About seven years ago, I was walking out of a Mass with a gaggle of religious sisters who would regularly attend the same daily Mass I did. I had my oldest daughter with me, who at the time was about 3 months old. My husband and I were in the midst of a move out of the city we'd called home for several years to a more rural area, closer to family. I was heartsick over the move and missing my husband who had moved a few months earlier than my daughter and me to start a job and find a house. These sisters were not strangers, we had worshipped together for a few months and I knew some of them by name, but I did not know them well. But that particular morning when one of them asked the usual, polite "how are you doing" question, I broke down crying. The sister immediately put her arm around me and walked me to their convent a few blocks away. Once there, they gave me a cup of coffee, listened to my little story of woe then played with my baby while I took a nap in a guest room. I remember it at one of the most loving mornings I've experienced.
My husband and I decided to spend our honeymoon wandering around San Francisco and seeing where the day took us. At one point we stumbled onto a little hole-in-the-wall Hungarian restaurant, and having never had Hungarian food, were eager to give it a try. We were a bit early for dinner, so there was no one else in the place except a bunch of old Hungarian men drinking at the bar.
While we were waiting for our food, one of the men bought a round of drinks for the house to celebrate his granddaughter’s engagement. Though we weren’t in their party, the waiter put two shot glasses of some dark amber-colored liquor I didn’t catch the name of in front of us and told us it was good luck for his granddaughter if we drank with them. My husband doesn’t drink, but I took a sip and found that the liquor was powerful, spicy, and just a little bit sweet. Not wanting to insult our benefactor, I finished mine off and then switched glasses with my husband and started into his.
The man who bought the drinks came over to our table to see if we liked them, and made a comment about how “my” glass was still partly full, which he attributed to the liquor being “too strong for the ladies.” My husband told him it was actually because I’d already drunk mine and half of his, and this delighted the man, who called back to his friends that “This American girl likes [liquor]!”
All the men thought this was hilarious and wanted to see for themselves, so somebody bought me another round so they could watch me drink it, which I did. They then asked us what brought us there, and when they found out we were on our honeymoon they decided I needed a good-luck round for my marriage too. Wanting to be polite, I bought them a round in return, and my memory gets a little fuzzy after that.
By the time all was said and done, everyone except my husband and the waiter was thoroughly drunk and having a very good time, and I’m told I learned to sing the Hungarian national anthem.
I'm in the Society for Creative Anachronism (sca.org, if you're curious, I could go on at length about it but for the moment all you need to know is that we're a living-history society with a wonderful internal culture of hospitality). A few years ago, I drove across about a state and a half, with a friend of mine, to go to one of our events. The plan was for us to do the driving Friday, sleep Friday night, and be rested enough to enjoy things on Saturday. However, I get lost ridiculously easily, so. . .
Things were going fine until we crossed out of our own state, when we proceeded to get thoroughly lost. It was November and already dark, and snow was blowing across the road, and as we bumped around rural roads our prospects were increasingly grim.
We asked for directions at gas stations twice (stranger count: 1 and 2), but by eight o’clock found ourselves in a place too rural even for those, and we began to consider asking at houses. The first time (3) we made sure the farmstead looked respectable, and the woman there was kind, but her directions failed us. We stopped at another house which had a light on, but no one answered our knocking. The third time we were desperate, and stopped at a house whose number was similar to the address we were looking for. (4)
“Do you know where this house is?” we asked the woman who came to the door, giving the number, and explained we were supposed to spend the night there.
“What’s the name?” she asked.
For the first time we realized that I did not know either the SCA or modern legal names of our hosts. It had not previously occurred to me to worry about this.
“I don’t know,” I said lamely.
(She got /very/ suspicious and we decided to go back to the road.)
We started making phonecalls to members of our families, and finally got someone who both answered and had a map handy, and found out that the road we were supposed to be on had gone out of existence, and got us on a similar road leading the right direction-ish. Eventually we came into a small town, which was as far as our newest set of directions could get us.
