Photos: author

This is an era in which tourism is the most postmodern of activities, and no experience is safe from the vacuum of commodification. There are Mexican tourists simulating the experience of crossing the border illegally in Hidalgo, where indigenous Otomi people run a theme park in which participants pretend to be migrants headed to El Norte. The tourists pay $125 to race along steep ravines and riverbanks, crashing through mud, brush, and dangerous terrain with the “border patrol” (the Otomis screaming in broken English) going after them, tapes of gunshot fire playing in the background, and the occasional terrifying scream coming from the bushes, signifying rape.

Alexander Zaitchik, a reporter for Reason magazine, ran the course in 2009 with a bunch of young, wealthy Mexicans who, as he pointed out, go to the U.S on tourist visas and sport Diesel jeans and hipster haircuts. Afterwards, they sat around the campfire drinking beer and swapping stories.

There are slum tours in Mumbai and township tours in South Africa, ghetto tours in Chicago, and revolutionary tours in Venezuela and Chiapas.

Some of them indulge in blatant and perverse exploitation and romanticizing of poverty; others attempt to make tourism, an inherently inauthentic and artificial endeavor, into an educational, empathy-building experience. But they all lay uncomfortably bare economic, social and cultural divides and pit the (relatively) moneyed traveler against the rooted, frequently impoverished, often discriminated-against locals.

They all contain some degree of voyeurism, guilt, twisted and complex longing (to join the revolution, to express solidarity with the slum-dwellers of Soweto, to “help” in some way) married to commodification (buy a t-shirt and a Pepsi in the Zapatista tienda, buy the experience of crossing the border).

Photos: author

They all, to put it simply, ask travelers to navigate a swampy and ethically iffy zone between naivete and cynicism. I tend to veer towards the latter. After seeing the revolutionary tourism linked to Oaxaca’s 2006 social movement which, like all social movements, was far more complex and intricate a phenomenon than the graffiti depicted it to be, I grew even more cynical.

In the midst of the Oaxaca conflict, the editor of Narco News – which covered the unfolding movement from a leftist perspective – came to the conclusion that “revolutionary tourism” was doing more harm than good, and regretted that the organizations and people pushing Oaxaca’s movement forward hadn’t strictly regulated the activities of foreigners as the Zapatistas had.

That example of the Zapatistas seems interesting after a visit to Chiapas, where tourism appears to be thriving in the Zapotec communities in the canyons and valleys outside of San Cristóbal.

So here’s the riff – in spite of everything I’ve set up above, all the problematic, superficial interactions and replications of wildly uneven power structures inherent in revolutionary tourism, I came out of a visit with the Zapatistas changed in a way that I’d like to believe isn’t superficial, that I’d like to believe hints at meaningful engagement, at some awareness of the other that goes beyond guilt alleviation or shining idealism or perverse voyeurism to compassion and belief in change.

It is so easy to be cynical about taking some sort of perspective-altering, revelatory tour through Zapatista communities, and to interpret the whole thing as the ultimate incorporation of real efforts to subvert the neoliberal system into the same commercial tokens, ideologies and values the system survives on.

It is so easy to sit in the comedor in Oventic and listen to the tour group shuffling around you compare donut stories and talk about Israel and wine and sandwiches in Nicaragua and think that this is just another authentic experience consumed and jotted down in the moleskin to be later strutted out at a hostel in Vietnam or Sydney.

Photos: author

But you’re there, too, for a reason that you hope goes beyond a check in the moleskin of experience, so unless your cynicism is unbelievably cocky and ignorant, you have to rein it in a bit in order to let yourself off the hook. You have to suspend your disbelief; there must be something else to it. This is what I thought going in.

Initially, as we waited by the roadside in the stillness under a white-gray sky, and the women with bandannas observed us from a makeshift observation post while dozens of other unmasked women and children loitered and knitted before a community store, I was uncomfortable. I wanted to see, yes, and to understand more about the Zapatistas, but in that act of seeing my outsiderness and the problem of my purpose were so obvious it was painful.

I am an estadouniense writer who’s come to poke around your community, take photos of your walls, swoon over your movement. I will probably think higher of myself after having done so, and higher of you. Then I’ll leave and I’ll go back to my life, and you’ll keep on there, hoping the army doesn’t come in and raze it all. I’ll have touristed your revolution.

But we were let in, and we ate simple quesadillas with slices of avocado and tomato before we were shown around Oventic. Another tour group browsed around the comedor and store, bought some things, and left. I went to the bathroom, with a kind, nervous, rail-thin man in his late thirties as my escort.

“Our facilities are rustic,” he warned gently.

“It’s no problem,” I said.

“There’s no toilet paper,” he cautioned.

“It’s fine,” I said.

They were rustic, but nothing you wouldn’t find elsewhere in rural Mexico. As I picked my way back to the man, black ducks waddled around fat green plants and a small stream. Not knowing what to say I asked,

“What do you do with the ducks?” I wanted to hit myself over the head as soon as I said it, but there it was – we were standing in the backyard of a Zapatista building, with trails curving off here and there and a rustic bathroom and big black bulbous ducks scattered about, and I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“We eat the eggs,” he said.

I was going to say, “ah, like in China!” but suddenly thought that’d be weird and instead nodded wisely as if eating duck eggs was a very sage idea. I’d never met anyone in Mexico who ate duck eggs, and the thought that this was my first factoid from the Zapatistas seemed comical and pathetic. We wobbled along the small stone path back towards the comedor.

“Stop!” the main said, “wait – you can wash your hands here. There’s soap, too.” I washed my hands and he leaned in with oval, inquiring eyes and asked,

“What do you do?” There was an insistence that went beyond curiosity to worry.

“I’m a writer,” I said, afraid that wouldn’t sound right but wanting to be honest. He asked the inevitable,

“De que escribes?” What do you write about? I rambled off a list of subjects: travel, critical travel essays, politics (leftist), Mexico, Latin America. He nodded.

“And your friends?” he asked. I identified Susy and Mauricio as students and Jorge as a photographer, and rushed to specify what Jorge photographed, citing a recent project on basketball in the Sierra Norte. The man seemed satisfied, nodding a few times, and we continued back towards the restaurant, parting ways as he veered off into the kitchen.

Photos: author

The visit continued on that tone of awkward mutual recognition, interest, and caution, but as we began walking down the steep hill and into the community a feeling of intense emotion came over me. The need to weep. It is rare in such a travel situation to get a sense of honesty, of – and I can’t imagine invoking this word without a mocking overtone, but I’m about to do it here – authenticity.

Here, my presence was tolerated, accepted, perhaps even condoned, but it didn’t detract from a wider truth that was being achieved in the buildings and meetings and community there. It didn’t seem to cheapen the project at hand, or to shape it. It made me very humble; the best indicator of the authentic.

I could understand for the first time in that visit what made the Zapatistas so compelling, so emotionally and intellectually powerful for their supporters across national, economic, cultural and social borders. It was a feeling more than anything else, the feeling of an alternative project – not frenzied, not reactionary, not hateful, not tentative and skeptical, but directed and organic and meaningful – in action. Women planted flowers beneath murals that said “otro mundo es posible.”

Another me would’ve cringed. I cringe writing this. But there, it wasn’t maudlin, and I didn’t see it as a sign of peace and love and la revolucíon as much as as an example of everyday life in a community that had regained its dignity from a corrupt government. It humbled me tremendously. At its best, that’s what travel should do.

A kid played basketball on a court with EZLN hoops, and fat, shiny black cows roamed a sloping lawn. Dogs followed teenagers collecting wood. Our guide, a man in his sixties in a black ski mask, asked lots of questions about Jorge and I’s upcoming wedding. Would we spend lots of money? Would we dance with a turkey? What would we eat? Would we drink? Lots?

He was congratulatory and told us he’d married when he was fifteen, and was still married to the same woman. He’d joined the Zapatistas five years ago, and lived between Oventic and San Cristóbal. He was like an old man you’d meet at the market, who’d clasp your hand and give you his blessings for your wedding, ask you how many babies you were going to have, and laugh gently at your answers.

He knew he was the one guiding us, hosting us, giving us permission to be here, and we knew it, always asking before roaming off into an unknown corner, but beneath the firmness of his small hardened body and his ski mask were warmth and curiosity. I don’t know why that was surprising to me – I had thought the people would be harder, more closed off and resentful, and the women were certainly quiet and withdrawn but not in a shut-down way.

The place, to put it very simply, didn’t feel bought, didn’t feel incorporated into the swirling worries about authentic and inauthentic, commodofication and resistance.

Photos: author

Mostly, what I felt was emotion, which didn’t belong to one category of sadness or excitement or belief or trust but was more the simple power of witnessing. I experienced a similar thing at a goat slaughter in the Mixteca, the only other time and place in years of traveling in which I’d use the word authentic.

We took lots of pictures, and bought t-shirts and cigars, and then we were back out by the road again in the pale fogginess of the late afternoon. Mauricio and Susy took two available seats in a passing taxi and Jorge and I settled in to wait for the next one.

A few minutes later, as we were taking pictures of the sign declaring this the heart of Zapatista territory, a man came out of the community gates and offered the indigenous women waiting on the side of the road next to us a ride.

“Are you going to San Cristóbal?” we asked meekly.

“Yes, subense,” he said warmly.

We got in the back of the van after the indigenous women, who were en route to San Andrés, and greeted them and the other passengers – presumably the man’s wife and his two children – and a young male driver.

The first half of the drive was silent, taking hairpin curves and slow descents and steep rises through valleys that feel like topo maps come alive, series of squiggling lines and treacherous precipices and ridges in greens and browns. Chiapas is overwhelmingly rural – we passed tiny scatterings of wooden shacks and the occasional ramshackle store, but there were no organized villages with their churches and restaurants as in Oaxaca. We passed palm green and pale green and pine green, patches of corn, cows and sheep, and the shadows of women in black skirts and men working the fields.

At some point, I asked the man who’d allowed us on board a question.

“How long has this community been in existence?”

I wanted to get a sense of whether it had been formed after 1994 or right then and there in the thick of things. He said,

“Pues, mil-novecientos-novente-cuatro,” as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, and once again I proved my scrabbling ignorance before the Zapatistas. But it got better from there. We started talking about governance, about education, about politics. The educational system is particularly fascinating. The kids study three subjects: social sciences (predominantly history), math, and biology/zoology. Once they graduate from secondary school, they become the teachers.

The schools don’t have government certification – “what would be the point?” asked the man laughingly, “if you’re trying to break away from the government, from their miseducation, why would you want them to certify and regulate what you do?” This does pose a problem, though, for Zapatista children who want to go on and study at university. The Universidad de la Tierra is the only university that currently accepts their qualifications.

The conversation wound like the road, around to Oaxaca’s 2006 political movement and to the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD, the increasingly interchangeable parties managing the corruption of Mexico. The drive back to San Cristóbal seemed to take minutes, and in the midst of conversation we barely noticed the van was driving right past the house we were staying at,

“Aqui!” blurted Jorge, just at the opportune moment, and we opened the door, shook hands, gave effusive thanks, and said our goodbyes.

The experience lingered the rest of the day, the way a powerful airport goodbye sticks with you like an aching pain for the duration of the journey. We walked the streets of San Cristóbal dazed and temporarily possessed by our experience in Oventic.

And then the speed and motion of our lives caught up with us again and we were eating pizza for dinner and planning the next day’s journey and catching up on emails, and the Zapatistas faded into the background of travel experiences and stories that lay in waiting only to surface from time to time like small boats on a choppy sea.

A few nights after that, on one of our last nights in the city, we finally caved and went to the Revolution bar. It was like the art scene of Oaxaca, but the pretentiousness had a strong hippie vibe and all the righteousness of deciding to switch historical sides and align oneself with the oppressed (while, of course, constructing one’s casa just outside the city and sipping beers and listening to folk rock by pretty young hippies).

There was a similar privileged-and-comfortably-leftie-Bohemian vibe, similar protagonists, more young mothers with curly-haired babies in indigenous baby slings.

Indigenous kids came and tried to sell their clay animals to the patrons, who smiled much more indulgently than most and teased them but ultimately declined their offers. The kids, impervious, continued on to the next round of tourists. Meanwhile on the pedestrian street clusters of tourists and families and couples streamed by – the nightlife in San Cristóbal is consistently vivid, even on Sundays. They sometimes cast curious glances at la Revolucíon, and then kept walking.

Photos: author

It was the quintessential Chiapaneco day – an excursion to Oventic, a night at la Revolucíon. I could see how this would get addictive – bagels in the morning, wine at night, picturesque forested hills and churches, like-minded Europeans and Americans baking bread and sharing the same ideals, coming from similar backgrounds (and benefiting tremendously from them to hang around Chiapas for a time), learning about the indigenous, doing some volunteer work, getting all the perks of a high quality of life in Mexico plus free guilt alleviation plus the righteous belief in your place on the right side of the battle.

And at the same time, I could see how it could be kind of awful. In a great piece written for Casa Chapulin, Leila (no last name is cited) takes San Cristóbal’s revolutionary tourists and foreign activists to task for outsourcing guilt and blame to “neoliberalism” or “corporations” while at the same time ignoring their own complicated roles as relatively affluent outsiders in Chiapas. She writes,

“Whether I’m spending the afternoon with Americans or Europeans talking about pleasantries and minutia, or having an equally evasive conversation with urban Mexicans, something essential is being avoided. None of us are talking about what’s all around us. None of us are acknowledging our own ease of life and its morally problematic positioning. We’re not talking in personal terms about the reality of poverty that flanks us on all sides; sometimes I’m not even sure we’re letting it trouble us. We recognize it systemically, intellectually, and beyond this we excuse ourselves.”

Even more powerfully, she asserts that the revolutionary tourist, who is politically-minded and who sticks around San Cristóbal for three months to several years, is no less a “tokenizer of the indigenous” than the more iconic tourist gleefully purchasing ethnic stereotypes as trophies.

Finally, she points out that the mere ability of revolutionary tourists to be present and to live in San Cristóbal is indicative of the inequalities of power and wealth that have characterized and continue to characterize Chiapas specifically and Mexico overall. Simply ignoring the fact that one’s own presence in a Zapatista community, buying t-shirts, is the result of a specific historical process and is also symbolic of that process, and instead commending oneself for “solidarity” and exorcising all blame and guilt to “the corporate-capitalist” system, is leaving a huge, self-serving, and ignorant gap in the process of attempting to contribute to indigenous movements.

What I love most about Leila’s piece, though, is that she doesn’t call for some stripped down lifestyle of solidarity via suffering, nor does she argue that revolutionary tourists are vapid and useless and should simply leave. Rather, she insists that self-awareness and criticism are essential to doing more than simply lauding ourselves and condemning the big bad guys – the government, the system, the corporation.

I would add that humility, too, goes a long way. What I saw in Chiapas was a brash lack of humility and in fact, it’s opposite – an ironic and vulgar egoism about helping the poor indigenous get their act together, a reincarnation of noble-savage-ish fawning plus European boutique tourism. There don’t seem to be many people saying wait, how is it that I, coming from France or Mexico City or New York, can expect to be down with the indigenous and part of the great revolution, on the honorable side of history and a soldier in some glorious battle for dignity and truth, when actually, history and politics and my background and situation have set me up to be in a position in which I can live an exceedingly comfortable lifestyle amidst poverty, I can study what I want and live where I please (and, I might add, do so guilt-free because I’m sympathetic with the poor?) There seems to be little discussion at all, in fact, of the great irony that San Cristóbal has become a snazzy little boutique destination for Tuxtla’s wealthy and curious ethno-tourists, the tense center of a (now repressed) revolution, and a playground for politically-minded foreigners to set up shop and watch Ingrid Bergman movies and drink Argentine wine and express their sympathy for one another’s sympathies, while all the while the military extends its tentacles further into the forests and jungles, the poor people continue to sleep and beg in the streets, and the Zapatistas, after fifteen years, struggle to hold onto what they’ve got left.

And yet, I went to a Zapatista community and would dare to call it a transformative experience. Educational, illuminating, and transformative. But I have, frankly, no idea as to what my role would be if I were to ever get involved with the Zapatistas, and I think it would have to be one that takes into account where I come from and what my privileges have been.

