We’re all human underneath (The culture of human beings)

One of the key things you learn from travelling is that humans are humans. The basics are all the same. There’s no need to be afraid of a culture you don’t know or understand , because if you break through the cultural barrier (if you see it as an obstruction in the first place), then we’re all just humans eating different things, wearing our clothes differently, believing different things and talking about things differently, and even peeing differently. 

Having the patience to remember that culture is just a layer of humanity when you’re interacting with and discovering different cultures, is fundamental to getting on in that culture. 

When you’re struggling to break bread with your right hand in an Indian village, and starving because you were already hungry and it’s taking you even longer to get your lunch into your stomach as you don’t want to offend anyone by using your other ‘toilet’ hand, it pays to remember that a huge number of human beings on this planet do indeed manage to survive by eating with one hand, so with patience, you’re not going to die.

When you’re struggling to hide your disgust at the guy who just phlegmmed a huge ball of spit onto the pavement infront of you when you’re walking along peacefully with your Chinese street food, remember that time when you had a cold and had to swallow that massive glob of phlegm that ended up in your throat because it’s not the done thing in your culture to get rid of it externally.

When you’re cursing the Brit in the meeting because they’ve used 100 words and you still have no idea what they want you to do, and you can’t decipher the instructions because all you hear is ‘sorry’, ‘would you mind if’ or ‘I don’t want you to go out of your way’… Remember that unless you communicate similarly when you need something from a Brit, you won’t ever get any help from them in return.  

Some layers of a culture may be thicker to penetrate, some you may not be able to penetrate at all. This is also something entirely individual and dependent on attitude and openess, rather than language skills, experience, wealth or any other factor (although these can certainly help).

To see culture as a layer to humanity is to embrace it as a natural and interesting curiosity of life in this world. To see it as a barrier runs the risk of not ever reaching the human layer. There can be no real hierarchy of culture, none is greater than another (despite concepts some have of ‘l’exception culturelle’ or even cultural capitals), just as there can be no real hierarchy of humanity (despite what many like to believe).

The Web goes offline (Paperwork and the Internet)

In the fast paced technologically progressive and relatively innovative developed world, it would be easy to expect paper and pen to be heading down the road to yesteryear. However, as much as wifi is a high street commonality across much of the world (English breakfast and wifi, or free wifi with your wine are fairly common signs when you’re on the road)…  It seems to be almost as common to be swimming in paper in order to get online in public.

A sea of wifi log ins in Spain

In a hotel in Madrid, upon checking in, I was asked if I needed the internet. Yes. How many devices? So, work laptop, kindle, iPhone, blackberry. So that’s 4. How many days are you staying? 3 nights. I was then handed twelve sheets of printed paper. Twelve different usernames and passwords, one for each device for 24 hours. It’s hardly worth the effort. Oh, and the default log in window didn’t work automatically when you selected the hotels connection, so you had to type that in too. (For more on wifi or lack of it in hotels, see this post here).

In an Asian airport, handwritten whiteboard signs direct you to ‘wifi password free this way’ and lead you to the information desk where you must show your passport and boarding pass, and then you receive your personalized log in credentials on a printed piece of paper.

The Internet is built in a way that (with a few exceptions, mainly due to paranoid leadership), geographical borders bear little significance. However, PayPal cannot cope with a person changing country. It became impossible to buy something on eBay recently based on the fact that I had not used the service in Switzerland and my account was registered in the UK.There areparts of the world wide web that are just wide, and not at all global. Which, as the name suggests, kind of defeats the point.

Internet security sometimes surpasses the internet… There is one shopping platform in Switzerland who have dreamt up the following registration procedure… choose a username and let us know where to send your password, we’ll snail mail it right on over! I like to imagine this business process was thought up by some suited traditionalists in a board room in Bern, and the old dudes thought they’d hit jackpot. Imagine if you forget your password, even after you managed to register the first time… then you need to wait another week for the new one to arrive in your postbox.

The internet is in its essence global and paper free, except when it’s not…. it’s quite astonishing how much paperwork is still involved in the internet!

Linguistic Beauty Pageants (What makes a language beautiful?)

