I’m always one up for firsts, and I suppose that this Friday can be one of many for me. Writer Maria Rainier approached me the week before I left for London Fashion Week (which I will be talking about in coming post on both my fashion blog and this one) with the idea of writing a guest post. It is unusual for me to have guest posts, but I figured that I might as well give it a try. Below you’ll find the insightful entry written on culture and travel by Maria.
Bio: Maria Rainier is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education where she writes about education, online colleges, and the future of online degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.
The Culture Box
“Perception is shaped by the culture box we inhabit.” – Dr. Cornelius Bushoven III, from Mahabalipuram, India in 1986
I picked up a copy of Traveling Notes by this obscure Professor Bushoven after I returned from my first trip to Viet Nam, feeling like many things but probably first and foremost exhausted.
I’d spent my two weeks in Viet Nam battling heat, mosquitoes, and the urge to pay all the beggars, but mostly myself.
Culture Box
“What is cleanliness?” Bushoven wonders in Traveling Notes.
I grew up in suburban Japan. Our city streets are immaculate and we take particular pride in organization, purity, and pretense. There, daily baths are a must and have been long before the likes of Matthew Perry came along with their so-called civilization. I mean, Greece was a culture shock to me. (“Wait, what do you mean you don’t flush down the toilet paper?”)
Two weeks before I’d set hands on Bushoven’s books, I’d walked wide-eyed through Hanoi, Danang, Hoi An, Ho Chi Minh City, and more. The streets of Hanoi had been one more of puddles than asphalt, and of what I could only guess. People of all ages sat in pools of the stuff, picking at their nails and selling their kitsh.
Upon returning to the hotel, I’d nearly broken down in tears, hating myself for the utter disgust I had felt at the sight of it all. I hated the place. I hated the grime-covered windows of stores. I hated that children and pregnant women were sitting on the streets. It was pity I felt mostly, but there was disgust there, too. I felt, to my everlasting shame, culturally superior.
I’m a college-educated, liberal, multi-cultural writer, I screamed at myself. How can I be so shallow, so wicked?
Culture Twist
From Bombay, India in 1973, Bushoven wrote, “We use repeatedly the same fork, knife, plate after ‘washing’ it. Is it not more sanitary to eat with your own hands off leaves; hands you have washed yourself? Hands you know where they have been?”
Bushoven has traveled. As he puts it, he’s put his foot into the Nile, the Arno, the Potomac, the Thames, the Tiber, the Hudson, the Jordan, the Volta, the Mississippi and Missouri, the Niger, the Colorado, and the Ganges. He has been to India more times than I can count, and every summer he takes a group of college students through India and the Himalayas. He is in better physical shape than most of them.
“And the reduction of expense and waste? Which is better: to squat over a hole and clean-up afterwards with water or to sit on a seat others have used then clean-up with paper? We consider ourselves sanitary and others dirty. Others see us as dirty and defiling. What about the indoor toilet; excrement within the house itself?”
Traveler
I wrote Bushoven and thanked him for his insight. He was kind enough to write me back. From some angles, he looks like Ezra Pound.
When I travel now, I do so as a guest rather than a tourist. Guests don’t enter someone’s home and wrinkle their noses at how different it is from their own.
Well, they shouldn’t.