I’m sure many of the revolutionary tourists living and working in San Cristóbal have had far more enduring and equally profound encounters with the Zapatistas and local communities in Chiapas, and I think those encounters mean something. I think they’re important, critical even, and they are the best of what tourism can (not necessarily does, but can) offer.

But what we make of them depends on how humble we stay before them, and how critical we are both of our own perspectives and positioning and of the movements we want so badly to believe in. The easy embrace of revolution via some vibey conversations at Café La Revolucion over a few chelas and some peanuts, cemented by a few friendships with indigenous kids, seems to me to be fairly pointless. Maybe not necessarily harmful, but certainly not charged with the real potential to change anything.

Ultimately, perhaps, if this revolutionary tourism – be it the kind that lasts an afternoon, like that which I took part in, or the kind that lingers and draws itself out over years in San Cristóbal – is going to actually affect positive change, and is going to create some sort of understanding and interaction that goes beyond the purchase of symbolic trinkets, then it’s up to each individual tourist to take his/her background, experience, and place into account, and to examine what he/she can do starting from that.

Me, I can read and read and read about the Zapatistas, something I’ve never felt the urge to do before because, dumbly, I coasted along on snippets I’d read and heard here and there and thought I’d gotten it. I can write. I can research more about this whole concept of revolutionary tourism and its implications. And I can believe, honestly and with feeling, in the authenticity of what I saw in Oventic, Chiapas.

If it’s authenticity we’re after, travelers, and solidarity, then that authenticity will have to express the authentic truth that our privilege is all tied up in the poverty we want to end and sympathize with, and our solidarity is plagued by the great fortune we’ve had in being able to choose, in comfort and relative luxury, to feel it.

We first need critical awareness of that, and humility. And from there we can take steps – respectfully, honestly, purposefully – towards solidarity.

Photo: 1116 Greenland Coast. Feature Photo: 1805 Way Up!

Here, Lance deals with decreasing pilot wages and makes radical claims about Chicago O’Hare.

Q: Statistically, a plane ride is supposed to be safer than driving in a car. But I’m not sure if I’m sold, based solely on the fact that one drives in a car multiple times a day/multiple times a week/thousands of times a year, therefore increasing his/her chances of death by much more than their 1-2 plane rides/year.

How safe is air travel really?

A: Chloe: How safe is air travel really? Pretty safe. Sometimes I take off from Beijing for home and land at the exact airport we had intended. Not one person has died! It’s amazing. Compared to travel by wagon train it’s hands down, no brain-er safe.

Your question compares air travel safety to auto travel safety. I’ve never seen statistics on number of flights versus number of automobile trips. Usually stats are comparing miles flown or hours spent in transit. Since I could have fun lying with statistics and I’d be making them up anyway, I’ll just say, you have less chance of dying while sitting in an airplane than sitting in your home.

Q: I recently watched Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story”. In it they discuss pilots’ wages and uncover how little they are paid, some even having to supplement their income with other jobs (one who said he has had to use food stamps). With such a specialized and highly trained occupation, and given the enormous responsibility that befalls a pilot commanding a plane carrying several hundred passengers and staff, this seems outrageous.

To what extent is this true? And how can this happen?

Moonrise at 60 North

A: Carlo: Michael Moore got his facts exactly correct. There is however, Moore to the story. The major airlines have, for the past twenty years or so, been siphoning off parts of their business to regional carriers. They say it’s just good business practice, but from a pilot’s perspective, it has only allowed them to separate employee groups while costing them a bundle in lost profit potential as well as capital guarantees to these small carriers.

Airlines spend a dollar saving a dime to keep labor costs to a minimum. Unions cause corporate executives to make dumb decisions all the time and the major airlines have a lot of labor unions. There is a tradition in the airline pilot field, similar to that of doctors and lawyers, that when they first start in their field they work the hardest and get paid very little.

Since regional airlines have become the normal stepping stone to get to the majors, they have been able to exploit the beginner tradition into standard pay for that size jet airplane. There is still considerable pay for those few who command an aircraft with several hundred passengers. However, even the top end of the industry is being eroded significantly, and in the future there will be fewer people of high ability seeking pilot jobs when pay and benefits are far less than they can earn elsewhere.

Q: Based on past experience, it seems to me that the Chicago O’Hare airport closes down due to inclement weather far more than other airports at similar latitudes and subject to similar weather do. Is this true, or do I have a personal bias against O’Hare?

A: I cut my teeth on that airport. 727 landings with a quarter on the console (a bet between pilots on who made the best landings). Laurie,do you think that Chicago O’hare closes down, or do you mean that bad weather causes O’hare more delays and flight cancellations?

O’hare is the best run airport for its size that I’ve experienced. It almost never shuts down. The other day, I landed in fog with Catagory 3, or just a few hundred feet forward visibility. Wow! It is, however, so busy that when weather forces traffic to slow down, airlines cancel flights to keep their respective operations functioning. Blame the airlines Laurie. O’hare rocks!

Community Connection

Travelers, this is your chance! Ask Lance a question! Consider it free therapy for all your airline fears. Leave your question in the comments below, and Lance will tackle it next week.

Photos: author

“What do you mean, not tourists?” asked my friend Mauricio on our recent trip to Chiapas. “You mean these people (travelers) really make this distinction?”

Mauricio’s an anthropologist, and a traveler, but one who hasn’t made traveling into the ethic, philosophy and career it often is nowadays. He may be averse to staying in a $100/night fresa hotel and heading out on a mass tour to Agua Azul, but he wouldn’t necessarily envision these choices as the scorn of tourism and the elevation of the traveler’s quest to proportions of mystical suffering. They’re just part of getting to know a place.

Mauricio, and other friends who also travel but wouldn’t swear allegiance to “traveling,” a community and worldview in and of itself, were bewildered by my very brief overview of the anthropology of travel. Over caguamas, after a 9-hour trek out of the Oaxacan valley up into dust-coated yellow-green hills and then down into the massive blow dryer on extra hot that is the Oaxacan isthmus, pants rolled up to the knee and tongues a-flappin, and up and up again into a San Cristóbal rainstorm and then around town on an epic search for keys to a friend’s temporarily vacant house I, slightly tipsy, etched out a brief syllabus for Travel Anthropology 101.

Photos: author

There are travelers vs. tourists, and the tenants of belief that the former have developed to distinguish themselves from the latter. There are the convictions about travel’s place in the changing globalized world and its potential to change this world; there’s the hierarchy of belonging to a place and the accepted degrees of superiority and condescension involved (getting increasingly “local” you’re freer to pity the backpacked baggy-eyed dopes looking for the hostel after the night bus); and there’s the almighty authenticity, so often questioned, so often invoked, so often emulated and sought and idolized; the ambiguous, whimsical God of the modern traveler.

Yes, all of this is part of Travel Anthropology 101. The travel community has as obsessive a set of codes and customs and practices as any meticulously studied clan or tribe.

So this was the ongoing joke – “are we authentic enough? Is this local enough?”

And meanwhile, the trip played itself out, and as it did, I began to realize that formulas, for as much as they may hint at potentially more informative or enriching ways to travel (reluctant as I am to play into the “we’re not tourists” fantasy I’ll admit that my experiences winding up in places far from highlighted “destinations” have often been the most rewarding) are ultimately attempts for travelers to impose their own hierarchy of values onto the places they visit. They are more about demonstrating to other travelers who you are and what you care about then they are about actually experiencing a particular place.

Photos: author

You can believe as passionately as you want in the necessity of hitchhiking in the back of a local truck to the local Zapatista community and eating the local food and having passionate discussions in Spanish with the local people, and you can meticulously avoid anything that smacks of a tourist trap or or a Lonely Planetized “must do”, and you may win a few more random and unexpected glimpses into the way a place works, into what life there is and has been like.

But ultimately, formulas matter far less than the awareness that in traveling everything matters. You don’t have to adhere to a coded series of behaviors to learn from it. This trip was like walking a path without any passionate ethic or plan and stumbling across revelations in the haphazard way one encounters a wildflower, a stream, a clearing. A conversation with a taxi driver. An interaction between an orange juice vendor and a police officer in the street. A morning run on the Cerro de San Cristobal. A beer at the Revolution bar. A futbol game at the Tequila Zoo. A beer with an anthropologist friend studying religion in Chiapas. Niñas selling stuffed giraffes in the streets. The people swelling on the pedestrian avenues at night, the portrait on the wall of the Casa del Pan, the way the one and only sketchy cantina was tucked in a gravel parking lot on the outskirts of the city. All of these things reveal, begin calling up the feeling and history and identity of a place the way a low flute calls up ghosts.

Photos: author

So it’s not the formulas. It’s the mere act of being present and aware. I’m not making a judgment call here about travelers vs. tourists and the inherent integrity and worth of the one vs. the other, or even the purpose or meaninglessness of the debate. My point is apart from that – it’s that travel is never going to fit your formula, and that’s what makes it so freaking addictive. That’s why you keep going back again and again, because you will regain your sense of smell, and throw off your rhythms and attitudes and perceptions, and come back all jostled and shaken and ready to fizzle over, like that bottle of beer carried on a long bumpy walk to the fiesta.

Nope, no formulas, no codes. Just the day in and day out, and the barely perceptible progress of getting to know something; the way the air feels when you step outside for the first time, the color of the sky at 6 p.m., the expressions on people’s faces when they pass one another in the street, the weight of history as it creeps through doorways and cracks in the streets and becomes a palpable presence – these are things you are lucky to get to know, and your formula withers away, irrelevant.

Feature Photo: Lady Annderground Photo: Kossy@FINEDAY

Here, Lance spreads his expertise around on everything from volcanic ash to potential hidden make out nooks below the cabin.

Q: I can see how it would be dangerous to fly directly a thick cloud of Eyjafjallajökull, but what is it about volcanic ash specifically that’s so dangerous for planes, even if it’s barely visible in the air?

A:: Volcanic ash is dangerous! It feels soft like talcum powder, but will dull the blades of turbine engines quickly and cause them to fail. Ash cloud will also beat against the windshield causing it to become opaque. Then the engines quit, usually one right after the other. You can’t see the ocean just before ditching. So, yes it can be a bit of a problem.

Q:Do planes really have hidden elevators and stairways like the ones do in the movies? You know – the ones to get down to the cargo hold to defuse the explosive, or the ones to go to the hidden room where flight attends and pilots sleep/make out/do whatever?

A: Some planes such as the 747 do have an elevator. Once in a while Hollywood does a pretty accurate job of showing details of aircraft. One recent movie had a pretty iffy plot intercepting a 747 with a stealth bomber to get a terrorist before he nuked D.C, but pilot aside, the inside detail of the 747 was pretty accurate other than the maneuvering space around cargo and electronics.

Some airplanes have crew rest areas above or below the cabin but I’m pretty sure there isn’t a whole lot of ‘making out’ going on. Crew members usually use their short break for some shut eye. In the old days crew members had a lot more fun!

Q:Wouldn’t it save some people’s lives, or at least give them a better chance at survival than going down in a huge fireball, if there were some way for passengers / crew / pilots / to escape (or be ‘ejected’) via parachutes?

A: Maybe the pilots could ‘punch out’ and leave the rest of you to fend for yourselves. Perhaps they could install escape pods. So far, no realistic application has been proposed, but as Sundance would say, “keep thinkin Butch. That’s what you do best.”

Q: Do you guys and gals always have the landing down stone cold (assuming no gear malfunctions), or are there some where you’re like, shit, we could’ve bounced right off the runway on that one?

A: Actually, just like driving cars, some are good, some less so and once in a while there’s a guy that shouldn’t be on the road. In the airline business the last would be extremely rare. But it doesn’t take much to go from perfect touchdown to ‘holy sh#& batman!’

Q: What would you say are the most coveted routes for pilots worldwide and why?

A: Aah, the dreamy world of free travel to beautiful exotic places. The term “livin the dream”, spoken facetiously, is way overused in my business. Most pilots choose routes for pay and accommodations. Some have friends or activities at the layover. Rarely do pilots covet, say, the Beijing flight so they can visit the Great Wall again and again.

Q: After you touch down on a landing, you hear what (I think) are called the “reverse thrusters.” I know the plane has an insane amount of inertia when it lands and you obviously need the reverse thrusters to slow down/stop, but what the hell is a reverse thruster and if the engines are still spinning in a direction to move the plane forward, how do they all of a sudden spin in the other direction to help you slow down…or is it a separate part of each jet engine?

A: Reverse thrust is used to help slow the airplane on the runway while at high speed. Using reverse causes less break wear which is good, but is never necessary to safely stop the airplane. The brakes alone are required to be good enough to get the job done. Reversers don’t spin the engines backward but turn the exhaust thrust forward using blocker doors and openings in the cowl (engine skin) to allow exhaust to do a quick u-turn as it comes out the back of the engine.

After the blocker doors are in place, the pilot increases power shooting exhaust out the back of the engines which gets redirected forward. It’s not highly effective but does help some, especially at higher speeds.

Q: Please describe just how much control a pilot exercises over, say, landing the plane. I’ve heard that computers do most of the heavy lifting with regard to not just calculating, but also executing on an approach (taking into consideration all of the information available, ie windspeed, etc). Is it really as hands off as it sounds?

A: Ever since the dawn of jet airliners autopilots and integrated navigation systems have carried the “heavy load” for pilots. In fact pilots have become very friendly with these flight deck interlopers naming them “George” and “Fred”.

George keeps the airplane steady and smooth, something that is very touchy and difficult for a pilot to do smoothly at high altitudes. Fred has navigating abilities that keep pilots from landing in Havana when the customers thought they were going to Miami. Now days Fred has triple redundant GPS with added backup to keep us on course within a foot or two all over the world. George and Fred can now even talk to each other.

So far the only mutiny news has been squelched as just rumor. An autopilot can actually land the plane and hold it on the center of the runway, but the pilot workload is actually increased not made easier for that type of landing. Also, there’s no glory in letting George get the landing.

Computers have changed the way we fly airplanes, but the workload hasn’t decreased, it’s just changed form.

Q:Ever see that movie Fight Club? Is it true what they said that the oxygen is really just given to keep people calm and mellow when/if the plane loses altitude/nosedives?

A: I’m not sure of your Fight Club reference. I promise that we do not mess with customer psyche by doling out oxygen to suit us. At normal cruise, the cabin air is like breathing in Denver (without the smog). If the oxygen masks drop, it’s because the air is now like the top of Vail or higher.

Q: I understand that turbulence isn’t really that dangerous, but it’s hard not to feel alarmed when the plane is bouncing around all over the place. Can you explain exactly what’s happening when the plane flies through an area of turbulence and why it’s not as risky as it feels?

A: Turbulence isn’t dangerous unless it’s extreme, so try the best you can to stay relaxed when it gets rough on your plane. The best answer I can give you about turbulence is an analogy, not scientific, and its similarity to riding in a boat. On smooth water the boat ride is like sweeping across glass.

But as the water gets choppy, the ride can be very bouncy. Still safe but not so comfortable. From the shore you see the chop and say to your friend with a boat, “thanks, but maybe some other time”. Air is very similar to water, though not as dense, and you can’t see the chop. There you are, stuck in an airplane wishing you were on shore. No danger, but no fun either. The biggest danger for us is the ‘puke factor’. One person gets sick, then others smell it and they get sick, etc…

And that’s all for Round 1 of Ask A Pilot, folks – ask your questions in the comments below and Lance will select a handful to answer next Monday.

Photos: author So many things to miss about Mexico.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have just signed my first lease in the United States in six years.

Six years.

That includes seven months trekking across South America, eating empanadas from baskets on buses and contemplating – alone and ecstatic – those wild Patagonian ranges; a stint teaching on Reunion Island in times of chikungunya, walking past the banyan trees everyday and following up morning runs with plunges into the Indian Ocean; the School of International Training teaching course in Oaxaca, Mexico, and the subsequent encounter with my future husband (a chance meeting in café Nuevo Mundo, a weekend in the mountains, and here we are four years later); a long year in Beijing trying to teach Chinese students to argue (“your own point of view! Unique! Controversial! Different from the rest!”), biking the clogged, polluted, endlessly mystifying streets and stopping for tall 5 yuan Yanjings; and the last two years, writing, back in Oaxaca with occasional ventures into the Sierra Norte or even all the way out to London.

