November 02, 2003
The Stupidity Unto Death
Why does it seem that meeting other foreigners abroad results in either a fascinating conversation with a like-minded soul who understands you in ways that your home-bound friends and family never could, or an excrutiating exercise in tongue-biting that makes you wonder how people who are that brain-dead could actually get ahold of a passport?
Last night's big expats.cz party was no exception. As I sat there talking to my friend, the extremely drunk English guys sitting around the other side of the table decided that a smoke-filled bar with a couple of hundred people in it just wasn't noisy enough. A little red plastic phone, someone's discarded costume prop, sat on the table; the three of them took turns picking up the receiver, screaming one end of an imaginary conversation into it, and then slamming it down with great force. I wish I could say they were even half as amusing as Bob Newhart, but the main scoring feature of their contest was apparently just the ability to scream the loudest.
After about 10 minutes of trying to ignore them, the one closest to me hung up and nearly knocked a glass ashtray off the table, so I said to him, "You know, you're on prime-time minutes here. You'd better stop or you'll run up a huge bill." "That's all right," he said, his head lolling back on the seat. "I'm worth it!" "Oh, you believe in Crystal Light so you believe in you, huh?" I asked. "Well, I'm a philosophy teacher," he slurred, "so I have to believe in something, don't I?" This guy couldn't have been more than 25 years old — what the hell was on his syllabus, All I Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten?
I said, "Well, not necessarily... you could be a nihilist, for example." "Aw, no, I'm not a nihilist. I'm an existentialist!" he cried. And what kind of existentialist was he, I asked? A Sartrean, for example? Or maybe a Kierkegaardian? "Yeah, yeah, Kierkegaard," gurgled the professor. I shook my head. "Well, I never liked Kierkegaard. He's too Christian for me." He waved dismissively. "Well, you know, you have to just kind of ignore all his Christian stuff."
For a second I thought I hadn't heard correctly. "Ignore Kierkegaard's Christianity?" I asked. "Yeah, you know, I just filter it out. He was a product of his times and stuff." Yes, this was a philosophy teacher suggesting that one could simply ignore the devoutly religious beliefs of one of the foremost Christian thinkers of the philosophical canon. I merely traded looks with my friend, who sat there laughing silently and shaking his head.
A few minutes later, our teacher friend and his mates bundled up in their jean jackets and stumbled out of the bar — in the process skipping out on a bar tab of more than 1,100 Kc (about £25 or $40), as we found out when a near-tearful waitress told us our "friends" had left without paying and demanded that we cover the bill.
I guess he must have filtered "ethics" out of his studies, too.
Posted by wildsoda at November 2, 2003 02:50 AMThis made me laugh.I know exactly where you are coming from!
When I first left Australia I spent several months backpacking my way around Europe and the UK. I was at least five to six years older than most other Antipodean backpackers I came across. It never ceased to amaze me how naive and stupid so many of them were. I wasn't sure if it was just my maternal instinct kicking in, but I was forever worried for their survival.
I met one girl who had her purse stolen in a London Park. She had left it on the seat beside her while she sat reading a book. The silly thing is not so much that she didn't have the purse strapped to her body, but that she had pretty much her whole travelling expenses - £700 cash - inside it, plus her passport, credit card and mobile phone. Obviously she was devastated but had managed to borrow money off a friend to continue her trip. While she sat there and told me this in a pub somewhere in deepest, darkest Scotland, she had her new purse sitting on the seat beside her. She hadn't learnt a thing.
I met another group of young Australians in Belfast who had absolutely no knowledge of 'The Troubles', had never heard of Bobby Sands and the hunger strikes of 1980/81 and did not know that Catholics and Protestants lived in separate parts of town. I was embarrassed by their sheer lack of world history and wanted to shake them out of their ignorance. The only good thing to come out of it, I guess, was that travelling is the best education there is and perhaps, just perhaps, they might have learned something from their trip to Northern Ireland.
But I see so many of my compatriots doing the two-year working visa thing who spend most of their time sitting in Australian-themed pubs getting drunk, I wonder if they learn anything at all about the culture they've come so far to experience. If they want to sit in an Aussie pub, why did they travel half-way round the world to do it ? ?
As you can probably tell, I get a little hot under the collar about these things! But I also think it proves that there is a massive difference between a tourist and a traveller. And just because you have a passport doesn't mean you have a brain.
Posted by: kimbofo at November 2, 2003 05:56 PM--
But I also think it proves that there is a massive difference between a tourist and a traveller. And just because you have a passport doesn't mean you have a brain.
--
Amen. The last time I was *traveling* around Europe -- in Prague, as a matter of fact -- I ended up spending a few days with a girl I knew from home who had decided to use some vacation time to come join me for a bit. However, she was a *tourist*, and so I had to spend my days following her as she tramped around the city, her nose in her guidebook, taking me from one tourist sight to another. "And after that, the book says we should do this. And then, the book says we should do that. And tomorrow, the book says..."
She thought I was crazy because I wanted to just walk around a bit, maybe get a newspaper and sit in a cafe and watch people go by, and then just walk around some more. You know, actually see *Prague*.
Tourists don't want to see anything that doesn't have an admission fee. Travelers want to see everything else.
Posted by: wildsoda at November 3, 2003 12:59 AMI tend to avoid other Americans. None live out where I am anyway, but if there were any, I'd probably avoid them. In a way this attitude - in myself - strikes me as pretentious and snotty, but on the other hand I am not necessarily comfortable hanging out with people I would not otherwise hang out with simply because we both have a blue passport. And there is also the fact that I tend to avoid people in general...
Posted by: mig at November 6, 2003 07:04 AMNo, you're right about the blue passport thing. I've always felt like a foreigner in the U.S. anyway (being one of those weird New York City people), so while maybe I could talk about TV shows and political candidates in common with someone else from the U.S., I might not have much more than that.
Posted by: wildsoda at November 6, 2003 11:32 AM