Cultural Differences In Europe

 In Paris along the Seine

The traveling I have done in the past, if you eliminate the seventies, has taken place in what is commonly referred to as the Third World. There, of course, there are a myriad of cultural differences depending on the country and the culture. But I didn't expect to find much of that in Europe where Deborah and I were the downscale peons descending from the much derided and lauded USA.

But things are done differently over there in subtle ways. One that came totally out of left-field and was explained to me by a gay male couple we were staying with in Belgium was that people don't commonly use wash cloths for their faces there. They thought my request for one was quite exotic. This seemed bizarre to me because I had bad acne as a young person and my washcloth was a bathroom staple. "How do women take off their make-up?" I inquired. They just...and Paul pantomimed sprinkling water on his face with his hands. I did notice that tissue boxes were often next to the sinks as well.

Asking for tap water at restaurants can be a dicey proposition, even without a drought. In France they will do it if you ask for "l'eau du robinet" water from the faucet. It will never have ice though. Ice is reserved for mixed drinks only. In Belgium they will run you out of the country if you ask for free water with a meal, but the Belgians will run you out of the country for a lot of things. A coffee-shop owner in Bruges was not going to let me sit with Deborah while she drank her espresso without ordering something. I refused and told him he was being unrealistic. He became furious but did not call the police. I had the whole scenario in my head, "Tourist arrested for refusing to order drink." I told him I was just going to sit with my wife while she drank her coffee. He stormed out of his own shop when I suggested he lighten up.

Beer and wine tended to be cheaper and more readily available than water, even in libraries. By ten in the morning folks were politely swilling beer in cafes, especially in Amsterdam. Never ask to be directed to a "Coffee Shop" unless you want to smoke marijuana. Cafes serve coffee, coffee shops are smoke to get high joints. When our host, Indra complained that some travelers make her apartment smell like a coffee shop, I thought dark roast, yum! But that's not the smell she was referring to.

A true sore point for me in Europe has to do with the fact that I can't go for more than about an hour and a half, two hours max, without emptying my bladder. When we visited museums or historic sites, this was not an issue, but for exploring neighborhoods it was. Public bathrooms were only in cafes and many cafes would only let you use them if you bought something. Buying a drink is counter-intuitive if your goal is to pee less! Belgians were fanatics about this, the French might give in but the Dutch were the least rigid if you gave them a good reason. Department stores or clothing stores did not have bathrooms. It makes me wonder about the capitalist history of making the shopper comfortable which must have been an evolutionary part of US culture. One store that did have a restroom charged .50 euros to use it (about 60 to 75 cents, depending on the exchange rate, but you had to have exact change).

All in all, I did have a great time running around France Belgium and the Netherlands. But now that I've returned, I do have a renewed appreciation for the land of the free, bathrooms and water that is.

The Zen of Travel

Hmong girls in Sapa

Traveling is one of those activities most people either love or hate. I don’t mean the kind of travel where you become part of a group of tourists running through the ruins. I’m referring to backpack-type exploration in which you have no set itinerary, just an idea of what you’d like to see and where you might go. The rest is left to fate.

My partner and I travel this way in various third-world countries during her summer vacation from teaching. We have assiduously avoided the first world partly because it tends to be less interesting but mostly because it’s incredibly expensive.

All those years I spent as cubicle fodder, a dedicated wage slave, I thought that travel was a waste of money. Except for a few souvenirs, you wound up with nothing concrete to show for it. But when I was forty, I was diagnosed with cancer and didn’t know whether or not my story was ending. I recovered completely. But when my destiny was uncertain, I made myself two promises. One was to write and try to get my work published.The second was to see the world.  

Travel is a Buddhist experience. Even a somewhat-lapsed Buddhist like me is aware of this. When you descend on a place you’ve never seen before you are completely in the present moment. You arrive knowing not a soul and with no idea of what you will eat or where you will sleep. Chances are you only possess a sketchy idea of the meaning and depth of the culture. You are at the mercy of experience, the full range of potential occurrences.

These are sometimes wonderful beyond belief like dining with an extended Hmong family in Sapa Vietnam, having tea and cookies with Turkish women lace-makers inside their volcanic ash cave home in Cappadocia, going to an earth goddess Pachamama ceremony on a remote Peruvian hillside or simply drinking a mango smoothie in the night market in Chiang-Mai Thailand as dancing girls take the stage.

The experiences sometimes can be not-so-pleasant: like running out of water on a bus on the Raya Pass in Peru at 15,000 feet above sea level because the road running into Cuzco had been blockaded by strikers. Or being detained for six hours and eventually extorted for about 120 dollars each because of a “visa re-entry” problem in Vietnam.

