My Cultural Shocks
I have traveled and lived in quite a few places and endured numerous cultural shocks. Looking back, I understand better why we humans from different places do not always understand each other and get annoyed with each others behavior. Living and traveling in other countries offers you a different perspective on life and is certainly enriching, but it is not always easy to absorb. Below follows an abridged list of my cultural shocks, but it is by no means exhaustive.
If you have your own list, please let me know, and I will publish them! It’s fun to know how we look at each other.
THE “WEST” AND SORT OF WEST
- USA: Americans think only they are sane. The rest of the world thinks they are insane. Depending on which side of the Ocean, the rest is right.And everything looks and tastes the same and their girls are xenophobic.
- Russia: Taking a bath is against the rules, unless you do it in vodka.
- Holland: Bikers don’t look right or left and run you over yelling YOU are stupid. Plus ample dog poop and the only place where I got robbed three times over the years by the same people. Guess once. Starts with an “M”, Holland’s most popular ethnic invaders.
- Belgium: Toilet paper cut from old newspapers and no sinks to wash your hands. Language either Flemish or Walloon, either way unintelligible. French fries, mussels and beer for breakfast (or “rouge”, red wine). Lots of smokers.
- France: Toilets with black holes, no seats and pissed-over footsteps and no sinks to wash your hands. Plus subway stink is the world’s worst. And heaps of dog and pigeon poop. Food is way too expensive and waiters are rude. And French love is a myth. Americans in Paris made that up because they don’t know what love is either, only in the movies. But I made some very good friends.
- Spain: Males can’t leave a girl alone. Females are locked up 24/7. And I can’t sing serenades in Spanish.
- Portugal: As many windmills as in Holland. They look spooky. Don Quixote traveled to Portugal to fight them.
- Italy: Males can’t leave a girl alone. But females eat too much pasta. And there’s too much pigeon poop, too.
- Germany: One menu only: bier, wurst und sauerkraut. And too much hoompa poompa.
- England: no menu at all, only rain, and after joining the EU they still drive on the wrong side of the road.
- Ireland: All Irish gone to New York to join the Democratic Party. Only Poles and Romanian pick pockets left.
- Scotland: Rain, cold weather, smoking chimneys and nobody speaks English.
- Switzerland: Swiss French unintelligible; Swiss German unintelligible, Swiss Italian, well, who knows; I don’t speak Italian. Traffic priority signs for frogs, cows and turtles. Puts holes in its cheese to attract Americans. Raclette sits in your stomach for two weeks and cheese fondue a bit longer causing an outbreak of fumes not liked by others, especially not your co-worker.
AFRICA
- Rwanda: Twice destroyed in thirty years with old colonial help.
- Burundi: Twice destroyed in twenty years with old colonial help.
- Central African Republic: snakes in and/or under your bed, wasps in your toilet, and pygmies running between your legs.
- Cameroon: The food looks great but you can’t eat it.
- Congo-Kinshasa: Everybody cheats.
- Congo-Brazaville: Nobody cheats. It’s forbidden by the law.
- South-Africa: Visit a shopping mall to get shot at and run for your life.
- Tanzania: Dar es Salaam has too many SUVs and nobody knows how they were paid for.
- Kenya: Wildlife is for tourists and the airport road is to kill them.
- Ethiopia: The table cloth is edible but you wouldn’t think that when you go to bed.
- Mali: That’s where Timbuktu is and when I got there I finally understood why.
- Guinea: Why for heaven’s sake did the colonialists put that country on the map?
- Ivory Coast: Must be called Côte d’Ivoire to show it was once French and because of that it has been good at destroying all it had been given.
- Ghana: The only place in Africa on the West Coast that seems to work because it has a direct KLM flight from Amsterdam.
- Nigeria: The one place in Africa that should work but doesn’t. Night flight out to safety.
ASIA
- Bangladesh: Delicacy: cockroached curry. Eating with your fingers; spit reservoirs in every corner of every corridor; toilets are bastions of urine, providing the main perfume in office buildings; and getting the Dhaka run if you don’t survive it (most of the time).
- India: more of the same, but a little bit more sophisticated. And heavenly Kashmir should be declared neutral territory for everyone to enjoy, not just Islamists, not just Hindus, not just Pakistanis, or whatever. Just let it be.
- Malaysia: A mushroom garden with millions of multicolored edible mushrooms and a McDonald’s in Kuala Lumpur. What a place to live.
- Singapore: The country that everyone wants to ape but only Singaporeans know how to run.