Could it be that there is a mathematical formula that calculates the beauty of a language (in the same way there exist theories of ratios for facial beauty related to the roundness, distance of the eyes and so on…the Swiss/British Philosopher Alain de Botton has written quite a bit about such ratios)? Perhaps the ratio of vowels to consonants affects how beautiful we perceive a language to be? Or could it be the pitch? The European languages generally perceived to be beautiful do have quite high usual of vowels, compared to those European languages often tarnished with the ugly label. What makes a language beautiful?

 

There are few people in this world who think Swiss German is a beautiful language (it’s perhaps relevant to note that I am one of the few). It’s quite heavy on the phlegmy glottal sounds that you probably wouldn’t want your lover to whisper in your ear late at night. Compared to the precision of high German, or the musical tones of Italian, Swiss German is a big mess. Depending on which patch of the complex and detailed dialect patchwork you land on, you might pronounce your ‘ch’ like you have a large frog at the back of your throat, or you might just leave it off the end of the word all together in apparent oral apathy. But doesn’t that just add to its beauty? Swiss German is for me a beautiful language for its poetic flexibility, it’s enormous variety and its ability to just get on with things. It is beautiful because it has a mind of its own, and because the language itself is so often a point of discussion among its speakers because its so off the wall even the natives haven’t worked it out yet (which is good, because as soon as you work out a language it’s most likely evolved into a new form…).

 

Familiarity of a language probably accounts for whether you perceive the language to be beautiful or not. Before I took a beginners course in Arabic I thought it sounded hideous. As soon as you can distinguish sounds as words, or as meaningful components, you unlock a beauty in a language. You don’t even have to understand it, but to recognise that a particular sound is intended to communicate something you can vaguely appreciate, is to begin to see its beauty. 

 

I wonder too if your perception of a language is intrinsically linked to your experiences in that language?   Do I think French is beautiful because I had good times in France? Or because there’s often a glass of red wine around when French is being spoken…do I find Swiss German beautiful because I fell in love with the country? I for example don’t really find Spanish that beautiful, but I haven’t spent much time in Spain and am also not over familiar with the Spanish culture (but maybe that’s because I don’t speak the language).

 

Maybe it’s just the sounds themselves, completely removed from the meaning and the eloquence of expression in a language. Yesterday I was listening to a conversation that for about two sentences I thought was Italian until I realised I didn’t understand most of it, concluding it must be Romanian or perhaps some strange Tyrolean dialect. It was beautiful. It actually sounded quite aggressive, but somehow the sounds softened the occasional glottal phonemes and the blunt grunting sounds. It jumped up and down, and went from soft rounded sounds to harder tougher ‘proper’ consonant fricatives. 

 

This week, talking to a colleague in India, I was trying to establish why almost every word-final consonant was being stressed. Working with Swedes, who can be quite susceptible to a touch of gemination (when you double the consonant sound, like in ‘getting’ to make it sound more like ‘getTing’), but this is extreme. But it is somehow quite a beautiful sound, even though it sounds incredibly strange to have every consonanT totally stresseD aT the enD of each worD (it does something funny to the nasal sounds that precede the final consonant too). So maybe it’s the novelty that makes a language beautiful? 

 

Since it’s so tricky, so subjective to determine what it is that makes a particular language beautiful, perhaps it’s just easier to say that it is language itself that is beautiful. The complexity, the possibilities, the dialects, the effects that language offers every individual using whichever language they choose, is enormous, and that’s pretty beautiful in itself.

In at the deep end (Open Water Swimming)

What is open water swimming?

Australians treat it as an essential survival skill, learning to swim is as important as learning to walk.  In Switzerland it’s a pastime, best enjoyed on a sunny day in a clear lake, or a river, or in one of the purpose built ‘badis’. In the UK, open water swimming still has a status close to that of an extreme sport, or something better left to the London loonies who jump into the Serpentine on frosty winter mornings before they head to their desk job in the square mile… 

On average there are between 450-600 drowning fatalities in the UK every year and inland waters account for 63% of these deaths  (source here)

There were 284 drowning deaths in Australian waterways between 1 July 2011 and 30 June
2012, most of which (26%) were in rivers/creeks/streams (source here).

