I began my journey at a ramen stall in Tokyo. Drawing on my ‘well-bred’ manners from Bogotá, I slurped my noodles in the most deathly silence. The chef looked at me with infinite sadness, as if I were insulting his ancestors. Next to me, a Japanese executive was slurping his soup with the noise of a broken industrial vacuum cleaner. “What’s wrong with this man?” I thought. Then I understood: my silence was his insult; my discretion was his contempt. Slurping is the applause of the palate.
I crossed over to China the following day. At dinner, to make up for my blunder in Japan, I wiped my plate clean with a piece of bread until it gleamed. My host turned pale. Distraught, he ordered three more dishes. Out of politeness, I ate them all. He ordered more. We ended up in a gastronomic battle of wills: he thinking I was a starving bottomless pit, and I thinking he wanted to force-feed me like a goose for foie gras. In the end, I let out an involuntary belch due to the pressure in my stomach. My host smiled for the first time. I had ‘spoken’ his language.
I arrived in the Middle East feeling like an expert. At a market in Tehran, a vendor offered me some exquisite tea. I gave him a thumbs-up to signal ‘Absolutely brilliant!’. The man dropped the teapot and looked at me as if I’d lied to his mother. It turns out that in those parts, my ‘all OK’ gesture was an invitation for him to go and do something anatomically impossible to himself.
To make amends, I sat down on a nearby sofa and crossed my legs elegantly, looking relaxed. Fatal mistake. The sole of my shoe was pointing straight at his face. At that moment, I realised that, to half the world, my shoe is an extension of hell. I was showing him the ‘dirtiest’ part of my being. I backed away, like a frightened crab, apologising in a language I didn’t even understand myself.
I arrived in Madagascar just in time for the Famadihana. I saw a family taking a grandfather out of a grave. I, imbued with my Western sense of respect, put on a mournful face and began to sob discreetly. An aunt approached me and gave me a sip of rum: “Why are you crying? Dad’s just visiting!”.
Ten minutes later, I was carrying the silk-wrapped femur of a man who had died in 1985, whilst we danced to the beat of a brass band. It was then that I realised that death is not an end, but a pause to change one’s clothes. Whilst back home the cemetery is a place of absolute silence, here it was the most genuine dance floor in the world. Who said the afterlife has to be boring?
On the steppes of Central Asia, I witnessed a wedding where I almost called Interpol. A bride had been crying her eyes out for days. I wanted to rescue her, until they explained to me that if she didn’t cry, her mother would think she was a rude, heartless girl.
Weeks later, at a wedding in South Carolina, I saw a couple jumping over a broom. To an outsider, it might have looked as though they’d gone mad or were about to play Quidditch. But no; they were sweeping away their ancestors’ slave-owning past, leaping towards freedom. A simple cleaning tool transformed into a sacred bridge. The magic of life: what is cleaning for some is redemption for others.
I ended my journey at a bus stop in Finland. People were standing exactly three metres apart. It looked like a choreographed social distancing routine before it had even become fashionable. I tried to ask what time it was by moving a little closer, and the Finnish man stepped back with the agility of a ninja, as if I had a highly contagious disease. His ‘personal space’ was the size of a football pitch.
Two days later, I landed in Mexico City. On the metro, my nose was pressed against a stranger’s armpit, whilst a lady told me all about her nephew’s gallbladder problems. My Finnish bubble burst into a thousand pieces. Personal space in Latin America is an urban myth; here, everyone’s skin is public territory.
Planet Earth isn’t a single world, but an apartment block with neighbours who speak different languages and cook things that smell strange.
What is a virtue on one meridian is a cardinal sin on the next. We live in a state of constant misinterpretation. But there is something beautiful in that chaos: the ability to laugh at our own ignorance. Because the only way not to be a ‘Martian’ is to accept that, to the rest of humanity, you’re always the odd one out.
Culture is the pair of glasses through which we choose to view the chaos of the world. That ‘strangeness’ doesn’t exist; there is only what is ‘foreign’. And that, ultimately, we are all someone else’s ‘crazy foreigner’.
If you ever see me burping at a funeral whilst jumping over a broom and showing you the sole of my shoe… don’t be alarmed. I’m just trying to be a citizen of the world. Or perhaps I’ve simply forgotten which country I’m in.