- Taiwan: The only place where China is not China but everyone speaks Chinese, and a tree you can slide through to become rich if you don’t fear getting stuck in the middle.
- Philippines: Manila TV is like American TV – just as awful. Only in the countryside you find its beauty, but you may get struck by a typhoon.
- Indonesia and Bali: Djakarta is like Lagos, but outside the city Java is a jewel. And on Bali they serve the best suckling pig on earth. Driving off the main roads you see the real Indonesia and its terraced rice fields. Heaven on earth. But paying the hotel bills was like hell.
- Hong Kong: British geniality mixed with Chinese Confucianism. Foremost a good cuisine, especially on the street, but everyone wonders how long the good will last.
- China: More bikers than in Holland, and I never had real Chinese food before, not even in Amsterdam or NY China Town.
- Macao: Beware! Bought my wife a sapphire ring that turned out a piece of colored glass.
- Japan: Plastic food in the window is for show but not for eating. You must bow when meeting people in the elevator. And even a GPS can’t find where you’re going
- Hawaii: advertised as little Asia but no, it’s pure America. So good to be back, or is it?
MIDDLE-EAST
- Saudi-Arabia: The place where beautiful women are kept in hiding and your head gets cut off for saying something about it.
- Lebanon: A Falafel tastes as good as a bomb.
- Jordan: An oasis in the desert and the only place in the Middle-East where I could ride a horse, have dinner in the open with a lovely woman, and feel at home.
CARIBBEAN/SOUTH AMERICA
- Guyana: Loud. Loud dogs, loud crickets, loud vehicles, loud music, loud people but great curry and the best rum in the world. Drives on the wrong side of the road because the British stole Guyana from the Dutch in the 100 year European wars and when it changed hands from England to Holland, the Dutch Governor did not know what left or right was because he drank too much rum. Since Independence everybody drives in the middle of the road, so I stay inside or take a cab. Beautiful and savvy women, always showing a pleasant smile; and everything stays the same.
- Surinam: Awfully isolated but Surinamers don’t mind. Fluent Dutch speaking Guyana (the only country outside Holland – apart from Flemish Belgium – that does): the greatest shock was that they are not Dutch at all, actually quite the opposite, and although pretty, women bite.
- Aruba: Nice but too much beach.
- Curacao: The place to live but too expensive to retire.
- Bonaire: For scuba divers only and iguana lovers.
- Jamaica: The place where I lost my Millennials and my tendons tore when climbing back into my capsized sailing boat, leaving me burdened with Jamaicanitis.
EASTER HYMN
A last meal and blessing hand
Brings us peace in holy land
Make your neighbor a best friend
Hate has no place in holy land
My heart will fold as red as blood
Forgive I will my tears will flood
You were created to be good
An undivided brotherhood
Lavender blue will spread in spring
It’s peace of mind that it will bring
Don’t make hate your tool of life
End your endless words of strife
***
Shout that peace is good for all
Not just you in clustered walls
Tear them down your flags of hate
They are NOT an act of faith
Shaking hands across the line
Sharing meals of bread and wine
Showing trust in someone’s heart
Making one a world apart
[And keep that dagger just in case
The other earthling shows bad grace ]
The Million Dollar Seat
In our days of hustling and bustling we often forget the value of what we have. We constantly want things to change, even without realizing that when they do, we don’t like what changed and want to change what cannot be changed back again.
This reflection dawns on me each time when I look out on Lime Street from my million dollar seat. Lime Street in Georgetown Guyana has not changed since I saw it for the first time in April 1974. It is so refreshing that in 2014, forty long years later, it is still the same. Granted, I would never have sat on this seat had it not been for having fallen in love with the smashing beauty in the house, in a place far away from the million dollar seat, but she took me to the seat and since that happened, I don’t want to release it for a million dollars.
Each time over the many years when I sat down in my million dollar seat, it baffled me that the view remained the same. Oh yes, the green city buses disappeared and made room for multiple vans as a genial replacement of public transport, relieving the city budget from a bankrupt company where nobody paid the fares. More cars appeared in the street, from old Wolseleys, Morris, and Austins to Toyotas, Nissans, and scooters. Taxis a plenty. But the horse-drawn wagons are still there, the utility poles have not changed, the same grass grows along the street, and the same houses border the street, some done-up a bit, but otherwise mostly the same.
I have come to appreciate this view. As an economist, I always deal with “ceteris paribus”, the Latin phrase for “all other things held constant”, as a way of arguing that economic outcomes are expected to be “x” as long as the “variables” don’t change (they always do). The perfect reason why economics is not a science like physics: a stone falls straight and does not zig-zag (as my socialist opponents always purport).