The only figure I can find for Switzerland cites 53 deaths in the most recent count (source here); although its UK & Australia figures are lower than those mentioned above…

The point is that how you see water and a country’s attitude towards it, will, I believe, affect what happens in on or around the water. I’ve read a couple of news reports in the UK press this summer where the risks of swimming in open water are repeated and repeated to the point that you’re likely to want to avoid even dipping your toes into a stream…treating swimming like a life skill makes sense for an island nation, but it makes sense also for those in landlocked countries. It seems a shame that the variety of waterways and swimming opportunities might be wasted because of a cultural attitude towards the water. What doesn’t seem to help is pushing open water swimming into some kind of indie corner where it’s only accessible to those who bother to buy the books about it (such as Kate Rew’s ‘Wild Swim’ which was a bestseller) and give it a go.  Everyone should of course be aware of the risks and dangers, but water should not be off limits (unless perhaps it’s a Bangalorian city-centre stream).

This week, crossing the Danube on a rather majestic bridge in rather majestic Vienna – a city which prides itself on just pipping Zurich to the post on top of Quality of Life surveys each year – I looked down into the water (which is murky and brown as it passes through the city), and thought, no, I couldn’t live there…if there’s water it should be swimmable. Although faith was restored when I spotted two wet-suited men carrying wake-boards walking along the Kärntner Straße. So maybe there is somewhere. Or maybe I’m spoilt.

Badi Unterer Letten, Zurich

Guerilla Lobbying on your lunchbreak (Or profitability of water)

Switzerland. The land of clear blue lakes, white water rivers and trickling streams. The water is so pure and heavenly that you could probably feed it directly to your newborn child to no ill effect. It’s so pure and heavenly that this guy in a boiler suit made a little video all about it (in German) … 70% of Zurich’s drink water comes from the lake of Zurich (perhaps less this week while they clean up after the street parade…).

There’s a little thing that some well-wisher has tried to do in Zurich, and that is to invent some concept of ‘Züriwasser.’ They’ve even gone as far as giving it a trendy little brand ZH20. The idea, is actually not too bad, in that they are donating 1CHF per carafe of tap water (even if it’s in a fancy branded bottle), to water charities worldwide. No problem there, and it’s great to make those lucky enough to be living in a land with clean water everywhere a little conscious that others are not so lucky. Note however that the remainder of the 3CHF per carafe charge goes to the restaurant, for ‘Seating, service and infrastructure.’  Which means essentially that the restaurant makes money from ‘selling’ tap water. I know often in Belgium they do the same (without the donation though). Surely if the customer is paying for other drinks and a full meal, the choice of whether you donate should be left to the consumer? It verges on guerrilla charity lobbying. 

What is worse is that some restaurants who are not jumping on the ZH20 bandwagon, are starting to sell tap water… I had a long discussion with a waiter when my bill came back with ‘Mineral – 1CHF’ on it (having ordered tap water). The waitress had not told us we’d be charged for tap water, and there’d be no donation to charity for selling the water. 

There’s another rant about this on Christine’s blog here. In the many discussions about this that I’ve had with various people, it often results in no tip. I think they’d do better to give good service, get a tip, and leave a donation box in the restaurant in case people might want to donate to a water charity. 

Are you being served Ma’am? (The politeness protocol)

Part of learning a culture, integrating, learning a language, whatever you want to call it (and however you want to do it), involves learning how to address people correctly in different situations.

This side of the Roestigraben, you’re expected to use surnames to address people in formal situations, to answer the telephone (which is particularly strange, because surely the person who is calling knows who they’re calling, and therefore a simple ‘hello’ would work just fine) and to introduce yourself. My surname sounds quite funny in Swiss German, which adds to my discomfort with this formality. 

In India, the overuse of ‘Ma’am’ and ‘Sir’ could easily make you think you’ve accidentally wandered onto a period drama film set without the appropriate costume. It is quite strange to go from a first name only environment in most areas of life to go to being addressed Ma’am by everyone you speak to. Perhaps this is something the Brits left in India, but it feels out of place in a modern world. 