The only open places on Main Street were the two bars, but the Post Office's entryway was unlocked and had a light on. We decided to eat our supper in there, where we could be warm without wasting gas, and have another round of calling people. (I'm counting this as 5, because someone we'll probably never know had to have decided to leave the outer door unlocked and the light on.)
This round of phonecalls resulted in us getting the phone number of our host. (6) We called it and learned that we were just two blocks away from site, where they were still setting up. “The road,” he said, “literally dead-ends into the community center parking lot. Think you can find us?” We thought we might.
After having wandered for an hour and a half in the dark, with blowing snow, it was actually that easy. Five minutes later we stumbled inside with our half-eaten sandwiches and muffins and had barely gotten down the stairs when a woman sitting in front of the kitchen (7) said, “So glad you’re here! Have you eaten yet? There’s soup and bread and brownies right there.”
I understand you were probably not driving in your SCA garb, but I can't help but picture you arriving at house number 4 fully kitted out while explaining you don't know the name of the person you're seeking.
Since we were arriving the night before, this was the /one/ time I wasn't already dressed! I have gone into gas stations on my way home from events, in garb, and just before the event that was the goal of all this wandering, some of us made a quick grocery store trip, four people wearing three different periods.
When I was in college I spent a semester abroad and during that time had many moments of vulnerability when I found myself depending on the kindness of strangers. One of the ones that stands out the most was when I fell asleep on the last train of the day leaving Rome. I missed my stop and woke up in a panic just a minute too late. My Italian was far from fluent, but I managed to ask a lady on the train about my stop and she conveyed that we'd already passed it. I was in a panic because I knew there wouldn't be another train going back until morning and I wasn't sure about buses either. Then she offered that her husband was picking her up at the station and he could drive me back to campus. It was late at night and I'm sure they wanted to go home to bed, but they deposited me at my doorstep. I wished that I'd been able to chat with them, but we had so few words in common.
These are strange sorts of questions for me because in my experience, tamping down some of the "weird" (comparatively to other parts of the world) aspects of American culture has helped me establish better relationships with the people I'm engaging with abroad. For example, a lot of Europeans think the American (especially Midwest and Southern) way of broad smiling at strangers and saying "Hi, how are you?" is really, really weird. If you attempted this on the streets of Sarajevo, you would get looks of "wow, this person is insane."
Meanwhile, if I go to country (especially a non-Western one, such as, for instance, Nepal that I visited a few weeks ago) in a spirit of humility, to not expect that my cultural values and mannerisms are the "default", I'm much more likely to have more positive engagements. As a former professor (himself British) once told my class, the standing instruction on being a student or tourist in a foreign country is to blend in, not stand out, and that requires a level of humility and graciousness that many Americans haven't learned to (or, worse, won't) adopt. Personally, I think "blending in" is especially important if you come from a culture with a history of colonialization and "power."
Common attitudes of being aggressively American and not seeking to learn is why a waiter at a cafe in Zagreb once rolled his eyes when he saw our table and also why his respect instantly and visibly rose when we ordered in perfect Croatian. He could tell we were American and he was prepared for trouble (because of past experiences), but he relaxed when he heard that we knew exactly what to do/how to be.
I think you are definitely describing an important part of being a respectful guest. And Clare talks about this too, a little bit above the part where I pulled my quote:
"To travel is to momentarily cut a tiny tear in this web, to get outside of life and look in. It is an illuminating pleasure and a privilege. It is also an unstable position, possibly exploitative and always fraught with the potential for humiliation. It carries the risk of committing some barbarous solecism through lack of understanding or inability to adapt, of being suddenly bereft of the status you enjoy at home, of finding yourself without the material or mental resources to cope with the exigencies of even leisure travel."
Even when you are making an effort, you have a good chance of making a big mistake, and you are entrusting yourself to others, even if you happen to avoid error.
That's interesting, what you say about blending in being especially important if there's a history of colonization. I completely agree with you, but I also remember hearing someone suggest once that it's better to stand out as a tourist than "blend in" in the wrong ways.
