still do. Secondly, if you have family and/or friends in Europe why not go there - given the number of people here who flew to DC for meetups it's strange they'd see it as some sort of upper class luxury. Finally, if you're living in Europe, things are close. If you have any desire to see things, you will. As long as you don't have a family, it's easy to live there - teach English, will travel.
I think it's more that having enough time off from work to travel in Europe is the mark of an upper-class fop.
When I was taking French courses in Strasbourg
Hey, that's where I did my semester abroad! When were you there?
Europe's pretty expensive if you don't want to camp or stay in hostels, though. I went with hostels mostly and enjoyed it, but doubt I'd go with hostels again. But when you do step outside the hostel/camping system, it becomes more difficult to do things like cook unless you're careful about finding a kitchen, which probably isn't as cheap as a room with a bathroom down the hall.
254: I hate to be a snitch, but I got it all from LB. I actually wrote something which vaguely assumed the Mead line, and LB was not amused.
As for Welsh women, I have referred an nineteenth century article to Dsquared reporting that 70% of Welsh women over the age of 16 have no sense of female virtue. I imagine it was about the same in 1920, and now. It was an issue in Parliament: the famous "Slutty Welshwomen Debate". Stevie Nicks is a characteristic Welshwoman that some of you may be familiar with.
I now realize that this is a dead thread, but the thing about deadpan joking in Samoa sounds exactly like the Micronesian people I knew.
And one thing I thing is pretty much true is that there's a lot of violence of various kinds, senseless, sensible, and otherwise. Fighting was considered a normal activity and often an obligation.
