Traveling across cultural boundaries can bring a powerful perspective shift, if you’re open to it, by challenging implicit biases inherent in all of us about what’s proper, correct, and particularly what’s normal and default.
The most obvious example is language: when travel takes you through regions that speak the same language you do, but with a different accent, at first the contrast is striking. You notice it everywhere – people speaking unusually, the sounds and rhythms different, the idioms foreign, manners and tone unusual to your ears and, especially, to your brain. But as anyone who’s ever thought for a moment about these dissonances has noted, it isn’t just they who speak with an accent, or has regional idioms – we all do – and there is little inherently correct or proper about our own form of our language, it just is.
Food also embodies so much about a place. Even where common dishes seem to be available, such as a hamburger, you quickly find that outside of homogenized fast food joints, even a simple burger has so much locality embedded in it, from the beef itself, to the way it’s cooked, to how its dressed and served. I’ve had a burgers in NM, TX, LA and elsewhere on this trip, and none of them tasted like the burgers from home. And they were all a joy to consume. I’ve long held that it’s always worth trying the local foods – unfamiliar, even weird though they may seem – because, simply put, people like them so they are probably good. I’ve never turned down an opportunity to try something offered me, and I’ve never felt worse off for having done so.
Manners are complex to grapple with, as we are so quick to judge people – are they friendly or rude? generous and warm, or cold and unwelcoming? – by the way they first engage socially, but even this is largely a product of local social norms and it’s often best to try to look past that first impression. Everywhere I’ve ever been, once you get passed the anonymous greetings of strangers and get to know people even briefly, it’s a safe bet you’ll find them open, friendly, and caring. Communities don’t survive well if they aren’t.
As we go from place to place, we’ve encountered so many instances of contrasts with home, and we’ve savored them all. Humans are at once richly diverse with their cultures, but in so many ways also the same everywhere.