The funny thing about this politeness thing, in both Switzerland and India, is that it doesn’t mean you get better service necessarily, it’s more that it’s simply protocol. This makes it even more annoying, since it’s often rather meaningless. To be told ‘yes Ma’am’ and then not get what you ordered, or to be addressed by your (mispronounced) surname and be told to check something on the website when you call your bank, is a bit of a pain. Both practices are clearly deeply entrenched in the culture. My feeling is that it is changing in both countries in a step away from such formal protocol, but it doesn’t happen overnight. 

I imagine its similar if you want to integrate properly in Britain, then you need to pick up on expressions such as ‘Would you mind awfully…’ or ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but…’ and suchlike, which I imagine feels quite uncomfortable if you’re more used to, and it’s linguistically and socially acceptable to be more direct in your own language.

 

Revolution! (Feeding the British)

Buying cheese in England

If you ever fancy a fight with a frenchman, tell them that you can find better food in England than you can in France. If they hang around long enough to even let you finish the sentence before walking of in disgust/hilarity/a gallic shrug of the shoulders, try pointing out that there are over 700 varieties of cheese produced in Britain (according to the British Cheese Board), compared to only about 400 in France.

Actually, the point here is not who produces more cheeses. It’s not even who has better cuisine. The point is that there is actually fantastic food in England, it’s just that British food has a terrible reputation. Or rather it has a dated reputation. That is the only thing that it has in common with French cuisine.

The British food revolution has largely gone unnoticed overseas, despite Jamie Oliver working day and night to spread the word. One of the great things about it is that there is an enormous variety of food available in England. The sweet potato for example is not native to England, but you can get it and many will know what to do with it. There are not many Swiss, French or Italian people who have worked their magic with a sweet potato (I use those examples having lived in those countries). There are not many shops that stock it here. Of course, it’s far from every English person who is on board in this food revolution, but there is a growing culture of awesome food in the UK, despite what you may well hear.

Micro-breweries are celebrating roaring trade, thanks to independent retailers stocking their stuff.  The British wine industry is thriving, thanks to soils similar to those in the Champagne region of France, and the lack of snobbery (yet, at least). The cheese is fantastic (although could do with a bit of a marketing boost; the cheese producers in England seem for the main part stuck in an age gone by).

The amount of independent food joints in town and country is proliferating; limited menus scribbled in chalk on grubby blackboards are working their charm in many a city. One thing about Switzerland that is continuously surprising (and a little frustrating) is the lack of decent (and affordable) lunchtime food options that don’t involve going to a restaurant. The UK, in contrast, has a huge number of fresh salad/soup/buffet bar options that you can mix and match for very little. Somewhere like Foodilic in Brighton, or the Grocer on Kings Road in London does not exist in Zurich, or even really in France.

And that is the British Food Revolution; it’s accessible food, awesome ingredients, variety of cuisines & flavours, and a little bit more innovation and creativity than many other places. Vive la revolution!

City loving (What makes a city liveable and loveable?)

I am a city person. Or at least, I am a person who loves cities. But I think I tend to fall for cities that have an element of the countryside in them. Or a closeness to nature of some kind. 

Zurich is a city that some love, but that others hate. I think if you’re used to large metropolises then it’s likely Zurich won’t be for you. I’m a big Zurich fan. Monocle is a big Zurich fan, although in their latest review, they complain a little about the Sunday slowdown. I’ve spent the last few weeks in Brighton, and although I know the city quite well, I have found myself falling in love with the city. 

What is it about a place that makes it liveable & loveable? This is my list…

• Water. Drinking fountains, rivers, lakes, the sea, canals. There has to be water.
• People. Good friends, new faces, old faces
• Coffee shops. Places like the Markthalle in the Zurich Viadukt, or the millions of tiny and fabulous coffee shops I’ve discovered in Brighton over the last weeks
• Accesible space. Proximity to mountains, more lakes, or to sea, to cliffs, to the great outdoors
• Bikes. I like cities on bikes.
• Youth and innovation. I like to get the feeling that something is happening. That there are new businesses cropping up here and there, that there is innovative movement in arts, festivals, buildings etc
• Sport. There has to be oodles of opportunity to be active.