But now, it’s back to the no-longer-so-familiar United States, and I’m terrified and thrilled. I’ll be starting the MFA Program in creative nonfiction at The University of Pittsburgh in the fall.

So this is one major development from your (sometimes) humble editor; the other is that I’m now the editor in chief of Glimpse.org, where I’m working with the Spring 2010 Glimpse Correspondents and getting the Fall 2010 Glimpse Correspondents Program going. If you haven’t applied yet, you should! You’ll get paid to work with a team of editors to develop a body of professional, published work.

Here at Abroad, meanwhile, we want your submissions! Heather Carreiro (Matador Abroad’s superstar intern) and I would love to see more stories about teaching abroad, international education programs and degrees, language learning, study and work abroad, and expat life.

In particular, we have calls for submissions out for:

Learning Experiences Around The World

How You Learned A Language

Tales From The Frontier Of Expat Life

and…

A Day In The Life Of An Expat

We also, however, welcome submissions related to any of the areas mentioned above. Please send queries or completed stories to sarah@matadornetwork.com.

In the meantime, safe travels, and a sincere thanks to all of you for being part of the community here at Matador.

Feature Photo: adpowers
Photo: web4camguy

You’ve been abroad and now you’re home. You’re more worldly, more cultured, and excited to share your experiences with your friends and family. You feel like a changed person, but the problem is, everyone else is exactly the same. And not only that, they expect you to be the same, too.

So how do you relate to them without coming across as braggy or snobby? Here are some suggestions from a kid who hasn’t been abroad yet, but who knows what it’s like to hear never-ending tales about Brazilian carnivals, Italian wine, and Australian rugby matches.This brings us to our first piece of advice:

1. Don’t go on and on and on and on.

Your friends and family are interested in your abroad experience, but that doesn’t mean you have to start every sentence with, “When I was abroad… ” followed by an hour-long narrative. People only want to spend so much time hearing stories and looking at pictures. Remember, no matter how fascinating an experience was for you at the time, not all experiences make for interesting stories.

Think twice before you: Turn a discussion about what kind of pizza your friends should order into a half-hour ramble about Thai stir fry.

Instead: Keep your stories specific, rather than just vaguely commenting on how nice this museum was or how awesome that monument was. Consider inviting your friends to a slideshow, during which you can share all the highlights of your experience during an allotted amount of time. Or, let your friends learn about your experience in their own time by sharing pictures and stories online.

2. Don’t pretend to be from your host country.

Yes, spending a semester in another country does help you get to know that country. Yes, you adopted new practices and tried new things. Still, let’s not lose perspective: You’re not actually from your host country. So while we encourage you to find ways to integrate your new knowledge into your life at home, remember that you can’t bring it all back with you.

Think twice before you: Greet your friends with two kisses on each cheek or send them off with a “ciao!”

Instead: Connect with people from your host country on campus or in your community if you’re feeling nostalgic. That way, you can continue learning about their culture and keep practicing some of those cultural customs that you miss.

3. Don’t act “holier-than-thou.”

One of the most exciting things about living abroad is being exposed to different tastes, perspectives, and practices. Sometimes this means reevaluating your own, whether that results in a newfound appreciation for quality coffee or newfound horror over the quantity of plastic bags that your compatriots use at the grocery store. Still, nobody wants to be lectured to, or hear you bash their tastes.

Think twice before you: Say something like, “I can’t believe you take 10-minute showers,” or, “I can’t believe I have to drink boxed wine again. We never drank that in Florence.”

Instead: Find positive ways to channel your newfound interests. Rather than lecture to your friends about water waste, take action by starting or joining a student group. If you want your friends to appreciate quality wine, take them to a nearby vineyard or a wine tasting. Trust us, they will have a lot more fun actively partaking in your interests than hearing you rant.

4. Don’t flaunt it.

It’s important to remember that it’s not possible for everyone to go abroad. There are factors that hold many people back, like financial restraints, academic requirements, or family matters. You’ve been afforded a great opportunity that isn’t necessarily available to everyone, even though it should be.

Think twice before you: Say something like, “Going to Denmark was the greatest experience of my life. You really need to get out of the country, Colin.”

Instead: Remember how lucky you are to have had this experience, and be sensitive when sharing stories with someone who hasn’t been abroad yet. You can also get involved in campus-level or national initiatives to expand study abroad so that more people can have the opportunity that you did.

5. Don’t hate on the United States.

Yes, it can be hard to settle back into your old American life. Maybe it seems boring and unexotic, or maybe new things suddenly bother you—the pace of life, the individualistic mentality, the mass consumption. But the fact is, there are many things that are wonderful about the United States, and they should not go unnoticed or unappreciated.

Think twice before you: Spend your weekend sulking in your dorm room or in your parents’ basement, complaining about the inferiority of your native country.

Instead: Walk through a new neighborhood, find a new restaurant, meet a new person. Go on a road trip with your friends, or take a cheap flight to somewhere you’ve never been. Sometimes we forget about how many cultural enclaves exist right here in our own country: Take time to explore them. Bring that eagerness to learn and explore home with you. And if you don’t always like what you find, use your newly expanded perspective to figure out how to make things better.

Community Connection

This piece was written by Colin May, an intern at Glimpse.org. Matador has recently acquired Glimpse.org and we strongly encourage you to head over there and check out Glimpse’s feature stories, articles, blogs, and tips.

Photo: weeta

South Africa

Though the first language of many white South Africans is English, don’t be fooled into thinking that means you won’t need a translator. Certain phrases whose meanings no longer have any relation to their American equivalents have seeped their way into the national vocabulary.

“Epic fail” is used 100% more frequently than I’ve ever heard it in the United States. “Hectic” refers to anything from a dance club to a T-shirt. And if anyone tells you that they’ll do something “now,” you better be ready to wait a while. “Now” means pretty much anytime in the future. “Just now” might mean soon-ish, or it might mean they really just want to get rid of you. If they say “now now,” you actually might be in business!

Courtesy of: Leona Rosenblum

Brazil

While speaking to a friend back home in Portuguese, he asked me: “Está ficando com alguém lá?” “Ficar” means lots of different things, but its basic meaning is to remain or to stay. So, I replied, “Sim com uma familia.” (Yes, with a family.)

I had just told him that I was making out with a family. Ficar com (with) is to make out. Ficar em (in) is innocent. If you don’t want to make people think rather badly of you, you can say, “Fico na casa de uma familia.” (I’m staying at a family’s house.)

Courtesy of: Christina Briscoe

Britain

A linguistic anomaly in England, rhyming slang supposedly developed as an idiom of resistance in the rougher parts of East London – to confuse the cops and unwanted outsiders. The idea is to substitute for one standard English word a different rhyming word or phrase, then shorten as necessary.

The “Wight way to rabbit,” then, would be “the Isle of Wight (right) way to rabbit and pork (talk).” You might also hear someone ask you to take your “plates off the Gable,” that is, your “plates of meat (feet) off the Clark Gable (table).” I’ve actually heard people use rhyming slang quite a bit in London. Try it out yourself, but only in the right company.

Courtesy of Marshall Worsham

Japan

One of my jobs at the school where I worked in southern Japan was writing letters to students each week. I had up to 80 student journals to read and respond to, and students were often amazed at the massive pile of notebooks I’d be working through at lunch.

They’d often make a strong-guy gesture (flexing a bicep) and say, “Fight!” This confused me at first, but I soon learned that it was a rough translation of the Japanese “Ganbatte!” meaning, roughly, “Do your best!” or “keep it up!” Or, if one is attending a sporting event, “go team!”

Makes you feel like a champion every time you hear it. Even if you’re just pushing a red pen.

Courtesy of: Saleem Reshamwala

Malawi

To travel like a local, forget the names listed on the map. The capital Lilongwe is known colloquially as “Ls” and Blantyre, Malawi’s largest city, is “BT.” These epithets make sense. But a more peculiar moniker belongs to Zomba, which Malawians call “Texas.”

No, Zomba is not enormous or fiercely independent or inhabited by large numbers of cowboys on horseback. But as the colonial-era capital, Zomba had a disproportionately white population. Never mind that those whites were British — apparently nothing evokes visions of whiteness like Texas, and thus the designation.

Courtesy of: Rebecca Jacobson

Community Connection

Add your Insider Tip to Glimpse. Applications for the Fall 2010 Glimpse Correspondents Program are also now open! Have you applied yet?

Photos: author

Nick Rowlands:

I love Farsi – it’s mellifluous and haunting. I really like Siwi too (a Berber language spoken only in the Siwa Oasis near the Egypt-Libya border) which is also very sing-song.

It’s funny, though, because so much seems to depend on who is speaking! I lived in Poland, and some Poles sound like they are chewing gravel when they speak, whereas some speak in such a beautiful, soft cadence that it turns my legs to jelly. Now I’m wondering how much this correlates with my perception of the speaker.

I also like Egyptian Arabic. It’s by no means a beautiful language, and it often sounds (especially as spoken in Cairo) as though people are shouting at each other, when in fact they are simply having a conversation. It is, however, slangy, adaptable, and full of rich, earthy expressions. My favorite one translates as “If hair was important, it wouldn’t grow out of your arse” (I’m bald)!

Dannbob:

I love Lebanese Arabic; it’s much softer than other Arabic dialects and they sprinkle in French and English along with it.

jclum3:

I have to say both Portuguese and French are my favorites. Both are beautiful to hear and speak. I love the way they make your cheeks feel after a long conversation.

Photos: author

But I have to disagree with a lot of you; I’m not a big fan of Arabic. My mother is Middle Eastern so I grew up on a bit of it when family was in town. Way too aggressive for my taste. But I guess it’s an acquired taste; that’s what my mom used to say.

Neha:

My vote goes to Urdu (I’m not sure but I think it’s close to Farsi; I think they have the same roots). The language is lyrical and tailor-made for poets; even the blandest statement sounds rich. And then there is French. But more than French itself, I love the French speaking English. Absolutely delicious!

Sara C:

Farsi, in my opinion, is the most beautiful language I don’t understand.

I also love Hindi – I feel a weird familiarity with it, and it’s probably the only language where, suddenly, without any formal instruction, I started to realize, “hey, I understand what they’re saying…!”

Oh, and Welsh. It’s not “beautiful”, per se, but I find it extremely quirky and fascinating – kind of like what someone else said about Egyptian Arabic. Slangy, informal, and a little bit hobbit-ish. My ears strain to figure out what kind of hilarious joke they must be telling.

Telse:

Lithuanian and Ukrainian sound soft and melodious. I also love hearing Finnish speakers. I don’t understand any of these languages, but they still sound beautiful.

And German will always have a place in my heart. Not exactly melodious, but it sounds so COOL!

pastor_riel:

I was waiting to see if anyone mentioned Romanian…my favorite language! It sounds so beautiful! It’s a blend of strong, confident Slavic tempered with the passionate, rhythmic flow of a romance language. In short, it sounds pretty damn sexy when spoken. And listen to how they roll their rrrr’s!

Community Connection

Please share your perspective on the world’s most beautiful language in the comments below. For me, it’s Spanish every time, because I feel like a kitten rolling around in a big pile of catnip every time I speak it. It’s flexible and full of energy and when I speak it the words come flying off my tongue before I know I’m sayin’ em.

Feature Photo: Muffet Photos: Lance Meade

Flying is an unavoidable part of traveling abroad, unless you’ve got the time, money and gusto to ply the oceans via cargo ship. For most people, it’s the equis, unspoken part of the journey. It’s the part that’s not written about; the alternately nerve-wrecking and crushingly boring transition zone of a journey that tends to quiet one into a contemplative, reflective state about the place and people left behind and the place and people ahead.

Flying also frightens many travelers – more than most would like to admit – into fraught states plagued by regrets and wishes and a desperate grip on the flimsy armrest. I, for one, am terrified of flying. One round of awful turbulence, which had the not-so-calm pilot saying “Flight attendants! Stop all cabin service! In your seats, now!” cemented this terror and I now suffer flights through a haze of dramamine, beer, and vague horror.

So with my fellow sufferers – and anyone who travels abroad and has to go through the ritual of rising and descending 30,000 feet – in mind, I’m introducing the Ask A Pilot series. You can ask your questions in the comments below, and we’ll choose one each week and send it along to Lance Meade, our go-to, unabashed, truth-telling pilot with a veteran’s stories. Here’s a word from Lance:

It’s my belief that everyone, especially intelligent educated responsible people, would never fly without some apprehension. When you climb on a Boeing 777 you’re handing over control of your well-being and longevity (your life) for the opportunity to ride in an aluminum tube hurling through the stratosphere at nearly the speed of sound, surrounded by more kerosene than half a dozen tanker trucks full, controlled by a couple of strangers whose only qualification you’re sure of is that they’re wearing cool sunglasses and stripes on their shoulders.

I’m one of those strangers. As a pilot for a major carrier for more than twenty-five years, over thirty on jet airliners, I’ve been flying airplanes since I was six and seriously since sixteen. It’s in the blood. Flying airplanes can be exciting and rewarding, but mostly it’s the tedious management of fragile egos and sitting on your tail for many hours.

I plan to be brutally honest with you all. There are aviation facts that can sound worse than they are if not handled well. Unfortunately,I’m not known for softening the impact. I’m not good at lying either, so if it’s the facts you want, go ahead and ask away.

Over the years I’ve seen some fun stuff. While flying some NBA stars to to the all star game I saw a 7′4″ center in a middle coach seat while a little 5′8″ guard lounged in a 1st class seat. There was the Friday evening hooker flight LAX to Vegas and the unforgettable 9/11 flight from BOS to SFO. They chose the LAX flight next to me.

There was the poor lady who needed a hospital when we were over Baffin Bay, in northern Canada, hours from the nearest airport (she made it) and the flight attendant who collapsed during our approach to LA, quickly changing a routine landing into an emergency.

Before coming to the airlines, I flew freight in old used up B-727’s.One was the airplane DB Cooper jumped from. Landing gear failures were pretty common in those old planes; that is, gear problems where special procedures were needed to get the gear down and locked. Later, while an airline pilot, we had a similar gear failure ending without incident, though that was the end of one flight attendant’s career. She even took a train home.

Please leave your questions for Lance in the comments below.

We’ll choose one each week and publish it and Lance’s answer as part of the “Ask A Pilot” series.

Feature Photo: Mike LichtPhoto: Penelope Jolicoeur

Ever had one of these days?

Photo: Zingaro! I am a gypsy too

Japan

On Valentine’s Day in Japan, girls buy boys chocolate. Boys buy girls … nothing. Sorry, that’s just the way it is. BUT, fellas, don’t think the Japanese chocolate industry is going to let you off that easy. Exactly one month later (March 14th) is White Day, when boys buy girls white chocolate. I once heard that the rule of thumb is that men should spend twice as much on White Day as the women spend on Valentine’s Day. If your budget’s tight, it might be a good time to plead cultural ignorance. Though the barrage of White Day advertisements might make that a bit hard to believe…

Courtesy of: Saleem Reshamwala

Laos

It is illegal for a foreigner to have sex with a Lao person, unless they are legally married. If you plan to, you risk being deported, or worse–spending time in a Lao prison. It is not unheard of for police to participate in extortion schemes where unsuspecting tourists are caught with a woman in their guesthouse room. Better not risk it, or make sure you know whom you are going home with after a night at the disco.

Courtesy of: Gabriel Shaya

Norway

If you want to buy a drink for the girl at the end of the bar, know that it is an investment. With the price of alcohol so high, the gesture implies you’d like more than a wave and some small talk. Dole out your gifts carefully because, in Norway, a free drink is not a frivolous gesture.

Courtesy of: Patrick McCue

Malawi

Displays of affection are common in Malawi, but you’re more likely to see them among members of the same sex than between men and women. Men hold hands while walking down the street or strolling through the market. Women are demonstrative as well, exchanging high fives, braiding a friend’s hair, and slapping each other’s shoulders genially while laughing. Do not, however, misinterpret these displays — homosexuality is illegal in Malawi and punishable by a maximum 14 years in prison. Men and women who hold hands or kiss in public won’t meet penalty, but such behavior is unusual and probably best to avoid.