Specifically, there's a lot of former French colonies in Africa that use both French and English as their business/tourism languages. I had a professor from France who talked about having traveled in that area as a young guy (probably would have been between the 1960s-1980s). Apparently he made a point of always speaking English there, because French had been the language introduced by the colonial power and he didn't want to look like a Frenchman high-handedly insisting on using the colonial language again. English had less baggage, in his opinion.
And my instinct, if I was there, would have been to use French because I too have always been told tourists should try to adapt to the place they're going and it's rude to assume everyone knows English. I don't know if it still holds since those countries have been independent for much longer by now, but that was a nuance that had never occurred to me.
(Also I'm impressed that you learned Croatian; that's certainly not a common one to learn!)
I can think of a time when I didn't exactly ask for help, but a stranger offered it anyway. I studied abroad in college, and after classes wrapped up I traveled a little bit with two other friends from home. We were trying to get to Saint Malo (in northern France), and a strike among the train workers threw our schedule completely off. We eventually made it to Saint Malo at about 6:30 pm (much later than we'd planned).
Our internal clocks were completely out of whack because we'd been traveling all day, plus it was the middle of summer so it was still broad daylight (the sun wouldn't go down until past 10:00). So when we arrived, we didn't immediately go looking for dinner; we checked into the hotel, walked along the beach, waded in the surf, etc. Finally it occurred to us that restaurants might actually be closing soon and we should go eat.
We were staying in the budget area of Saint Malo, so there weren't a ton of options. We eventually found a small restaurant where there seemed to be only one lady running the kitchen. In retrospect I'm sure she was almost about to close when we showed up, but she took pity on us and let us order and stay there to eat even though it really was late (between 9 and 10 pm). If she hadn't had that kindness we might just have had to skip dinner.
And one smaller gesture of hospitality really meant a lot: we were talking to each other in both French and English and she must have heard that, but she did us the honor of only speaking to us in French (which is how we'd spoken to her), letting us use our language skills since that's what we wanted to do instead of automatically making it easy for us with English.
About seven years ago, I was walking out of a Mass with a gaggle of religious sisters who would regularly attend the same daily Mass I did. I had my oldest daughter with me, who at the time was about 3 months old. My husband and I were in the midst of a move out of the city we'd called home for several years to a more rural area, closer to family. I was heartsick over the move and missing my husband who had moved a few months earlier than my daughter and me to start a job and find a house. These sisters were not strangers, we had worshipped together for a few months and I knew some of them by name, but I did not know them well. But that particular morning when one of them asked the usual, polite "how are you doing" question, I broke down crying. The sister immediately put her arm around me and walked me to their convent a few blocks away. Once there, they gave me a cup of coffee, listened to my little story of woe then played with my baby while I took a nap in a guest room. I remember it at one of the most loving mornings I've experienced.
<3 A nap is such a needful thing but a need it takes a lot of trust to ask someone to meet!
My husband and I decided to spend our honeymoon wandering around San Francisco and seeing where the day took us. At one point we stumbled onto a little hole-in-the-wall Hungarian restaurant, and having never had Hungarian food, were eager to give it a try. We were a bit early for dinner, so there was no one else in the place except a bunch of old Hungarian men drinking at the bar.
While we were waiting for our food, one of the men bought a round of drinks for the house to celebrate his granddaughter’s engagement. Though we weren’t in their party, the waiter put two shot glasses of some dark amber-colored liquor I didn’t catch the name of in front of us and told us it was good luck for his granddaughter if we drank with them. My husband doesn’t drink, but I took a sip and found that the liquor was powerful, spicy, and just a little bit sweet. Not wanting to insult our benefactor, I finished mine off and then switched glasses with my husband and started into his.
The man who bought the drinks came over to our table to see if we liked them, and made a comment about how “my” glass was still partly full, which he attributed to the liquor being “too strong for the ladies.” My husband told him it was actually because I’d already drunk mine and half of his, and this delighted the man, who called back to his friends that “This American girl likes [liquor]!”