The great thing about cities, is that everyone has their own experience of them, that they have their own view of them. Cities are constantly evolving into something new, and that’s part of the fun!

Zurich, by the water

Brighton, by the water

 

 

Nomadic Woman (Lone lady travels)

As a woman, in many parts of the world, it’s downright daft to walk around unaccompanied by friends or even a man. As a blonde, perhaps even more so in many places… But the reality is, there aren’t really so many places where it’s impossible to be a woman travelling alone. However, if you are willing to do it, there are certain things that you have to put up with, and this rings true for most the places I have travelled alone…

 

• people may well think you’re a prostitute if you’re sat in a bar by yourself
• people will ask you where your husband is
• people will ask why you’re not married (yesterday’s count; 4 people, 3 of which were women)
• people will look at you if you’re sat in a bar or restaurant alone in the evening, but they will rarely approach you
• people will ask you if you’re alright (‘You need support, ma’am?’)
• people may well think you’re a little odd

For today, I’ve told one person I’m not married, and one that I am, and that my husband is at the hotel.  I’ve made ‘friends’ with a crazy lady who knows nothing about me after a 30 minute ‘conversation’ but I know all about her Australian pilot husband who flies private jet around the world, I’ve seen all her Facebook profile pictures from the last 5 years. Two men told me ‘You don’t know how beautiful you are.’ That doesn’t happen if you’re travelling in a group. 

I have no problem with this of course. My point is that I think it’s easier to travel alone as a man. There are fewer questions, fewer expectations, you have more opportunity to talk to people without having to lie about non-existent marriage. Of course, when you travel alone anywhere, you have to be careful, whatever your gender, but as a woman even more so. 

Interestingly, countries where I imagined to have trouble as a woman on the road, such as Syria and Brazil, where actually no problem most the time. And those countries where you’d think it might be easy to travel as a woman alone have been the ones in my experience that have been the opposite (like France and Belgium).

Doing it with the lights on (A disappointing Earth Hour)

For Earth Hour 2013 (March 23rd 8:30 – 9:30pm for those who missed it), I was on a hotel terrace restaurant overlooking the sparkly Dubai Marina. The waitresses kindly gave us one of those plastic bracelets you snap so they start to glow (the kind you get at university nightclubs), and informed us, that Ma’am, Earth Hour would commence at 8:30pm, Ma’am, and that, yes, Ma’am, they would be switching off the lights. 

I was intrigued, not only because Dubai Marina is an electrician’s dream, in that there are buildings reaching to the clouds that need lighting up, but also because the lights are not only so you can see where you’re going in the dark, but also for selling. Bright neon hotel signs, brands, floodlit malls, beams lighting up the newest highest shiniest building… you get the picture. At 8:30pm, nothing happened, lights remained bright and numerous. At 8:35pm, the lights on the terrace where we were sat went out. We looked around. We looked around again. Nada. Niente. Other lights stayed on, the sky stayed illuminated. 

Dubai by night, even during Earth Hour

After about 30 minutes, the Ramada must have finally got the memo that something should have been happening, as they switched off the big red illuminated branding across their towering hotel. All other lights in the windows stayed on.

I was very disappointed in Dubai’s attempt at Earth Hour (although I’m sure it’s not the only place where this happened). For a place where a massive SUV is the chosen method of transportation, and apples come in a plastic wrapper, have they built a society that cannot cope without an hour of light? Is it because of the insane amount of commercialisation (they don’t want people to miss the Ramada sign for an hour), or because of an insane level of energy consumption (Air Con, SUVs, beautiful (and ugly) skyscrapers whose exteriors ‘require’ illumination) that people have got so used to they cannot deal without it? Either way, I don’t think Dubai is the only city where Earth Hour was shunned in favour of keeping the lights on, but it’s worrying.  

In Europe, there are so many campaigns to switch off lights as you leave a room, to fix dripping taps, to share cars, to take showers instead of baths, to buy energy conscious appliances and so on. What hit me in Dubai is that whatever we do for the environment; our small steps in our little households, there are nations growing where these tiny considerations are so far off the priority list.

Scary, isn’t it? 

To find out more about Earth Hour, click here