Courtesy of: Rebecca Jacobson

Photo: cjbsaw

Egypt

For many Egyptians, the concept of a group of girls and guys being close platonic friends is beyond foreign. You’ll have to repeatedly explain to your friends that none of the guys are “yours.” Meanwhile, you might want to let some people assume you’re together. You’ll generally be left alone if you are (or claim to be) married. When traveling alone in Cairo I switched my ring to my right ring finger, indicating that I was married or seriously spoken for. Once strangers noticed this, they usually didn’t persist with unwanted advances.

Courtesy of: Delia Harrington

Mongolia

It’s not uncommon for a Mongol and a foreigner to go on a date, but be forewarned. If you’re a guy and a Mongol sees you walking with a Mongolian woman at night, it wouldn’t be a total surprise for him to give you a hard time and maybe even throw a punch. If you get pushed around for being with a Mongolian, show that you’re not messing around and they should leave you alone. Just keep it civil.

Courtesy of: Lindsay Myron

Community Connection

All of these tips come via Glimpse.org. Studying, living, or traveling abroad? Submit your own tip to Glimpse.

Applications for the Fall 2010 Glimpse Correspondents Program are now open! Have you applied yet?

Photo: author

Smells good. Smells like sausage. No, wait wait wait – not just sausage, chorizo. Yes, mmm, chorizo with eggs, mmmm, those soft creamy eggs with the tang of that red sausage, meaty, creamy, wrapped in a warm tortilla.

Ow! Damn. And she’s yanking me again. Always in such a rush at this hour, ready to start the jog up the steps and onto the hill. I’m already breathing hard, looking at her expectantly, and at the same time keeping an eye out for the stray cats that dot these stairs, thin and bony and mean as hell but oh so delightful to chase up fences if I get a chance. She doesn’t like it, though, because then the señoras with tough white braids and brooms come out and give her those stern glances.

The air here in this mountain valley is fresh and strong, with character and depth and presence. It smells like cool, soft pine needles and sweet flowers, the big pink and orange flowers that look like loosely pursed lips and have the goofy tassles in the middle. Between the leaps up the stairs I also distinguish the faint stink of exhaust from city buses, the smoke of cooking fires, and the flat, warm, grainy scent of tortillas puffing up on the clay grills they call comales.

We make our rounds on the Fortin, up the steep mountain path fringed with herbs – fennel, thyme, and rosemary – and then back down and around the dirt road, kicking up little poofs of that ubiquitous terracotta dust, taking in the wide-rimmed bowl of bristling city beneath us. I take glorious flying leaps at the birds and almost get a gecko.

At 8 the sun here starts to pound from the sky like an opera singer going full force, and I have to steal moments in patches of shade when I get a chance. The light comes barreling down out of that cocky blue sky all pride and confidence and fills the landscape with great triangles and squares and heaps of itself, creeping in beneath tree branches and blasting walls with high notes.

We go to the market. Here I smell furiously, as much as I can as I’m dragged along towards the juice stand. There’s the sharp ticklish smell of cherry tomatoes, the intense perfume of mint and basil, the vague, earthy scents of squash flowers and zucchinis. The blackberries practically sock me in the nose, fat and fresh and reeking of cloying sweetness. The mangos are a balm, plush and lovely, their scent gentle and soft like a blanket.

I wait while she gets her juice. It’s green and blurry, full of stuff. I think there are raisins and pecans in there, and spinach. She sips it from the bag while we walk home. Traffic clots in the streets and cars honk and occasionally people gape out their windows at me and I gape back and secretly chuckle. She chuckles too. A man whistles nearby and I turn sharply to look at him. Knock it off, buddy. He does.

Kids in school uniforms come in loose knots up the sidewalk, estorbando as they say in Spanish (blocking the way, but there’s really no translation. Estorbando conveys a different kind of blocking, one born of the type of lingering and eventually-getting-there behavior they don’t really have in the U.S). The girls are pretty with long wavy hair and black Mary Janes, and they laugh. Their white shirts are wrinkled and haphazardly worn over plaited skirts. They eat chips out of a bag. The boys make ridiculous sounds, like monkeys or wild pigs, trying to impress them. They have dark hair whose waves they try to suppress with gel. It mostly doesn’t work.

The sounds make me want to paw at my ears: the gas truck, its clanging chains and bells to alert the neighbors to its presence, the Agua Super Agua, Agua Super Agua, Agua Super Agua through the bullhorn of the water truck again and again, the rickety pick-ups and chugging VW bugs and old motos all taking a tope (speedbump) at the same time. The church bells’ sad sing-song.

I’m grateful when we round the corner to our cobblestone, dead-end street and head uphill. I give a glance or two back, catch the sprawling grid of narrow streets, the colored buildings, the distant bulk of mountains turning purple under the morning’s bright light, and I think I can almost make out the plumes of meat-flavored steam from taco stands. Sigh. I wish. Maybe tomorrow she’ll let me have one. Today, I’ll settle for a few sips of water and a nap at her feet.

Feature Photo: ctd 2005 Photo: aemaeth

Matador is sponsoring a sweet contest for language lovers and learners at the Spanish-English conversation exchange site Lenguajero. If you’ve ever wanted to be an internet language rock star, here’s your chance – read on for more info. Below is the press release from August Flanagan, Lenguajero’s owner:

Lenguajero.com is running a community based audiocast contest in which Spanish and English speakers from all over the world will submit a 4-8 minute long audiocast (mp3 format) about one of these topics:

1. Something interesting in your local culture, local slang, or an
interesting place in your city or country.

2. Your favorite…book, movie, hobby…(you decide).

Members of the Lenguajero community will vote for their favorite audiocasts, and the two winners (one English speaker and one Spanish speaker) will each receive a $75 USD gift card to the winners choice of Amazon.com, iTunes, or
Mercado Libre, as well as several fantastic language learning programs.

Lenguajero will also be offering the winners and runners up the chance to record and publish their own audiocast series that are engaging, informative, and educational.

The contest is running now, and ends at 11:59 p.m. April 16th, 2010. For more contest information, or to submit an entry go to the Lenguajero website.

There are already several fantastic submissions including a great 4 minute tutorial on all the different uses of the word “huevo” in Mexican Spanish.

****

Yes, readers – that last one was from yours truly and her Mexican partner, testing out their podcast prowess.

The contest rocks as an opportunity to get yourself and your name out there if you have a language learning site, you love learning and exploring languages, or you just want four minutes of fame talking about your favorite movie.

Photo: Fotos China de Jorge Santiago

Dear Abroad Readers,

You, I believe, are language learners. You’re at the very least language curious. You try and wrap your mouths around the tones in Mandarin and fearlessly stake your dignity on the precarious pronunciation of a phrase of Japanese slang. You tackle Arabic, Portuguese, Swahili, Spanish. You have, as I’ve realized reading our fierce and committed comment threads, deeply entrenched and passionate opinions about language learning.

I want to hear your stories about struggling with new languages, stumbling forward and finding your identity, your voice, your comfort zone and finally, ultimately, your fluency in another tongue. You don’t even have to be “fluent” in an academic sense, speaking clearly and smoothly with few errors; you can simply have learned how to navigate another language and how to understand and make yourself understood.

I want the stories of how you went from gaping uncertainty to those intuitive leaps of understanding, those breakthrough conversations (even if it was just, finally!, ordering a beer correctly) and what tricks, strategies, or unconscious tactics you used to get there.

Please try to keep submissions under 1,500 words, and avoid Beginner’s Insert Language Here study tips. I want to hear personal, individual stories about the journey you took to learn a language. Think of it as a linguistic travel narrative, charting your itinerary and your explorations into the foreign conjugations and word orders.

Send submissions to sarah@matadornetwork.com with “How I Learned _______” in the subject line.

Cuidense mucho,

Sarah

Photos: author

This past weekend I took an epic road trip from Oaxaca City to a remote bay near Huatulco for the wedding of two of my best friends. I was their (unofficial) minister; Jorge was their photographer. They invited approximately fifty friends and family members down to a small beach with an open-air restaurant, a rustic bar, and a number of dreamy cabañas scattered around the hillsides.

Three kilometers of unpaved, bumpy, winding, vertiginous road led to the cabañas, the restaurant, and the glassy jade bay giving out onto the Pacific. After tottering in in an enormous, wobbly passenger van, all of us sucking up sharp breaths of air, we didn’t leave for four days. There were Bloody Mary’s, there was phosphorescent plankton, there were quiet mornings with nothing but faint pinks, greens, and oranges, there were bird songs and waves and millions of stars.

Photos: author

I had to think about sea urchins in order not to cry as my friends gave their vows and I pronounced them husband and wife.

Like all road trips, this one came complete with about 8,952 unexpected mini-adventures. Here is a glimpse at Oaxaca’s Pacific Coast by the numbers.

Bottles Of Wine Transported In Ginormous Van: 40

Bottles Of Alcohol Transported In Ginormous Van: 20

Number Of Strange Bathroom Noises Heard During The Night At Pochutla’s “Best” Hotel: 30+

Topless Old Men In Boxers Observing Morning Traffic From Rooftops In Pochutla: 1

Number of Geckos Observed In Hammock Outside Room: 10

Number of Scorpions Inside Room: 1

Bottles Of Scorpion Mezcal Consumed: 1

Fish Tortas Eaten: 4

Number of Family Members Crying During Wedding Ceremony: 3

Number of Teary Post-Vow Wedding Kisses: 3

Beers Consumed In Highly Emotional State: 4

Siestas Taken Inside Mosquito Nets: 3

Bottles Of Wine And Alcohol Loaded Into Van For Return Trip: 0

Smelly Hitchhikers From Albuquerque Picked Up En Route: 1

Miles Traveled With Smelly Hitchhiker: 20

Pesos Required To Fill Gas Tank: 700

Alternative Tiny Mountain Roads Taken To Avoid Protest Roadblocks: 2

Number Of Bulldozers Clearing Narrow Unpaved Curves On Tiny Mountain Roads While Cars Wait To Pass: 1

Times Looked Down Out Driver’s Side Window To See Massive Drop Off Cliff: 5

Number of Military Checkpoints Encountered : 2

Searches Performed : 0

Number Of Soldiers Playing Dice As Our Van Cruised By Unnoticed: 7

Roadblocks Encountered On The One Road To Oaxaca: 3

Number of Cars Driving Aimlessly Through Desert In Hopes of Finding Alternative Routes: 7

Cacti Hit While Maneuvering Van Through Roadless Desert To Avoid Roadblocks: 20+

Cows Narrowly Avoided While Maneuvering Van Through Roadless Desert To Avoid Roadblocks: 3

Topes (speed bumps) Unsuspectingly Slammed Driving Through Tiny Pueblos To Avoid Roadblocks: 5

Random Turns Made Into Blocked Streets In Bumper-To-Bumper Traffic In Oaxaca: 3

Cars Hit While Backing Up In Ginormous Van In Tiny Oaxacan Streets: 0

Charge To Rental Van For Cactus-Tope-Hitting-Offroading-Mountain Adventures, in Pesos: 0

Minutes After Arriving Home That Two Dogs Passed Out In Imperturbable Slumber: 1

Total Hours Driven On National Strike Day: 12

Total Hours Drive Normally Takes: 6

Negra Modelos Consumed In Exhausted Stupor: 4

Minutes It Took To Miss Thrill Of The Road: 5

Photos: Fotos China

Every morning in Beijing we were missing something.

“Hey! Did you eat all the eggs?!”

“Shite! No milk?!?”

“Oh, maaaaaannnn. We’re outta coffee.”

“Where did those little cookies go?! Where are those little butter cookies?!?”

Without fail. We’d do a halfhearted doomed search around the kitchen and then there’d be the inevitable battle over whose turn it was to venture out into the frigid hazy morning and try to scrounge up the Chinese vocabulary to get whatever we were lacking.

“You go. C’mon, I’ll make the bed and the coffee and—“

“No, you go! You’re the one that mowed down all the cookies yesterday.”

“Please, nooo, it’s so cold…”

I always lost. Basically because Jorge and his photographer’s attention to detail make a better cup of coffee.

Photos: Fotos China

So I piled on sweater and jacket and scarf and hat and coat and fumbled around for the keys and clunked down the freezing concrete coal-dust covered stairs out into the Chinese morning. Most of the time it was gray — a vague, yellowish gray — and cold.

Making that venture out into the street in China felt nothing like stepping outside anywhere else. Rather, it felt like tentatively emerging from one’s warm wireless-equipped spacecraft onto an alien planet. No matter how many mornings I left the house on some dumb errand it felt equally, strangely the same.

Now, those brief morning walks have become one of those defining rituals that have etched themselves into my brain to be forever associated with China, and the street scene in the morning will still be what pops to mind in 5, 10, 20 years when I think about the surreal year I spent in Beijing.

Moving around so often, I’ve found that what I take with me are symbols that have formed semi-consciously in my mind. The literary term is metonymy—using a small part to represent the whole. This is what ends up happening to me when I leave a place; my mind and my memory resort to metonymy, attaching to certain symbols which come to represent the whole.

The men playing chess under massive trees by the beach in La Réunion symbolize the island and my seven months there. The light afternoon clouds and the salsa blaring out of tiny bars symbolize Oaxaca, and taxi rides past brightly colored boxes of houses and piles of oranges and pineapples will always symbolize Mexico. The morning walk symbolizes Beijing.

Photos: Fotos China

These things aren’t necessarily central to my life in any of these places, but the symbol factory seems to operate on a different level; searching for symbols based on the same subtle, deeply personal criteria that attract one to a particular smell or type of light or smile for reasons she can’t quite grasp.

Thinking of Beijing now, I remember the half-drowsy feeling of turning onto the street and heading to the Muslim cart for sesame bread or the Dia for eggs or the bakery for donuts and cookies.

There are ridiculous amounts of people in the streets even at 7 and 8 a.m. Bicycles are passing and taxis are skirting around them at speeds that make me cringe. Old couples shuffle with bags full of vegetables. A garage of gray brick spills heaps of colorful garbage into the street and stray dogs roam around eating it. People spit. Girls in knee-high boots (if I never see another pair of knee-high boots in my life it won’t be long enough) giggle and link arms and eat puffy steamed dumplings on their way to class. General chaos ensues in it’s calm, inscrutable Chinese form.

And then I climb the stairs (coal-black and prison-esque) again, stamping my feet every few steps to keep the stairwell lights on, and I open the door and the apartment suddenly feels like a warm haven of love and familiarity.

Maybe I remember the morning walk for that reason—for the fact that it made our provisional, “what’s that smell coming from the drain?!?” “home feel like home. For the fact that it formed, ever so briefly, a part of who I was and what I saw and did and thought for a certain period of time, in a certain place.

Photo: Micah Sittig Feature Photo: LHOON

At 4:45 a.m. you wake to the gently rocking train and the early, absurdly early, Chinese morning light. It gets light around 4:30 now, probably because China rejects the idea of time zones in favor of national solidarity.

Waking up at quarter to five — usually the thickest slog of night with darkness and dreams at their heaviest — and seeing pale green light rising is yet another of those in-between-worlds sensations so frequent in life in China.

Waking up, you are not quite sure where and if you are. Awakening in the train is an unsettling experience. It’s odd to both fall asleep and get up in noticeable motion, like being in another, floating dimension.

Then the light and the snoring senior tour group below quickly ground you in reality, and it’s time to hit the bathroom before fifteen people try to pack it in and brush their teeth and spit over one another and pass each other in the hall and refill their tea thermoses, ah, the humanity!

Soon the masses will be filling the narrow corridors with all their odors and routines and steaming cups of hot tea and jabbing toothbrushes but now, at first light, it’s still calm, there are still feet sticking out from under the covers and snores and the steady, calm sound of the lulling train.

Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

You sit up and promptly catch yourself before you smack your head on the train’s ceiling. You have smartly chosen the top bunk in the hard sleeper class. Hard sleeper isn’t so much hard as cramped; each car contains 10 small door-less rooms which hold six beds.

These are actually quite comfy and come with big, fluffy white sheets which you want to believe are freshly laundered. The three beds that comprise one bunk have different prices; the lowest one is fifteen yuan more expensive than the highest one. This supposedly buys you space and ease except for the reality those in the hard seat classes, random passerby, stubborn grandmothers or people in top bunks usually end up using your bunk as a comfy window seat.