Well, Lime Street in Georgetown Guyana is the perfect example of all other things being held constant. The same beauties come and go and never seem to age.
The same little food carts with their Calypsos blare over the street. The same loud vans with their oversized speakers drum by. The same stray dogs hop from grass poll to grass poll, cross the small street in utter disregard of oncoming traffic, somehow never getting hit. It’s a continuous flow of things that never changes in substance, only in color, number or size.
There are other million dollar seats.
I know a few, such as a terrace on a beach house in Goa in India where you can stare for an eternity at the Indian Ocean rolling in,
sitting on a balcony in the Jura watching the Mont Blanc across Lake Geneva, turning white to pink to blue, a seat under a parasol on a Bali beach where the sea stays forever blue
or a view of a swimming pool bordering the Dead Sea.
But Lime Street is different: it’s not nature, it’s in the middle of a town where hordes of colonialists, World Bank and IMF and other “developers” have come to preach the benefits of change. And it did not. Thank God.
It’s a relief to look at things that remain the same.
Above: Lime Street Early Morning
Middle: Lime Street at Siesta Hour
Below: Lime Street After a Rain Fall
It’s peace of mind. Leave the hustle and bustle to others and other places. Bring poetry into your life. Sit, watch what stays, let it flow and come back into place, while sipping from a glass of rum. Value what is and what you have.
Don’t change. Don’t change. Don’t change.
THE TWO ANNS
A New Short Story, Two in One
Arriving on the right is the second short story under SOME WOMEN I HAVE KNOWN, entitled “The Two Anns”. These were the first two lovely young ladies I fell in love with. Does anyone remember their first loves? Well, I do. Unforgettable. The telling cover design is by Melanie Stephens of Willow Manor Publishing, Virginia, USA. While for the black-skirted beauty Ann my new Raleigh from England was a huge attraction, for the second Ann with her exciting skirt in the air it was purely ME. With both Anns I went through heart-wrenching emotions, and I am sure they did, too. Why was our little world so cruel?
I trust most of you can read Kindle books on Amazon. For those who cannot, you can easily get Kindle for PC FREE! Just go to Amazon.com, select or type in the search box Kindle for PC, and install it in just seconds. And you have access to thousands of books and stories for small sums, including this one.
Have fun!
Killing the Elephant Poachers- End of Story
Last story ended after Yves shot Mombé and the rangers killed his poaching tribe.
“Can we get this Land Rover to work, to get back in time?” Yves asked.
The captain called one of his rangers. The man opened the hood, peeped inside, searched with his fingers and fiddled with the wires. It took him fifteen costly minutes but it didn’t work.
“Look in Mombé’s pockets or his tent there,” Yves suggested. “He may have kept the keys himself.”
They found them in a small plastic toilet bag next to his filthy mattress.
“Did anyone keep my rifle case?” Yves asked. The captain ordered one of his men to get it from the place where they’d been hiding.
sahel-bf.org
The same man drove Yves and Pierre back to their base, where they found the Highlander waiting. Close to eight in the morning and still an hour drive.
Patrick’s Cessna stood ready to go. Everything was working according to plan. Seemed like one of his many missions accomplished.
Glynn Charles-Jones
By eleven o’clock, they landed at Bangui airport, as scheduled. Jean-Baptiste drove them in the Minister’s SUV. But he didn’t take the Avenue des Martyrs that led to the ministry and went left to the Avenue de l’Indépendance.
“Where are we going?” Yves nerves went on full alert.
“To the Minister’s residence,” answered Pierre, grinning, looking at him.
Yves didn’t understand. “The agreement was that I would get my money at the Minister’s office.”
“The Minister changed his mind,” Pierre said, coolly.
“How did you learn about that?” Yves asked.
“Jean-Baptiste just told me at the airport.” Pierre stared ahead of him and didn’t elaborate.
Yves wished he’d kept his rifle case with him in the event he had to flee, but the job finished, he had stored it in the back of the SUV. Big mistake. But his pistolet MAT 49 rested safely in the holder under his fatigue.
They drove past the French Embassy and several luxury residences, probably rented out to foreigners of international agencies or inhabited by members of the higher ranking political class. Jean-Baptiste stopped in front of a wrought iron gate of a large property surrounded by high concrete walls, topped by razor wire and spikes.
Le Progres.fr
“The Minister’s home?” Yves asked.
“Yes,” Pierre said.
A guard inside holding an AK-47 opened the gate. They drove in and parked in front of a free-standing garage. Jean-Baptiste guided them through a side door of the house into an immense living room, fully furnished with sofas and long chairs, looking out on a terrace and a sprawling swimming pool.