All the men thought this was hilarious and wanted to see for themselves, so somebody bought me another round so they could watch me drink it, which I did. They then asked us what brought us there, and when they found out we were on our honeymoon they decided I needed a good-luck round for my marriage too. Wanting to be polite, I bought them a round in return, and my memory gets a little fuzzy after that.
By the time all was said and done, everyone except my husband and the waiter was thoroughly drunk and having a very good time, and I’m told I learned to sing the Hungarian national anthem.
I have a fun story about this :).
I'm in the Society for Creative Anachronism (sca.org, if you're curious, I could go on at length about it but for the moment all you need to know is that we're a living-history society with a wonderful internal culture of hospitality). A few years ago, I drove across about a state and a half, with a friend of mine, to go to one of our events. The plan was for us to do the driving Friday, sleep Friday night, and be rested enough to enjoy things on Saturday. However, I get lost ridiculously easily, so. . .
Things were going fine until we crossed out of our own state, when we proceeded to get thoroughly lost. It was November and already dark, and snow was blowing across the road, and as we bumped around rural roads our prospects were increasingly grim.
We asked for directions at gas stations twice (stranger count: 1 and 2), but by eight o’clock found ourselves in a place too rural even for those, and we began to consider asking at houses. The first time (3) we made sure the farmstead looked respectable, and the woman there was kind, but her directions failed us. We stopped at another house which had a light on, but no one answered our knocking. The third time we were desperate, and stopped at a house whose number was similar to the address we were looking for. (4)
“Do you know where this house is?” we asked the woman who came to the door, giving the number, and explained we were supposed to spend the night there.
“What’s the name?” she asked.
For the first time we realized that I did not know either the SCA or modern legal names of our hosts. It had not previously occurred to me to worry about this.
“I don’t know,” I said lamely.
(She got /very/ suspicious and we decided to go back to the road.)
We started making phonecalls to members of our families, and finally got someone who both answered and had a map handy, and found out that the road we were supposed to be on had gone out of existence, and got us on a similar road leading the right direction-ish. Eventually we came into a small town, which was as far as our newest set of directions could get us.
The only open places on Main Street were the two bars, but the Post Office's entryway was unlocked and had a light on. We decided to eat our supper in there, where we could be warm without wasting gas, and have another round of calling people. (I'm counting this as 5, because someone we'll probably never know had to have decided to leave the outer door unlocked and the light on.)
This round of phonecalls resulted in us getting the phone number of our host. (6) We called it and learned that we were just two blocks away from site, where they were still setting up. “The road,” he said, “literally dead-ends into the community center parking lot. Think you can find us?” We thought we might.
After having wandered for an hour and a half in the dark, with blowing snow, it was actually that easy. Five minutes later we stumbled inside with our half-eaten sandwiches and muffins and had barely gotten down the stairs when a woman sitting in front of the kitchen (7) said, “So glad you’re here! Have you eaten yet? There’s soup and bread and brownies right there.”
I understand you were probably not driving in your SCA garb, but I can't help but picture you arriving at house number 4 fully kitted out while explaining you don't know the name of the person you're seeking.
Since we were arriving the night before, this was the /one/ time I wasn't already dressed! I have gone into gas stations on my way home from events, in garb, and just before the event that was the goal of all this wandering, some of us made a quick grocery store trip, four people wearing three different periods.
When I was in college I spent a semester abroad and during that time had many moments of vulnerability when I found myself depending on the kindness of strangers. One of the ones that stands out the most was when I fell asleep on the last train of the day leaving Rome. I missed my stop and woke up in a panic just a minute too late. My Italian was far from fluent, but I managed to ask a lady on the train about my stop and she conveyed that we'd already passed it. I was in a panic because I knew there wouldn't be another train going back until morning and I wasn't sure about buses either. Then she offered that her husband was picking her up at the station and he could drive me back to campus. It was late at night and I'm sure they wanted to go home to bed, but they deposited me at my doorstep. I wished that I'd been able to chat with them, but we had so few words in common.