The middle bunk is alright but still puts you full on in the fro of the noodle-sellers and the curious onlookers and the random arm or foot and is much too central for your taste. So the top is the way to go, except for the fact that you have about a foot less head space than the other two bunks so you are constantly curling your neck into absurd S-shapes.

Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

But once you lie down you are in (relatively) peaceful serenity in your own individual universe. You can lie there and contemplate your culturally-determined top-bunk individualism. It’s not the closed door, roomy, soft sleeper compartment with four beds and fake felt roses on the little tables, but it’s not the hard seat with seeds being spit at your feet and migrant workers sleeping in your lap, either.

So you curl your head like a gummy worm to squeeze out of the bed and ease down the little ladder without stepping on anyone’s feet or head. You step into the narrow corridor, rock a little, straighten yourself out, and take in the wheat fields which are passing silently in the morning light.

The morning is hazy white and faintly dizzying, and under it the landscape seems uniform and endless. You make your way to the bathroom, where you pride yourself on your incredible stability faced with a squat toilet and a moving train. Then you splash your face with water, brush your teeth and head back to the two little fold-out seats in front of the window to watch the morning grow and the landscapes slide by.

Slowly the train wakes up around you. People stumble with crazy hair to the bathroom. Old men strut and flex and roam in their tight white long underwear. The senior tour group is up and busting out their bags upon bags of bizarre Chinese snack food. You count four bags alone with the two old ladies in the bottom bunks of your room. They’re wearing the unmistakable red caps of Chinese tour groups. Their male friends, donning the same caps, come over and crowd into the bunks for a little Chinese breakfast party.

You watch as the fiesta unfolds. They break out metal bowls and the women serve up millet congee. Then there are boiled eggs for everyone (some duck and some chicken) meticulously peeled and devoured. Then the freak parade of meats—tubed white sausages, chicken feet, and gooey unrecognizable who-knows-what. Then, refreshingly, apricots and cherries, which leave a big mound of pits on the small table. And finally little white bread biscuits out of an enormous bag that says, “Fine French Bred!” and finally, everyone slumps back in their seat to wait out the final hour to Qingdao.

Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

Whew. You, meanwhile, break out your French press to awe and astound your neighbors with coffee, that scandalous, criminal beverage. You put two scoops of grinds in the French press and fill it with hot water (available in all Chinese trains) as the senior tour group gathers round with looks ranging from outrage to amazement.

They whisper to each other and you hear the occasional “laowai” (foreigner). What’s the foreigner doing?! “Ruining her stomach, for sure!” you’re sure one woman is saying as she clucks her head back and forth. The group of red-capped elderly tourists watches for the full four minutes of brewing time until you push the French press down and serve your coffee, and they wait until you drink it—will she do it, will she do it?!?—before they lose interest.

From there on out, it’s a smooth caffeinated ride through the flat, silent landscape. Gigantic nuclear plants rise out of the haze and fade again into the disappearing wheat fields. You see huge stretches of vegetable fields where the tiny, distant silhouettes of farmers can be seen crouched and lost in work. From time to time a road appears between the ceaseless flat fields and on it is a girl on a bicycle.

Eventually grimy buildings covered in pipes and wires and ancient-looking metal machinery conquer the landscape and you know you’re getting closer. You pass a few rivers and ponds which are a green oily color straight out of animated TV shows. Patches of blue sky show and fade in the gray haze, and then you see the telltale lingering cloud ahead which indicates smog and encroaching civilization.

The train makes a final pass through a landscape that is now dominated by rusted parts and chugging factories of who knows what, and the occasional river bordered in brightly colored garbage, mostly plastic bags. The last kilometer of the train ride is the most brutal. Dozens of orange-shirted migrants, most of whom look older than fifty, are bent over hammering away on the tracks. Even the toughest-looking construction workers have clear plastic thermoses of tea.

The city begins to emerge out of piles of dust and bricks, and finally parallel tracks appear to either side and train cars block the scenery and the train grinds to a final halt. Everyone simultaneously makes a grab for luggage in a free-for-all chaos where it seems as if bags are falling from the sky and limbs are flailing everywhere, and then people book it for the doors. You heave your pack onto your back and step out into the streams of passing people, into the Chinese morning, into Qingdao.

Photo: author

In a recent World Hum piece, Eric Weiner made the claim that Turkish baths and whirling dervishes, two traditional cultural practices he enjoyed in Turkey, would not exist today if it weren’t for the support of tourist dollars.

Young Turks, he asserts, have a waning interest in these practices and therefore tourism is all that sustains them. In his view, this “inauthentic” preservation of culture and these “inauthentic” cultural experiences are better than none at all. He states that the “travel snobbery” which criticizes tourists for courting such experiences and commercializing them is “rampant, insidious, and frankly, annoying.”

To this I respond:

If we’re attacking snobbery, is it not also snobbish for a tourist to claim that he and other tourists are responsible for the preservation of culture, since the locals can’t seem to bring themselves to do it?

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with going to a Turkish bath or a Mexican dance festival or a Balinese tribal ceremony that might feel slightly – or totally – constructed for tourist consumption. But I think celebrating this as the preservation of culture is self-congratulatory and smugly condescending, and it can wind up being imperialist.

If Mexicans or Turks or the Balinese no longer value the tradition being “preserved” and have lost interest in it, or see it merely as a spectacle for foreign tourists then really, whose culture are tourists preserving, and why? And more importantly, who has the right to decide whose and what kind of culture needs to be preserved? It sounds to me like the tourist is preserving his/her desire to experience the “exotic” and the “romantic,” and not a living, vibrant and necessary part of local culture.

When a cultural phenomenon has ceased to contain significance for local people and has become an entirely commodified experience produced for tourists dollars, it has moved into that 21st century society of the spectacle.

I don’t mean to imply that we should all throw up our hands in fatalistic acceptance that culture is dead, or that it’s going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. But I also don’t think that culture is necessarily being preserved, or being preserved in a beneficial and productive way, simply because tourists pay for it. That argument inches us closer and closer to a world in which every cultural experience is something that is inherently designated for consumption, and culture is something determined more by what foreign tourists want to see and experience than by what local people actually believe in and practice.

It seems that what is bound to happen here is that Turkey could spiral off into the 22nd century, clogged with cell phones and traffic and Starbucks just like anywhere else in the world, while tourists go on paying for massages and traditional dances. And what, really, does that preserve? A certain sector of the economy? Tourists’ precious, foreign impressions of Turkish “culture”?

Weiner’s argument brings up Edward Saïd’s now familiar point about Orientalism – the West exoticizes and simplifies the East, fixing it permanently in the past and flattening its people and culture into stereotypes.

To a certain degree, cultural tourism that no longer has roots in a particular culture and that survives off of income from tourists does exactly this. Tourists go and look at a 15th century Turkey, reinforcing established notions of what Turkey should be and negating the country’s more complex and challenging modernity.

Meanwhile, the tourist dollars seem to instruct Turkey on what kind of culture it needs to have – here, you can’t protect it yourselves? We’ll do it for you. Saïd labels this process the internalizing of cultural stereotypes: tourists come in, establish what Turkish culture is via their ideas about the preservation of culture, and then hope that the Turks will internalize it.

I find the loss of traditional cultures distressing, but I don’t think that allowing traditional cultural practices to be commercialized and purchased by tourism is necessarily a positive solution, particularly when these cultural practices may hold far more meaning in the minds of tourists than they do in the daily lives of locals.

I think this solution also ignores so many of the factors that contribute to the death of traditional culture – devastating free trade agreements and the influx of multi-national corporations, the huge push of American capitalist culture overseas (particularly evident in modern Mexico), unchecked development, environmental destruction.

Tourists may keep paying for their cultural experiences in Mexican amphitheaters and Turkish hamams, in “cultural villages” in Kenya or Borneo, but that doesn’t stop the processes that devalue traditional culture and corrode it into a mere product to be consumed. The purchase of cultural preservation with tourist money also hints at a world in which someday, the Turks or the Mexicans or the Chinese might no longer have any connections to traditional culture, but tourists will still go into little bubbles and watch dances or ceremonies, pay their money, and leave, and culture will live on in tourist enclaves as an authentic, commercial simulation of what once was. Something similar like this could be happening in China, with the rise of the country’s ethnic minority theme parks.

This is the society of the spectacle at its most grim – traditional culture no longer holds intrinsic value for the people of a particular country, but inside the bubbles “preserved” by tourism tourists can buy a different, antiquated vision, a traditional culture that is no longer of importance and value to local people but has become yet another product they can sell.

I have two points here: the first is that conflating a tourist’s consumption of a traditional cultural experience with cultural preservation is dangerous. The commodification of any traditional practice for tourist consumption is something that should be considered and handled very carefully or else it threatens to divorce that practice entirely from the realm of local cultural tradition and turn it into tourist fanfare. Secondly, tourists should be very careful about claiming they have the right –and indeed, the responsibility — to preserve a culture that is not theirs. It smacks of condescension and imperialism and ignores the phenomena that contribute to the degradation and destruction of culture in the first place.

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

PocketCultures aims to “put the world in your pocket.” The site features blogs and articles from writers around the world and attempts to provide readers with a palpable, unique sense of local places and cultures. Its writers are diverse, coming from Thailand, Costa Rica, Germany, and Britain, among other countries.

PocketCultures pushes beyond the “look at this bizarre local custom!” gawking of so much travel writing to help travelers get a feel for the social and political issues a particular culture is dealing with, and the way its people eat, dress, speak and think.

It’s a site for the travel anthropologist, who wants to not only visit a place but to see the world from the perspective of people living there.

I interviewed Liz Chatburn, managing editor of PocketCultures, about the site, blogging, and traveling.

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

How did the idea for Pocket Cultures come about? Can you share its story?

We’re three co-founders and we have all traveled and/or lived in several different countries. One thing we noticed is that the ‘real version’ of a place, which you see through visiting or getting to know locals, is often quite different from the story you see from outside.

For example the Vice guide to Liberia has been getting a lot of attention recently. But what was featured in that series is not representative of the lives of most Liberians and if you talk to a Liberian or someone who has spent a lot of time in Liberia you’ll soon find that out. Actually, we’re working on a series of interviews with Liberian bloggers at the moment.

So, back to the story… we thought it would be great to create a place where people from many different places could share the ‘real stories’ of their countries with each other. We hope in this way we can make connections and help promote better understanding between people of different countries, cultures, religions and backgrounds.

So far we have contributors from nine different countries and they are all passionate about exploring different cultures and sharing their own. As well as wanting to share their cultures, some also joined because they feel their countries are not well understood or don’t get the attention they deserve from the rest of the world.

Pocket Cultures has a really interesting section called “My partner is a foreigner.” This is an area most travel blogs don’t cover. How did the idea for this section come about?

It seems that many people who spend an extended period in another country end up meeting someone!

As one contributor to “My partner is a foreigner” wrote about living in Turkey:

“One of the things that surprises me about the Turkish culture is the huge sense of hospitality, they meet you today and tomorrow you are at their home having dinner and finally it happens like me…. you get married!!!”

Being part of a cross-cultural couple has its own unique set of challenges but it also puts you in the special position of experiencing another culture though your partner. We thought this would be a fun way to explore cultural differences.

One of the things I love about Pocket Cultures is that it covers “blogs of the world” — blogs from all sorts of different places, both in English and in foreign languages. Do you think blogs are changing the way we travel and encounter foreign cultures? If so, how?

Definitely. Personally I think guidebooks are really useful and I don’t think they will be going away soon. But by reading blogs as well before you visit a new place you can see a local’s perspective and gain deeper insights into life and culture there.

The other great thing about blogs is the interaction – you can easily leave your own feedback, or start a discussion with someone on the other side of the world. So yes, for people really interested in better understanding of a different place and culture blogs are a great opportunity.

How did you begin traveling? How do you think it affected you as a person?

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

I’ve always been curious about the world, but my first real travel experience was a rail trip around Europe during the summer holidays whilst I was at university. I grew up in the UK, where you have to cross water to go abroad, so it was a totally new thing to cross borders without getting off the train!

As well as the ‘hey, there’s a whole world out there!’ moment, my travelling friend and I also met some really interesting people who didn’t speak English. It was a great feeling to be able to communicate using our (very bad) high school French and German. That was a huge motivation to carry on learning languages.

You are in an intercultural marriage; can you tell us a little about what that process has been like for you? How did you meet your husband, and what sorts of rewards and frustrations have come from being part of an intercultural couple?

We met when we were both studying in Barcelona. Deciding where to live after getting married was fun: we took a map and each marked our favorite countries. It turned out that we both liked the idea of experiencing life in Turkey – that was quite a surprise! That’s how we ended up here.

One great reward of being in an intercultural marriage is learning to be more open to different cultures and flexible about different ways of doing things. I’m definitely more laid back than I used to be. Deciding where to live is one of the most difficult things, because we cannot both live near our families. At least these days it’s easier to keep in touch with Skype, email etc.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced while traveling and living abroad? How have you overcome them (or how are you still struggling with them)?

On one hand I have friends in a lot of countries, which is great, but on the other hand we can’t hang out without someone getting on a plane, which is not so great. Making new friends takes time, so that’s always a challenge when you travel or move to a new place. It can be even more challenging to develop deep relationships with people who have grown up with a culture that’s very different to yours.

I try to be open minded towards different points of view, and meet lots of different people rather than searching out people with a similar background. It’s more difficult at first but very rewarding. Turkish people are incredibly friendly and outgoing so living in Turkey has been a pleasure in this respect.

When you think of “travel,” what’s the first thing that pops to mind?

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

Definitely food! I love trying food from different places.

Would you mind sharing your travel philosophy, or the way that you think about travel?

Interesting question! First I should say that I think everyone travels for different reasons and I don’t think there is a wrong way to travel, as long as you get what you want out of it (and don’t do any damage to the place you visit)

I believe that people all over the world have lots in common, but there are also some differences, and understanding and respecting those differences is key to getting along. So I travel to learn more about what makes a place and its people unique. I’m as happy sitting in an everyday café soaking up the atmosphere as I am seeing the sites.

What do you look for in a piece of travel writing?

The best kind of travel writing lets you picture the place whilst you’re reading. I love articles that show insights into daily life and culture: encounters between people, the atmosphere, what the food is like, what makes a place special.

Also, for me a respectful approach to potential readers from other cultures is really important. Often when reading an article I think ‘how would I feel if someone wrote this about my country?’ How we experience a place is partly filtered by our own cultural values and expectations and I think really good writing is aware of this subjectivity and acknowledges it somehow.

Community Connection

Attention Matador U students! Do you want to become a contributor to PocketCultures? The site is currently looking for regional contributors.

Photo: author

Hold on to your seats, ladies and gentlemen: it’s not just mushy peas anymore.

Well, actually, it IS mushy peas, but this time with a celeriac foam reduction and a duck egg Parmesan crostini in a martini glass on the side.

Photo: author

British food hasn’t necessarily changed; it’s just realized that hey, it can stand out on the international foodie scene, too. As Iqbal Wahhab, owner of Borough Market’s glass-walled, light-filled restaurant Roast put it, the British have just recently begun to value their own food traditions.

Photo: author

This is evident in the current foodie trends, which emphasize local legumes and veggies (lots of turnips, potatoes, celeriac, lentils, mushrooms and the inevitable peas), staple British meats (roasted Cornish hens, quail, lamb, pork belly) and of course, fish (avec or sans chips).

There are an abundance of Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants, but I’m going to set those aside for another piece since I didn’t have time to explore them, and I’d like to delve into the emerging phenomenon of traditional British cuisine.

Chefs are dressing up British fare with the type of stellar presentation and attention to detail that one might normally associate with say, Italy or Spain. The local ingredients they have to work with render wild fusion feats unnecessary, and the elaborate blending of exotic foreign cuisines that characterizes so much of American food culture isn’t as obvious in Britain.

As the aforementioned Wahab pointed out, the real work of a restaurantor at the moment is sourcing exceptional ingredients and allowing them to shine. Wild beef and lamb, Stiltons and Blues and Cheddars to make you weep, fresh local fish and oysters, creams and butters from organic British dairies.

So where to begin your foray into British food?