The Minister rose from a long chair on the terrace, put on his colorful gown and slid into his sandals.
“I heard Mombé is gone,” he said, his face not revealing a trace of emotion. “Let me take you to my office.”
Yves followed him, but his instincts told him something wasn’t right. Still, he wanted his money. He stayed behind Pierre, on his guard. The Minister went through the front door, turned left to a large building at the side of the compound and opened its sliding door. His office?
“Come inside, and have a look,” the Minister said, smirking, closing the sliding door. Pierre stood beside him, grinning.
Yves stood looking at a hangar chock-full of tusks displayed on the floor, as well as AK-47 and other arms. Mombé had been a rival. Reason why they didn’t want a French army sniper. Either they wanted him as an accomplice or they wanted him out of the way, and neither was an option. He grabbed his Mat 49 and shot Pierre in the head. Pierre slumped on the floor right in front of the Minister. The Minister froze, tried to flee, but Yves warned, “You stay right here, Monsieur le Braconnier. You tell Jean-Baptiste to bring my money or you’ll be gone, too. I have Legionnaire friends here and you know it.”
The Minister yelled for Jean-Baptiste. Yves hid his pistol in his fatigue. Jean-Baptise arrived, staring baffled at dead Pierre.
“Bring the money,” the Minister ordered.
“Alone, and no tricks” Yves added.
Jean-Baptiste left, puzzled, and came back later with the same type of brown envelope Yves had received in the plane, but much larger.
“Open it,” Yves said, “show it.”
Yves reached into the envelope holding his pistol aimed at the Minister. The Euros were neatly bundled in packs of one hundreds.
“Count them aloud showing me the inside,” Yves said.
Jean-Baptiste did as told and by the time he reached fifty, Yves ordered him to stop. He grabbed the envelope.
“Shut the hangar and bring the car,” Yves said. When the SUV stopped near him, he said to Jean-Baptiste, nudging his pistol in the Minister’s side, “Open the back of the SUV.” He took out his rifle case with his left hand. “Close it,” Jean-Baptiste did. Yves pushed the Minister onto the front seat. “To Sofitel,” he hissed, and sat in the back. “No false moves.”
The SUV drove past the guard who opened the gate, seemingly unaware of what had happened as the hangar was out of his sight. Arriving at the Sofitel, Yves told Jean-Baptiste to leave him the SUV’s keys and to come with him and the Minister to his room. “Don’t say a word, just smile. I keep my pistol aimed at you from my pocket.”
The receptionist in the lobby smiled at the Minister and Jean-Baptiste, who remained stoic, and rushed to push the elevator button for them. He didn’t seem suspicious.
Carrying his rifle case and the envelope in one hand, Yves elbowed his two hostages friendly inside with the other, thanking the receptionist. On the fourth floor he pushed them into his room, and locked the door behind him. He offered the Minister the only chair at the small desk and sat on his bed, keeping his weapon ready.
“Never double-cross a Legionnaire,” he said. “You stay here until I’m gone. If you try to come after me, I’ll inform the French Embassy of your tusks.”
Jean-Baptiste stared at him, his eyes full of hate. The Minister had a mocking expression on his face, as if he didn’t believe what was happening to him. Yves took his duffel bag, put the envelope in it, and closed it. He knifed the telephone cord, left, locked the door behind him, slid his pistol into its holder underneath his fatigue, took the elevator down, passed through the lobby without looking at the receptionist and went for the SUV. Knowing he had little time, he drove to the fishermen’s site at the Oubangui River where he’d gone a few years before. Three fishermen were sitting at the riverbank beside their pirogues, smoking and chatting.
afriquenews.wordpress.com
“Take me across the river to a safe place,” he said to them. He held the SUV’s keys in the air and pointed to it. “Yours.”
jean-marie lambert.sfr.fr
When he walked onto the opposite shore, he was sure they would be looking for him at the airport or on Bangui’s exit roads, as few would figure he’d fled across the river into the DRC, even though it was a favorite escape route for overthrown presidents and other threatened high officials.
Two weeks later, another set of rebels overtook Bangui, in a never-ending battle over diamonds and territory. The Minister and Jean-Baptiste probably fled or succumbed. The rebels would find the tusks, fight over them, and kill more poor elephants. If he’d stayed with the Foreign Legion, he would most likely have been sent there again to keep locals from slaughtering each other. Useless. Better enjoy a few weeks at the Côte d’Azur.
centrafrique presse
End