These are strange sorts of questions for me because in my experience, tamping down some of the "weird" (comparatively to other parts of the world) aspects of American culture has helped me establish better relationships with the people I'm engaging with abroad. For example, a lot of Europeans think the American (especially Midwest and Southern) way of broad smiling at strangers and saying "Hi, how are you?" is really, really weird. If you attempted this on the streets of Sarajevo, you would get looks of "wow, this person is insane."
Meanwhile, if I go to country (especially a non-Western one, such as, for instance, Nepal that I visited a few weeks ago) in a spirit of humility, to not expect that my cultural values and mannerisms are the "default", I'm much more likely to have more positive engagements. As a former professor (himself British) once told my class, the standing instruction on being a student or tourist in a foreign country is to blend in, not stand out, and that requires a level of humility and graciousness that many Americans haven't learned to (or, worse, won't) adopt. Personally, I think "blending in" is especially important if you come from a culture with a history of colonialization and "power."
Common attitudes of being aggressively American and not seeking to learn is why a waiter at a cafe in Zagreb once rolled his eyes when he saw our table and also why his respect instantly and visibly rose when we ordered in perfect Croatian. He could tell we were American and he was prepared for trouble (because of past experiences), but he relaxed when he heard that we knew exactly what to do/how to be.
I think you are definitely describing an important part of being a respectful guest. And Clare talks about this too, a little bit above the part where I pulled my quote:
"To travel is to momentarily cut a tiny tear in this web, to get outside of life and look in. It is an illuminating pleasure and a privilege. It is also an unstable position, possibly exploitative and always fraught with the potential for humiliation. It carries the risk of committing some barbarous solecism through lack of understanding or inability to adapt, of being suddenly bereft of the status you enjoy at home, of finding yourself without the material or mental resources to cope with the exigencies of even leisure travel."
Even when you are making an effort, you have a good chance of making a big mistake, and you are entrusting yourself to others, even if you happen to avoid error.
That's interesting, what you say about blending in being especially important if there's a history of colonization. I completely agree with you, but I also remember hearing someone suggest once that it's better to stand out as a tourist than "blend in" in the wrong ways.
Specifically, there's a lot of former French colonies in Africa that use both French and English as their business/tourism languages. I had a professor from France who talked about having traveled in that area as a young guy (probably would have been between the 1960s-1980s). Apparently he made a point of always speaking English there, because French had been the language introduced by the colonial power and he didn't want to look like a Frenchman high-handedly insisting on using the colonial language again. English had less baggage, in his opinion.
And my instinct, if I was there, would have been to use French because I too have always been told tourists should try to adapt to the place they're going and it's rude to assume everyone knows English. I don't know if it still holds since those countries have been independent for much longer by now, but that was a nuance that had never occurred to me.
(Also I'm impressed that you learned Croatian; that's certainly not a common one to learn!)
I can think of a time when I didn't exactly ask for help, but a stranger offered it anyway. I studied abroad in college, and after classes wrapped up I traveled a little bit with two other friends from home. We were trying to get to Saint Malo (in northern France), and a strike among the train workers threw our schedule completely off. We eventually made it to Saint Malo at about 6:30 pm (much later than we'd planned).
Our internal clocks were completely out of whack because we'd been traveling all day, plus it was the middle of summer so it was still broad daylight (the sun wouldn't go down until past 10:00). So when we arrived, we didn't immediately go looking for dinner; we checked into the hotel, walked along the beach, waded in the surf, etc. Finally it occurred to us that restaurants might actually be closing soon and we should go eat.
We were staying in the budget area of Saint Malo, so there weren't a ton of options. We eventually found a small restaurant where there seemed to be only one lady running the kitchen. In retrospect I'm sure she was almost about to close when we showed up, but she took pity on us and let us order and stay there to eat even though it really was late (between 9 and 10 pm). If she hadn't had that kindness we might just have had to skip dinner.
And one smaller gesture of hospitality really meant a lot: we were talking to each other in both French and English and she must have heard that, but she did us the honor of only speaking to us in French (which is how we'd spoken to her), letting us use our language skills since that's what we wanted to do instead of automatically making it easy for us with English.