Borough Market

Photo: author

Any good foodie will lose herself for at least an afternoon in London’s Borough Market, wiping tears from her eyes at the gorgeousness of stacked blocks of cheese and plump, speckled free range eggs.

The setting itself is a spectacle; the area has been a marketplace since the 11th century and has that charged historical energy of a place where humans have gathered for thousands of years. With Southwark Cathedral towering stoically behind you and the labyrinth of vendors in tiny winding streets, it can feel as if you’ve drifted back to an 18th or 19th century London market day.

We talked with vendors about the rise of a foodie scene in Britain and they traced it back to the mid-1990’s, when people began expressing an interest in organic, local and seasonal food. Lizzie Vines, one of the owners of Wild Beef, a Devon-based farm which prides itself on being “more than organic” and grazing its cattle on natural, health-rich local foliage, said she’s seen her and her husband Richard’s company take off in the past ten years.

Photo: author

Wild Beef is at the forefront of a foodie movement in Britain, encouraging producers to work with the climate, the fertile soil and the local landscape and to ride the flow of seasonal changes. The result is not only a beautiful steak filled with minerals from diverse plants and grasses, but a sustainable and healthy environment.

Destinations

Community Connection to Israel

Community Connection to Mexico

Photo: author

The cheese-obsessed can also irritate the staff at Neal’s Yard Dairy for hours, grilling them about the fermentation of Brie and asking for sample after sample. I hovered around the huge, photogenic blocks of cheese absorbing them through osmosis, fantasizing about customs officials not finding them in my checked luggage. There were fat rolly-polly blocks going black and blue with age and prestige, cartoonish wedges of cheddar, soft, sighing slices of Camembert. The shop offers cheese tastings and classes.

Then there’s Northfield Farms, which specializes in beef, pork, and lamb, and sources meat to celebrity chefs like the idolized Jamie Oliver. I liked the place because the butcher, Brendan Maguire, had a killer cockney accent and was the one and only Brit in my whole stay to call me “dahlin.” He pointed out that in Britain, a farm can use pesticides 10% of the year and still be organic, and was highly critical of the organic certification process.

From what I observed, Britain doesn’t have the same fascination with the organic title as the U.S does. Local food and knowledge of where food comes from and how it’s produced seem to trump the term organic. Maguire was adamant that food labeled “wild” could never be “organic” as organic refers to food that has to be very carefully monitored and cultivated. I nodded enthusiastically partially out of agreement and partially out of fear of how the cockney accent might take me down if I ventured to disagree.

There’s also locally raised and farmed ostrich meat at Gamston Wood Farm (herbed ostrich meatball, anyone?), award-winning Welsh cheese, hot mulled wine and cider, and a beer shop, Utobeer, which has over 600 beers from around the world and is part of a push to revive British microbreweries which suffered after the major breweries took over many pubs in the 1980’s.

Photo: author

Phew. Alright. On top of all the stalls, there are also restaurants and coffee shops fitted into the industrial framework of the market. We had lunch at Wright Bros Oyster Bar, where I ate each bite of mackerel and spiced potatoes as if it were my last. If you don’t feel like sitting down or doing the restaurant thing, there are steaming pots of curries and paellas which are spooned into boxes to be eaten on the fly.

The Gastropub

Photo: author

The gastropub has become a British institution. I experienced it in Camden, a London neighborhood known for its markets and its goth/punk past. The Hawley Arms is all high ceilings, old wood, and stockinged hipsters sipping pints in front of fireplaces. I had a pint of ale, a “minty lamb” pie (mint, herbs, and organic lamb) and peas and mash. At first I thought the peas were a sort of ironic hipster joke but no, they’re apparently as inseparable from pies and mash as Mac n’ Cheese is from American childhood.

The pub, I must say, cannot be done without a pie. Pork, lamb, beef, or maybe goat cheese and sweet potato for vegetarians. The crust is distinct – strong, dense and flaky at the same time. The best pies will have a crust that can hold its own, and a steaming interior of herbs, meat and veggies. The mash should have a dark, vinegary gravy and a thick texture – nothing like the mashed ‘taters that come out of boxes in the U.S. Top the whole affair – peas, mash, pie – with a dash of vinegar.

Photo: author

You could also go the fish and chips route, although I’d recommend saving that for the latter half of a long, raucous, beer-infused evening, when sitting in the corner of a fluorescent shop with vinegar dripping down your fingers and a plate of piping hot fried food in front of you is nothing less than divine.

Gastropub fare also includes bangers and mash and bubble and squeak, which sound like zany characters in a new age cartoon but are in fact basic tenets of British cuisine. Bangers and mash are sausages and mashed potatoes, and bubble and squeak (way up there in the list of all time greatest national dish names ever) is a mix of veggies left over from a Sunday roast. The roast, exactly what it sounds like, is also a gastropub essential, usually served on Saturday or Sunday (think British, carnivorous brunch).

Photo: author

Whatever route you go, you must pair it with a pint. Then, you can take 5,000 pictures of that pint like I did, since British beer is somehow so photogenic all brown and caramel in its glass. Sadly, microbrews are hard to come across, as most pubs are run by one or another major brewery. Stella Artois, a Belgian brew, is a good standby as other ales tend to be a bit watery and are much less carbonated than American beers.

Pies and Puddings : The Essentials

Photo: author

We seemed to keep running into the same ingredients and concoctions everywhere, perhaps because the emphasis in foodie world is so much on the seasonal. Polenta was the vegetarian standby; a whiter, creamier version with Parmesan, eggplant (aubergine) and zucchini (courgette: yes, Britain is closer to France than we are).

There were halibut and mackerel cooked in butter and served with spinach and/or potatoes, and roast lamb and pork belly, falling off the bone and ever so slightly pink. Beets – beetroot, in British terms – were a popular garnish and added a great, deep sweetness to savory mushrooms and the bite of vinegar.

Warning: just about anything can be a pudding in Britain. If you see pudding on the menu, do not cringe in disgust at the thought of one of those sad little plastic puddles of artificial chocolate or vanilla. No. Pudding can be a fluffy, buttery roll, a sort of hollow and lightweight biscuit, a savory stuffing-esque concoction of meat and raisins, or a desert (sometimes menus will have a whole section labeled “puddings,” which apparently include chocolate cakes and apple strudels). When it doubt as to nomenclature, the British seem to think, call it a pudding.

Cocktail wise, it’s all about the elderberry and the bramble (a Scottish fruit that looks a bit like cassis) mixed with vodka or whisky.

Photo: author

And finally, desert. Oh, desert. I am pulling myself back from the brink of drooling pseudo-poetic rhapsody here to tell you, straight up, that desert rocks. Meringues (sometimes called “pavlovas”) look like puffy white buns, but don’t be fooled. They are brittle and explosive. It is near impossible to crack into one without causing a SMACK! and a burst of debris around the tabletop.

Apparently, according to the waitress who I’m sure disappeared a moment later to mock the clueless American tourists, it is normal to create a mini disaster area of meringue bits and pieces. You then scoop these up, coat them with cream and berries, and get to feel as if you’re not really mowing down a heavy desert because the meringue is so light it melts in your mouth.

Photo: author

The cheese, oat cakes, and chutney combo is also beautiful. Usually you’ll get four or five cheeses, oat cakes, and an assortment of sweet chutneys. I tried the fig, date and walnut chutney spread on a grainy oat cake (a small cracker) with a chunk of soft, pungent Camembert. Yes. I could not speak for a few moments. Then I came around and dug into the cheddar.

To sum up, ladies and gentlemen, don’t blow off British food. It’s coming into it’s own. The British seem to be realizing that they have some phenomenal local ingredients which, when fleshed out and dressed up just a bit, can wow the foodies that normally head on over to France and Italy to eat.

The most distinctive feature of the foodie scene in Britain might be the fact that, despite the enormous popularity of Indian food and curry, the up and coming focus is really on classic, ancient British foods. And since I’m a huge believer not only in the locavore and slow food movements, but also in the assertion that one of the best ways to get to know a culture is through eating, I highly recommend a foray into British food. A pint, a pie, a pudding – and you’ve come to know a bit of Britain.

Feature Photo: wili_hybrid

I’ll fess up – I studied abroad in Aix-en-Provence, France, an emblem of the European study abroad experience with it’s idyllic stone fountains, sidewalk cafe culture, boutiques, bright photogenic markets, and pigeon-filled plazas.

I don’t regret it; it was my first time overseas and I squeezed every inch of experience out of it. I took a week-long bike trip from Aix through the Camargues (Provençal cowboy territory). I hiked across the island of Corsica and labored for half a summer in a French vineyard. I smacked my tooth into a plaza in Naples and drove to the furthest tip of Sicily. Travel was planted in me and hasn’t stopped growing like ravenous ivy ever since.

d’n'c

But if I could recommend a study abroad experience to someone else, it wouldn’t be in Europe.

Now that I’ve traveled and lived so many other places, I understand how easy that experience was. I studied entirely in French at the Institut des Etudes Politiques, but there was always English in the background just in case; the culture, while stunningly different to me when I arrived, was navigable and familiar enough to get a feel for; the food was different enough to glamorize but not so different that it produced late night, sleepless cheese cravings.

More importantly, the school (the University of Wisconsin-Madison) set the whole thing up and walked students through it in baby steps. If I could go back in time, I’d use all that organizational help and power to go someplace which is extremely difficult to navigate bureaucratically and institutionally on one’s own – someplace, say, like Senegal, or China.

I’d like to study in these places now, but the prospect of negotiating my way alone through the Chinese university system (something which another university, this time one I was teaching for, did for me in 2007) is daunting at best.

saad_ahktar

Having professionals guide you through the process of studying and living abroad eliminates a massive bureaucratic and technical headache.

If you’re already paying tuition at a university, then studying abroad in South Africa or East Asia is like a free ticket through all the complicated hoops you’d need to jump on your own in order to set yourself up with a life in one of those places.

Then there’s the personal growth factor. Did I grow in Western Europe? Did France change me? Yes. Did it rock my world, shake the foundations of my cultural assumptions and beliefs? No. It gave me an appreciation for the little things. As Europe has so often done for Americans, it fine-tuned my senses and made me realize how much I was rushing around from stimulation to stimulation in a progress-driven frenzy.

But in comparison to the enormous blow to my ego and worldview that was one day in Beijing, that year in Western Europe was an afternoon drinking wine in the park. Same with South America. My travels there were of a very different nature than anything you’d do on most study abroad programs – I crossed the continent alone, on buses, with a budget of wads of horded coffee shop tips. I camped most of the time and hiked Patagonia on oatmeal, pasta and alfajores. Sure, it’s unfair to compare this with what’s possible within the limits of a university program.

But the experiences and the awareness of different histories, circumstances and worldviews I got out of that trip so superseded those of my year in France that I can only wonder about what I might’ve thought, done, or attempted had my first experience abroad been in Lima or Caracas.

I spent those seven months in South America testing the boundaries of my daring and independence and exploring ways to get immersed in places, to get as far from my comfort zone as possible, to connect with people of vastly different cultural backgrounds. I realized I hadn’t pushed myself that far in France because it wasn’t as necessary. South America challenged me far more than France ever had.

craigCloutier

This isn’t to say that study abroad in Latin America or Africa or Central Asia is an automatic porthole to mind-blowing travel breakthroughs. And it isn’t to say that Western Europe is incapable of stirring up such breakthroughs, or that it isn’t important or worth seeing.

But I think that if your first immersion travel experience is someplace other than Seville or London, it might have an entirely different impact. It might shape the way you see the world in more profound, troubling, and lingering ways.

The number one thing study abroad in France taught me was that there are infinite opportunities to do whatever insane thing you’re thinking about doing. Before leaving for France, I wouldn’t have ever considered living in a vineyard and working 10 hours a day to pay for a hike across Corsica. I would have thought it virtually impossible to drive a van from Cairo to Capetown, or to bike across Patagonia.

After that year, I know that if I really want to go live in Rwanda, if I really want to teach in Japan or to ride a motorcycle through Cambodia, I can do it. I’m not wealthy – I am extremely fortunate to be in good health and to have the personal and political freedom to travel if I want. I’ve paid for every travel adventure I’ve ever had by working or saving.

So my realization of the magnitude of opportunities for travel wasn’t simply a realization that I could spend money roaming continents or dappling in exoticism; it was the realization that I didn’t need to have tons of money or privilege to travel.

ninjawil

I think going someplace that is not Western Europe would reinforce this realization tenfold. It seems unfathomable to many Americans to walk across East Africa, or to live and study in a small Chinese village. Studying abroad makes this seem possible, and the realm of possibilities just keeps expanding. If you start out with an opportunity that seems frightening and difficult to fathom, imagine how vast the possibilities could seem afterwards.

Finally, and most importantly, the U.S needs people with empathy and understanding of regions outside of Western Europe.

Studying abroad is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to create consciousness of the way people think and live in many different areas of the world.

Immersing yourself in cultures that are poorly understood, feared, or dismissed in the U.S can make a world of difference in creating a more compassionate and informed future generation.

Photo: author

I’m looking for stories about expats exploring the complicated terrain of cultural differences, attempting to come into some sort of a mutual understanding.

I’d like to hear about how you navigated the ups, downs, sudden about-faces and gradual revelations of attempting to integrate yourself into another culture. Your stories could take place in the classroom, on the street from your perspective as a man or a woman newly aware of your gender in another culture, in a restaurant or a smoky kitchen, in wellies knee-deep in the mud, in a board conference room at a meeting with inscrutable colleagues, smoking a pipe around a campfire.

The point is, give us a sense of place and a sense of movement, internal as much as external. Move us through your changing perceptions as you adapt to life abroad. Please, please, avoid the maudlin and the cliché. Avoid a pretty little realization wrapped up like a Christmas gift with no tape snaking round the edges of the gift wrap. Show us the tape: the process. What cultural assumptions have you confronted? How? Where? What cultural differences have you bumped up against, have surprised you, interested you?

Please send your submissions (under 1,200 words) to sarah@matadornetwork.

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

It smelled like burning fungus. As if a whole village had collectively opened the forgotten containers of leftovers in the fridge, dumped out the contents, and set them on fire.

Outside the car sugar cane stretched for miles and miles, under a gray sky into which drifted columns of smoke. If it weren’t for the columns hinting at chugging, spewing factories, the landscape would’ve been peaceful, a tropical pastoral scene.

“What smells?” I asked.

“Caña,” said Jorge.

“That is not sugar cane,” I said righteously, “that is trash.”

It was sugar cane. I passed the cane trucks, my hands trembling at the wheel as their enormous weight heaved from side to side, sticks of cane falling out to litter the road. Once we saw one take a curve a little two quickly; it wobbled precariously for an eternal second, all its weight ready to slam down on the dirt road, before the driver righted it and drove on like nothing.

Jorge, the dog and I had come to the far northern corner of Oaxaca state, along the border with Veracruz, to take photos of a highway. Or rather, the Mexican Bank of Public Works and Services (BANOBRAS) had contracted Jorge to take photos of a highway and he had contracted me as his driver (I was to be paid in dark beer upon termination of the trip).

We had driven for five hours by the time we pulled off the federal highway to Veracruz and began jumping and jolting along the ratty, broken road through the sugar cane fields. Occasionally, we’d pass a pueblo – a ramshackle conglomeration of stores, tin-roofed houses, mud, and broken roads – our entrance and exit marked by the slam of the bumper against unmarked topes (speed bumps, which can appear anywhere and everywhere and range in size from gentle hills to massive ass-breaking wrinkles of asphalt.)

Just outside the pueblos were the cane factories. Up to then I had not associated “sugar cane” with “disgusting industrial pollution.” But there I was on the edge of a sugar cane field, taking in the scent of rot and waste and heat, watching a soot-covered factory straight out of 19th century London belch black smoke into the sky.

Backed up from the factories were trains of cane trucks waiting to be unloaded. They idled under their bulging bundles of sticks, the drivers getting drunk in nearby cantinas with broken windows. Old, weathered men with dirty wife-beaters gathered things around the train tracks. Barefoot kids cruised by on bikes. We drove on.

Finally, just as the heat had made us feel sticky, lethargic, and disgusting, we pulled up in the lucky little pueblo Banobras was smiling on. Like every other pueblo along the route, it was a heap of open-fronted stores, narrow alleyways, emaciated dogs, and trash in puddles.