Yes, anything can happen when you venture out into the world. The people you meet will be wonderful or awful just like those at home. But only they can show you how to turn the crystal in a new direction allowing you to see life in a way you could never have previously imagined. The value of that cannot be measured.

Una Gringa en Mexico

Statue in Guanajuato

There is no substitute for travel. It is a way to feel part of a world so much greater than yourself that opens up a vast array of cultural norm and shines a light on the things we take for granted and fact that these assumptions are not universal in nature.

Although many of their lives are harder, people tend to be much kinder in Mexico. They will readily help friends and family and go out of their way for foreigners. Folks put up with our grammatically flawed Spanish, answered our stupid questions and walked us to places we couldn’t find.  There is a warmth, a generosity of spirit, that is totally unlike anything I’ve experienced in the USA.

This is a laissez-faire capitalist country and hard-working people sell everything from folk art to food to bathroom use, which comprises a national industry. Imagine a job in the US where individuals spend their days giving out toilet paper and cleaning toilets that individuals may use for a fee of 3 to 5 pesos a shot (about 15 to 30 cents). The poverty in Mexico is astounding but so is the growth of a rising middle class.

When it comes to ethnicity, there is an obvious caste system. The darker skinned, indigenous people predominate in the service industry as maids, shop employees, lower level restaurant workers. Yet being an individual entrepreneur is pretty much unregulated. Folks can set up a artisan booth, a taco stand or a public bathroom without government intervention or guidelines.

Mexico is a place where you are on your own in many ways. Real estate taxes, even on mansions tend to run about 30 to 50 dollars a year. Due to lack of genuine police protection, the cops don't get paid much and there is widespread bribery and corruption. The rich and middle class create their own gated communities and hire private security. It is a libertarian dream state. It is left to the individuals to protect themselves and their property because, to quote Bob Dylan, “the cops don’t need you and man they expect the same.”

Deborah and I met up with a relative of a friend who had been living in San Miguel for over ten years. She had increased the height of a wall between her place and her neighbor’s because the adolescent males next door kept trying to break into her place. She said they were bored rich Mexican kids who just wanted a challenge. She also believed that the police had earmarked her as the problem because the family was wealthy and influential. And, in spite of the fact that she is of Mexican-American descent and speaks Spanish, she is considered a perpetual outsider.

That is the dark side of family bonding; the relative ostracism of the expatriate community which, in turn, tends to stick together like any minority group. To American eyes, there is an appalling lack of public safety regulations. Children ride in open backed trucks.  Everything you eat is at your own risk. The potholes in the street are treacherous and there is no such thing as a lawsuit for tripping and falling anywhere, even on government property. I can’t begin to imagine what disabled people must endure. Fireworks punctuate the night like gunshots and dogs run wild.

I have finally come to terms with the fact that I could never live in Mexico. As a long-limbed, big-footed, somewhat sexually-indeterminate, pink-skinned creature, I stood out in every crowd. I longed for the anonymity of blending and the luxury of simply seeing others on the streets who looked like me. I am very happy to be back home but also grateful for the cultural experience of Mexico our close, yet very different, neighbor to the south.

Travel as Buddhist Practice

Ajijic Seen From Lake Chapala

I'm in the process of packing for 3 weeks of travel in Mexico with Deborah. Since I'm putting everything in a backpack that I have to carry, my decision are made almost exclusively by weight. It's a challenging prospect due to the fact that we will be at in a range of climates from 7,000 feet above sea (sunny and comfortably temperate) to absolute sea level which, in July, will be steaming. I'm taking lots of soap so I can wash and rewash the clothes that I'll be sick to death of by the end of the trip. 

Packing is one of the hardest things about travel. Once we leave, we will have next to nothing and will, judging by our past performance, get used to it. It will be as though we never had any other life but the one of motion. Travel is one of the few genuinely Buddhist experiences. You are in the moment because there is nowhere else to be. Taking in the world and meeting basic needs of food and shelter are the goals that take up all the available space. It is a freeing feeling.

When I was young, following the death of my mother in 1973, I took the money from her life insurance, a friend and we went to Europe to bum around indefinitely. Our venture, meant to last at least a year, ended in eight months, not because we ran out of money (hostels and train travel were dirt cheap then) but because, even at 23, we ran out of stamina and patience with nomadic life. In the long run, there is an isolating quality to observing other's lives from the outside.

But, in the short run, I am really looking forward to a few weeks of suspended reality. Especially because, as a newly retired person, I haven't yet defined the parameters of what that day to day reality will actually look like.