We stopped to ask a woman, sitting outside of a curtained door with a couple of scruffy kids around her, where the highway was.

“Buenos tardes señora!” Jorge greeted her, “do you know where we can find the new highway?”

She crinkled up her face in confusion. “Highway?” she asked.

“Umm-hmm,” replied Jorge, “the one they just built?”

“Martina!!” she belted out to the area behind the curtain, “you know ‘bout any highway?”

A woman with kinky brown hair and full thighs in short shorts emerged from behind the curtain. “Highway?” she asked.

This situation multiplied itself several times before we realized that the citizens of this pueblo were not clued in on all the progress they were profiting from. Jorge decided to call the contact Banobras had given him, a representative of the municipal government. The contact asked us to meet him in the town square.

Like most town squares in most Mexican villages, this one was painted like a cake with blue and white frosting. A few lone men sat on benches and talked.

“Where is he?” Jorge wondered aloud. The dog, a German Shepherd completely out of place in a middle-of-nowhere tropical town, looked up at me pathetically and panted.

“I’ve gotta got to the bathroom,” I said whiningly. “I’m going to ask that guy where one is.”

I walked up to a señor with a noticeable potbelly pushing against his blue dress shirt and asked,

“Do you know where I could find a bathroom near here?”

“No hay,” he said, barely smiling under his mustache. So much for that. I thanked him anyway and turned around. Jorge, behind me, called out,

“Do you know where we can find a señor so-and-so?”

“That’s me!” the man said, and stepped forward with the puffed chest of one called to duty. How, I wondered, had this guy not been able to put together the young guy with a massive Pentax camera slung round his chest, the German Shepherd and the blond girl to figure out that maybe, just maybe, this was his photographer?

Miraculously, it turned out there was a bathroom and the man officiously ordered a pimply-faced teen to show me to it. The teen led me into the Municipal Government Office, which looked like a college frat the morning after a blowout party. Piles of folders and papers were strewn about the room, 5 peso plastic bags of salsa were dribbled here and there over (official?) documents, greasy taco wrappers overflowed from the trash cans. A heavyset woman sat amidst it all and gave me a big smile, gesturing to the door behind her.

“There’s no water!” she said cheerfully.

“No problem!” I assured her.

The bathroom scene was gruesome. I closed my eyes, held my breath, aimed for the toxic disaster of the toilet bowl, and swore to hold out next time for a patch of Earth on the side of the highway. If these were the municipal government’s facilities, I thought, what on Earth was the rest of the pueblo using?

After I’d emerged from the bathroom we piled into the car to go check out the highway. The official directed us through the labyrinth of bumpy roads composing the pueblo until we arrived at a flat stretch of asphalt parallel to the railroad tracks.

“Make sure you focus on the white line!” the Banobras rep had told Jorge. “And really show how the highway is bringing progress to the community!”

There was no white line. Scrappy dogs with their ribs showing like accordions glared up at the car. A man with a huge bundle of cut cane shuffled along the road. We pulled onto a patch of yellow grass. A few feet away, a big group of men were getting drunk.

I caught snatches of drunken babble (“gringa guera orale mira su perro ven aqui guera”) as I leashed up the dog and Jorge and his contact began walking up the road looking for a money shot.

Around me were the signs of pueblo life—men getting obliteratingly drunk, roosters (which the dog lunged at, making the drunks laugh), handfuls of wide-eyed wary kids, shacks that looked as if they might collapse at any moment from the sheer fatigue of standing all day in the heat. The sky was gray and pregnant with clouds in the late afternoon, and the air was like a bath.

The dog and I scrambled up the little gravel hill to the railroad tracks and admired the view: a thin gray line of asphalt backed by cane for miles, the ghosts of factories in the distance. I came across villagers up there, mostly women carrying eggs and babies, and realized no one was walking on the road. Just Jorge and the municipal government man far up ahead.

Thirty minutes and fifty photos later, we were carting the contact back to his ravaged office. He waved us off with a look of extreme relief to be back to his job of standing sternly before the Municipal building. We turned around and pulled out of the pueblo.

“Porquería, no?” said Jorge the second we were alone in the car. This translates more or less as “bullshit.” I wholeheartedly agreed.

“Did you focus on the white line?” I asked sarcastically.

Jorge scoffed as he tried to figure out how to photoshop out the mangy dogs and barefoot kids.

“Well,” I said, “at least we’ve got a smoother ride from here on out.”

Two minutes later, the asphalt stopped abruptly and we plunged onto a pothole-and-rock-strewn disaster of a dirt road. The car sunk and burped and slammed against the ground like a Hollywood star on a destructive binge. Progress had lasted approximately 1 kilometer. I wondered how many extra rooms the municipal government men had added to their houses with the rest of the highway.

Sometimes, I thought, all you really need to do is see; sometimes the political and social and economic realities are there laid out in everyday life and landscape and you can read them simply by being present. Travel can teach you quick and dirty. About where sugar cane comes from. About where the money for “progress” in Mexico often goes. About how quickly a highway can change, and how to pray for your life under the hulking form of a sugar cane truck soaring to the heavens with sticks.

Feature Photo: nick hobgood Photo: roblnh00d

The fact that Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines is still docking luxury cruise ships at Haiti’s privatized beaches is grotesque; but sadly, taking a wider view of international tourism, it’s not shocking. The type of harsh unconcern for the circumstances of local people isn’t an aberrance from the tourism norm, but rather the norm itself.

Privatized resorts all over the Caribbean, particularly in Cuba but also in Mexico, the Dominican Republic, and a host of other countries, often have little interest in the fate of the locals they bar from their premises with gates and armed guards.

Yes, you’ll hear the familiar rhetoric that Royal Caribbean has spouted in response to outrage over the decision to continue stopping in at Labadee beach in Haiti, where passengers tipple cocktails and jet ski on cordoned off beaches while Haitians endure mounting horror in Port-au-Prince. The cruise ships and the resort are helping the local economy; the resort at Labadee beach employs and supports more than 500 Haitians.

Photo: roblnh00d

Never mind that there have been major protests against the privatization of the beach and the fact that Haitians not serving a cocktail to a cruise goer are banned from entering; never mind that the vast majority of Haitians receive almost no economic benefit from Labadee other than the hope that they’ll someday be among the select few picked from the mass of cheap labor to work at the resort, never mind that a chunk of their natural wealth has been partitioned off for frolicking tourists. Never mind that these resorts follow the same model of privatization that impoverished the country in the last two centuries.

I know that the job situation in Haiti is desperate; according to Harper’s, the ratio of people in Haiti to the number of permanent full-time jobs there is 80:1. But is appropriating idyllic sections of coast for the exclusive use of wealthy tourists really the ideal way to develop job growth there or anywhere?

Above and beyond this, what sort of message is Royal Caribbean sending to the tourism industry when it says that docking a ship in Haiti following an unspeakable disaster, allowing passengers to fly down zip lines and soak up the sun on private beaches while thousands of people are dying, is OK?

It’s a message that says, “you know what, the ‘locals’ may be suffering – may be dying, may be screaming for their loved ones amidst piles of rubble – but that’s not really of our concern, because as tourists, we’re not a part of it. We drop off some packaged food and move on.”

In a nutshell, it’s saying tourism cuts off a little, beautiful, sanitized part of an impoverished country, cleans it up, and places armed security guards around it to make sure the locals don’t get in (The Guardian noted that people booked on ships scheduled to stop at Labadee are worried about desperate locals climbing fences in search of food).

Beyond the incredulous decision of the cruise line to encourage tourists to “cut loose” in Haiti at such a moment is the wider implication the decision holds. If the tourism industry – specifically, the cruise industry and the luxury resorts it relies on – can embrace such a stark and obscene dichotomy at a time like this, what does the future hold?

Photos: Fotos Oaxaca

There is, of course, a long tradition of the expatriate artist. Fitzgerald and Hemingway left a trail of expat glamour along the left bank that still beckons smitten American intellectuals today, and artists from Gauguin to Kerouac have fled the confining norms and lifestyles of their home countries to search for inspiration abroad.

The New York Times recently ran a piece about expat artists in China, profiling several of these artists and exploring their reasons for heading East. Among them are familiar expat justifications for leaving home: lowered costs, the escape from gentrification and market-and-money driven societies, and the creativity that emerges from the challenges and constant stimulation of immersion in a foreign culture.

China, with its relentless blind march into modernity coupled with its low cost of living, has a particular appeal for expat artists. Living in Beijing I remember being stupefied by the size and scale of the art in the Dashanzi art district, the way it rambled boldly this way and that drunk on sheer exuberance. There were giant boobs. Massive installations in old factory spaces. Life-size Maoist soldiers and rooms full of TV’s. Dashanzi didn’t have the stale, postured pretension of other art districts in major Western cities. It was giddy and taken with its own life force.

It is this type of energy that expat artists seek, and China provides it (along with a fat heap of frustrations, cultural differences and political threats which are stimulating when not maddening). But the same energy can also be found in many other places, particularly developing countries where artists don’t have to obsess as much over striking the balance between earning and creating, and where daily life serves up a chaos of encounters that get the creative brain off and running.

The uncertainties; the need for constant observation and awareness; the thrill in detail and novelty; the conscious and unconscious struggles to dig in deeper; the search for local stories and puzzle pieces to put together; all of these components of expat life are also keys to the creative process. So it seems that living overseas and creating are natural compliments.

Then there’s the sense of creative abandon abroad, the liberation from whatever aesthetic, social, cultural norms might reign in the artist in at home. To put it very simply: you’ve just got to pay more attention living overseas. And that’s what artists do – pay close attention to the world, and then remake it.

I live in Oaxaca for a host of reasons – my husband’s Oaxacan, I can’t imagine living in the States after five years abroad, I can survive off of a meager salary and still treat myself to beers and good food from time to time. But living here also keeps me sharp. There is always something to study, intellectually or aesthetically, from the smell of the air to the old man carving spoons outside the market. There’s always a new puzzle, be it one that makes me want to scream and bemoan the loss of cheddar cheese and an easy sense of belonging or one that delivers me once more to that childlike state of awe.

So expat life, for many artists, is a way of tapping into and enhancing the creative flow, even if it means at times you get bowled over by a river you can’t control. It allows artists the freedom and stimulation to create. And to take breaks from such creation to eat fresh, warm, hand-rolled tortillas at the market, as I’m going to do right now.

Community Connection

And you, Matadorians? Have you considered living overseas? Are you currently an expat? What were your motivations for going?

Feature and Above Photo: Fotos Oaxaca

We piled on the bus like a group of awkward middle-aged kindergarteners, fumbling around and smacking our heads against the plastic TV’s. My mom, sister and I, the slightly skeptical cool kids, formed a little grouplet in the back of the bus. There must’ve been around thirty of us altogether, masses of white flesh, sandals, and outdoor wear. The Spanish teacher proceeded to make very slow, meticulous announcements about where we were going and how long it would take to get there, and the middle-aged gringos shuffled around in their seats, chatting.

The bus pulled out of the city and glided onto the highway into the valley. Gringo murmurs filled the cool bus air and the valley opened up into greens, yellows, and rocky buttes, long squares of corn and grass stretching up to dry peaks. Half-built tin houses and orange-green mezcalerías with small maguey fields hinted vaguely, half-heartedly, at the presence of people.

The journey to Mitla was uneventful, all those gringo bodies carted around in a big clean gringo bus that bumbled through ramshackle Mexican pueblos, towering above the moto-taxis and pedestrians and squat Ford stick-shifts, us with our white faces stuck to the windows looking out onto hot, brown-green Mexico.

Photo: author

It felt bizarre. I don’t think I’ve ever been on a tour bus. I’m skeptical of the ol’ backpacker standard affirming the inauthenticity of the tour bus vs. the authentic quest of the “traveler” but damn, I must say that being on one of the things does throw one’s perspective for a loop. Even for someone who thinks she’s cynical enough to grasp and honor the postmodern lack of authenticity behind just about any travel experience, the organized tour can be a bit jarring.

In the beginning, I couldn’t get over the stark inside/outside divide. We sat on our big blue seats in our big white bus looking out on the jumbled cubist scenes below, disarray in various shapes, colors, and sizes, foreignness sprawled out there before us like a movie set we could venture into and shrink from when it got to be too much, and eventually wrap up neatly into a few trinkets and photos so we could say, proudly,

“One time, in Mexico…” or “In Mexico, they do this…” with that satisfied smack of the captured experience.

We got out of the bus in Mitla, blinking, stumbling, little swirls of dust rising around our feet, plunk, plunk, plunk, one gringo after another plunking out of the bus like penguins wandering dazed out of a cave under the watchful eyes of zoo-goers. The sun was high and hot at 10 a.m. and we were standing on the side of the road in a dusty pueblo.

Photo: author

The Spanish teacher guide shooed us this way and that, speaking very carefully as if one of us might dumbly wander over to the other side of the road and get lost, a scenario that I had to admit wasn’t terribly unlikely. Her Spanish came in the cadence of the kindergarten teacher who has spent years explaining how not to hit one’s neighbors and why one shouldn’t eat the glue.

We filed into a family home. One gringo after another, looking this way and that, smiling politely and trying, in all earnestness, to squeeze poignancy and insights and deeply meaningful authenticity out of everything from flowers to dog to grandma. We just kept coming in, one after another, until the simple living room, with its old faded couches in the corners and its pretty altar adorned with photos and flowers, was packed full of gringos.

The Spanish teacher admonished us to make room for the new arrivals and we kept packing in, squeezing into corners and crowding round the couches, the never-ending gringo parade. When we were all relatively settled and quiet, our gringo minder presented the house’s grandma, an older woman with gray-white hair and a gray dress, whom the gringos actually applauded, with no sense of irony or absurdity, in an outburst of gratefulness – A Mexican! A real one! And she’s old! And folkloric! And representative of everything we want to feel and experience and care about before we go back to work on Monday!

Eager and primed on all sorts of travel lit and the spiritual necessity to squeeze every ounce of Culture out of the experience, it’s hard to fight the urge to applaud Grandma Mexico.

The grandma talked about the altar and why she’d built it, and maybe half of the gringos understood, but everyone nodded because they knew she was talking about Culture and whatever it was was deeply moving and emotional and poignant and something they should talk about in hushed, contemplative tones with their friends and co-workers in a few weeks. So they nodded. The grandma finished explaining and took her leave under the mixed gazes of pity and admiration and perhaps, caught up somewhere in there, a tame form of envy.

Then they served the mezcal. We partook – five tiny plastic cups, five people sipping and laughing. We had one foot out of the experience and one foot in, but for all we tried to look at it on a meta-level our gringoness and the inherent absurdity of our presence in that house in Mitla was exposed and handed to us on a platter.

Tourism, that ugly condition “travelers” like myself try to hide, was branded on our foreheads. A gringo stepped in the flower pot containing zempasuchitl, the flower of the dead, and flowers and water went everywhere. The gringo tried to extract himself, ready the pot, tidy up the flowers, and a swarm of Mexicans surrounded him and removed him from the situation. Everyone was milling around drinking mezcal, turning red, swapping travel stories.

We went to the cemetery slightly buzzed and fully immersed in the absurdity, blinking into the sun, stepping gingerly over the speed bumps and rocks and discarded gravel of the pueblo road, the gringo parade now on full display for the town.

“I feel like we should be singing the national anthem or something,” I whispered to my friend. To complete the full-on gringo show, to make the consumption of pre-fabricated cultural assumptions a little more mutual. We were, I felt, tall and fat and white and nearly all in sneakers or sandals and professional outdoor wear bought from some glass-walled shop in the parking lot of a giant shopping complex somewhere in America.

The blue sky exposed us, the people of Mitla cast bemused passing glances at us and hurried on, and we sipped our little plastic cups of mezcal and soaked up the nearby mountains rising, the white, hot, yellow dryness of Mitla.

The cemetery was a jolt back into reality. Not the reality of the gringo imagination, but the reality of the Day of the Dead in Mitla, of Mexicans going through a ritual that was actual and felt and present and, dare I say it, genuine in that moment. A reality that would exist with or without the presence of the needy wandering gringo-child.

Photo: author

Flowers were everywhere and on everything, calla lilies, marigolds, vibrant purple masses of furry flowers on white-gray graves. The flowers, the sun, the blue sky, made a kaleidscope of color. People bustled in the unhurried way Mexicans bustle, stepping around graves, lighting incense, sorting flowers, carrying babies, sweeping.

There were babies and old people and couples and people laughing and señoras with twin braids with silken fabric woven into them. There was an old, rusted bike I focused on for a minute, narrowing my vision down to one thing. I could start to pick out the tourists after a few minutes, but they were irrelevant, all caught up just as I was.

We walked around for awhile, dazed, looking at graves and at people sweeping and dressing them in flowers, taken aback by the reality of it.

The Spanish teacher tried to keep the order of the cultural lesson in tact, instructing in the same careful tones how the family kept up the grave of the maternal grandparents and then the paternal grandparents, but the neatly packaged and constructed pseudo-authenticity of the experience had briefly disintegrated as people dispersed into different corners of the graveyard, some still chatting about travels through Sweden and only barely catching a glimpse of the spectacle of here and now in Mitla Mexico (would they even remember the town’s name? I doubted it. But it wasn’t really necessary for “one time in Mexico I went to…”) but others absorbing, sorting through that confusing mental stew of outsiderness and insiderness, of wanting to understand and almost understanding, of experiential learning where reflection and experience go side by side, jostling each other.

Then we left. It was back on the street, a little quieter, fireworks going off everywhere around the town now. The little, poppy, jolt-you-out-of-your-skin fireworks they set off every minute of every day around Mexico. Smoke trails lingered in the sky against the blue. People were “bringing back their dead” according to a friend of mine, who managed to walk through the whole experience – bus tour, family home, cemetery, mezcal – with calm grace and humility. A drunk, brown, round nut of a man in a white straw hat weaved towards and away from our gringo parade.

“I live in U.S.,” he slurred in broken English, weaving. “Atlanta.”

Only my teaching experience could help pick out the words. Other gringos shied away from him, wary. I, stupidly, caught his eye and gave a “buenos tardes,” which he latched on to instantly. I spoke in Spanish, he responded in English.

“Trabajas en los estados unidos?” I asked politely.

“I live there,” he slurred, “I’m a resident.” He was half-looking at me and half weaving.

“Ok,” I said, “y qué haces aquí?”

“Vacation,” he said, “I’m on vacation!” There was something much more doomed than enthusiastic about it.

My mom attempted to join the conversation but couldn’t understand a word the man said. We reached the house and started filing through the door again, and the man knew his vacation was ending there. There would be no authentic Mitla and mezcal sipping for him, not there, anyway. He took advantage of one last try and took my mom by the hand, pulled her aside, and attempted a gallant kiss on the cheek.

“Beautiful, very beautiful woman!” he said.

We went inside, laughing, but I felt a little sickened by the interaction with the man, jutting into the tidy cultural experience of our gringo parade. There wasn’t time for sociological analysis or guilt, though, as we were all soon crowded back around the altar and the family was crying and fireworks were going off outside and my family was crying over the death of my grandparents and then we were drinking beers and eating mole around a table on folding chairs, and a gringo was bragging about how he bought a belt off a peasant in Guatemala for “more money than that guy had ever seen in his life” and when my friend asked how the peasant held his pants up, the gringo shrugged and said, “pins or something.”

I couldn’t really deal with that without making everyone slightly uncomfortable, so I had to stand up and go hover around the baby, who was almost as exciting a gringo attraction as grandma. Being at a susceptible biological moment in my life, I couldn’t resist the baby pull.

She was a little girl called Carlita, oblivious to the oddness of the beaming white faces staring down at her, giving little coos and bubbly smiles to her adoring foreign audience. I let her clasp my finger for a bit and then wandered outside, to where my sister had escaped from the increasingly suffocating swapping of travel tales (“you’ve been to that place in the highlands of Guatemala, too? Almost no one goes there…”)

There was a yard out back, a scrappy little dog, and the quiet sense of life going on as it usually does off down the dusty roads.

The Spanish teacher instructed us that the señoras in this house hicieron trabajos artísticos muy bonitos and we should consider buying scarves porque esta familia nos dio todo gratís y son muy amables, muy amables. It was like having a National Geographic for Kids voiceover distilling the experience for us, dictating where our emotions and priorities and attention should be at any given time. Most people complied with the voiceover’s instructions and bought scarves, lots of them, and soon the gringos were bedecked in bright greens and pinks and blues, beaming over their purchases.

I stood back and observed, and I saw in their faces – trying in broken Spanish to talk with the Mexican grandma, trying on scarves, fondling the material – the desperate need for connection. Something, anything spiritual, anything “real” would do, they just wanted to be a part of it.

If they could buy it for twenty pesos it was an enormous relief, mission accomplished, and if they could give that money directly to this Mexican grandma it was like some big, sweet gulp of water in the parched spiritual desert of the American marketplace, of daily American life.

It was the brief relief from some sort of long detachment and disconnect, and maybe it was all they needed, maybe it was just a vain construct in a world gone so postmodern that even relief from commodification fed back into greater commodification, but it could also have been the spark, the indication, of something much greater. An indication of yearning for a certain connectedness between people, traditions, and beliefs outside of the realm of what could be commodified, bought and sold.

How many of those Columbia boots and jackets and t-shirts had been made in Cambodia somewhere, by a five-year old, and yet their wearers were so desperate to get a little bit of connection here, to feel like this act of buying was noble and was helping to preserve and respect something they honored and even, perhaps, envied.

Instead of seeing that paradox as ironic, I wanted to see it as hopeful – the desire to participate in and respect this culture and its people, to show gratitude for it, and to be respected by it, overlapping the blind, disconnected and detached decisions that go into buying a pair of pants at Target. Maybe the former would usurp the latter, or at least question it.

So perhaps it was the mezcal, but I felt hope there. Of course we then piled back onto the bus, with people already formulating their anecdotes to tell on next year’s trip to Belize, and promptly stopped at a sprawling tourist market full of Mexican souvenirs made in China.

Everyone plodded out and plodded on again, but hardly anyone bought anything. Perhaps that was simply an anomaly, an indication that they were all too tired and sunburned to care. But I like to think it was because they’d gotten a taste of a certain connectedness, and they were still wrapped up in it. And perhaps, the rest of it felt false. Who knew how long it’d last, who knew if it was all a figment of what I wanted to believe. Twenty minutes later we stepped back onto the colonial streets of Oaxaca and parted ways, so I suppose I’ll never know.

Feature Photo : pardeshi Photo: jfew

Nearly half of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered, and experts predict that by 2050 most of these endangered languages will be extinct.

The histories, worldviews, and specialized, localized knowledge enveloped in these languages are being lost in favor of regional lingua francas – English in Europe and North America, Spanish in South America, French and Swahili in Africa.

It’s difficult to grasp all that dies with a language. It isn’t simply the grammar or the literature or the idioms or stories that disappear, it’s also a vision – one more distinct human way of seeing and making sense of the world. The disappearance of languages is a narrowing of human perspectives into fewer structures, fewer possibilities.

Photo: Graham Crumb

I was blown away by UNESCO’s interactive atlas of world languages in danger – 98 languages in Papua New Guinea alone! 191 in the United States, 31 in Laos, 26 in France, 196 in India, and the list goes on. Even some small islands, such as Vanuatu in the South Pacific, have fifteen or more endangered languages (Vanuatu has 46, nearby New Caledonia 18).

Imagining 46 linguistic systems functioning simultaneously on one small island can send the mind spinning. It’s like looking at all the blinding, shimmering shades of green in a rainforest canopy, trying to make sense out of the overlapping intricacies.

But while it’s much easier to imagine the fluid, constant green of one common language, it’s also somewhat of a sad, flat image to anyone who has tried to wrap their mind around a world like zempasuchitl and all that it conveys (for the curious, it’s a Nahuatl word referring to the flower used in Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations).

Photo: darkroomillusions

So what can you do? Perhaps in addition to studying Spanish or French or Swahili (for I won’t argue that those languages aren’t necessary and that learning them doesn’t have some wonderful benefits) you could study one of Latin America’s indigenous languages or learn Xhosa, Zulu or Tswana in South Africa. You can also explore Matador’s language page for tips and advice on language learning in general.

Undergraduate or graduate students in the U.S can apply for FLAS (Foreign Language and Area Studies) fellowships for language study. The fellowships give generous funding for both academic year and summer intensive language immersion programs.

Another way to contribute is to give to the Endangered Language Fund, which provides grants to researchers who study, document and aim to preserve endangered languages around the world.

Photo: MacJewell

National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project is an excellent resource to find out more about endangered languages and the efforts being made to revitalize them. Living Tongues also has a fantastic compilation of links to sites dedicated to studying, preserving and documenting endangered languages, and the mind-blowing Rosetta Project offers insight into the construction of an archive of all documented human languages.

Anthropologists, ecologists, artists and politicians have made the point that biodiversity and cultural diversity are central to human creativity. Language, also, is a distinct expression of the human imagination, and when a language goes extinct another pathway for human exploration and understanding disappears.

Feature Photo: powerbooktrance Photo: giuvax

If you’re like me, you find yourself putting off everything you should be doing by reading translations of obscure Russian idioms or working out the subtle differences between various usages of cabrón.

You probably get giddy over new words. You lose yourself in fantasies of learning Portuguese…then Thai…then Swahili…You’re a sucker for languages, love the puzzles and the logic and cultural revelation behind them. Love extrapolating philosophies and perspectives from ‘em.

Since I am a massive language dork and a sucker for procrastination via language blog, I will enable your geeky habits and pass these language sites along to you. This is my culling from Bab.la’s list of the Top 100 Language Blogs of 2009, plus a few of my personal faves.

Photo: buenosaurus

1. The Linguist

I listen to this guy talk about language acquisition while I make chili. Seriously. If you ever wanted to be a linguist, or just longed to listen to one wax poetic on the internet, this is the site for you. There are videos and posts about everything from basic French grammar to how language learning is like drinking overflowing cups of sake.

2. The English Blog

Jeffrey Hill’s blog for English learners and teachers uses current news, videos, photos, and strange found gems from the internet to analyze and discuss English. Don’t let the learning-English aspect turn you off. You can find videos about cranberry growers in New England, violins in China and the making of Twitter Lit, plus links to language articles around the web.

3. Tofugu

Great for Japanese language and culture. Whether you’re paranoid about chopstick faux pas or you get a kick out of transitive and intransitive verbs, you’ll feel at home here. Offers snark and the basics of Katakana.

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography

4. Omniglot Blog

Love the “mystery language” recordings (makes language seem strangely beautiful and detached from meaning) and the hodgepodge of interesting info, from Welsh words for “gruel” to cross-cultural terms for the moon.

5. Separated By A Common Language

Ever received that look of confused disgust when you call an aubergine an eggplant or a lift an elevator or a jumper a sweater, or vice versa? Oh, how I like nothing better than a dorkier than dorky conversation with a Brit about the difference between cookies and biscuits. This blog, run by an American linguist in the UK, explores all the finer differences between British and U.S versions of English.

6. Fluent In Three Months

Benny the Irish Polyglot’s site is helpful for unconventional language learning tips, like how to get rid of your English accent. (“Bone-jurrrr!” anyone?) While I’m skeptical that a foreigner can ever “become Brazilian,” as Benny attempted, I like some of his hints. He is very much of the get-out-there-and-talk-to-native-speakers and learn-by-travel philosophy and promotes this on the site. Good for people who find themselves spending most of the day gaping in confusion, starting from scratch with the language learning process in a foreign country.

7. The virtual linguist

Recent entries include a post on the origin and history of the word “merry” and an overview of new additions to the Oxford English Dictionary 2009. My favorite: “remembery: a written commemoration (now obsolete); a person’s memory, or the thing remembered.” Great for writers.

8.Mr. Verb

“Language Changes. Deal With It. Revel In It.” So reads Mr. Verb’s banner. Here you will find a linguistic slant on everything from Sarah Palin to Scandinavian dialects, plus an abundance of interesting links.

9. Lenguajero

A genius Spanish-English exchange site. The site offers users a chance to meet native English or Spanish speakers and practice speaking with them. It also allows users to write on a new topic everyday and have their writing reviewed by native speakers, and to create their own “smart flash cards” and review them.

10 .Wordia

I love Wordia. I mean seriously, I sink back into my chair, give up on finishing that tedious email, and click on definition after definition. This is what words should be, right? Individual to each person, tied to distinct personalities. Addictive.

Feature Photo: star5112 Photo: aline salazar

Spanish fits me like a worn pair of jeans, whereas French makes me feel like I’m at a wedding in a freshly ironed dress, trying to stand up straight.

French feels confining. It’s about the aesthetically exquisite, the barely pronounced “s,” the impeccably executed “r.” Done well, the latter is a subtle feline purr. Done American-style, it’s a loogie struggling to come up. There’s just no room for error.

Ah, but Spanish encourages flexibility, improvisation. It’s all curves and individual style. It’s those jeans that love your hips and your ass, it’s a series of dance moves which can make even the most flat-accented gringo seem precious and endearing. It lets you take it for a ride, chilled out, adaptable, whereas French says – you will take me here, now, when I want, how I want. You fit me.

Spanish simply dovetails with my personality. For me, a cool, blue Latin American morning is synonymous with travel, and Spanish is synonymous with the joy of speaking another language. I love running in Mexico and seeing a beat-up pickup truck full of Santa Claus piñatas, and I love the way people at parades stop and offer me a swig from a bottle of mezcal. I love the way you can slide words around in Spanish, drop the pronouns, add -itos and -isisimos to exaggerate and emphasize.

Photo: pasotraspaso

In Spanish it feels like I can play, mixing my own language cocktails, and this is more than OK – it’s desirable. And from the very beginning, people are indulgent with these creations. You can make the world’s most undrinkable mix of triple sec and vodka and Kahlua and people will toast you for the effort.

“Hablas español!” the Ecuadorians said admiringly when I was still bumbling my way through the basics of “cómo estás” and sticking pronouns in all sorts of awkward places.

But also, I just like the sound of Spanish. The big potbellied “o” of gordo. The little scurrying feet of ahorita. The up-down lilt of ideal like the crest and fall of a wave. The mantra-esque sounds of mañana and lo que sea. The drawn out, three-step, melancholy fall of tristeza. The a’s and o’s that float at the end of words. And of course, the unbeatable r’s.

And you? What’s your language personality? What language fits you?

Photos: author

The Toronto Star recently published a list of ten ethical travel destinations for 2010 (although the headline, in a little mathematical/editorial confusion, advertises seven). The ten countries have supposedly been selected on the basis of “everything from promoting natural environments to building tourism industries that benefit locals.” There seems to be a somewhat imbalanced emphasis on countries who have made conservation a priority and who boast exceptional natural environments, but the list seems fair enough.

However, I find the notion of “ethical travel destinations” bizarre. What, after all, is an “ethical destination?” And how can one classify a whole country as ethical or unethical? Obviously, the article is referring to governments and government policy and judging on that basis, but I still find the label odd.

In the context of travel, I wonder how useful it is to label certain countries ethical and others not. I can see the logic behind it and understand what kinds of factors might be figured into the ethical equation – but how much would be lost in travel if we only traveled to “ethical” places?

Mexico is deeply unethical in its treatment of women and its obscene corruption, and China is unethical in more ways than I can count, but would not having traveled to or lived in either of these places make me a better person and a “better” traveler, and would it have enhanced that global understanding we like to think emerges from travel?

Behind this definition of ethical travel lurks the old beast of holier-than-thou presumption. You, Ghana, we choose you for your “impressive commitment to genuine democracy” but you, Senegal, or Benin, or Bolivia, we’re not really going to grace you with our presence because you’re not ethical enough. And we’re going to hand pick, according to our criteria, what satisfies our definition of ethics and spend our time and our money accordingly.

I agree that it’s important to be aware of the ethical background of any place you travel. I’m always surprised at people who can travel somewhere and enjoy coral reefs and turquoise bays without giving the slightest about the situation of the people serving them, talking with them, living there year round.

But I’m not sure that defining a place as “ethical” or “unethical” is really useful in travel, and I’m not sure that avoiding places which lack the ethical standards established by Western media is really a productive or helpful idea. I lived for a year in China – couldn’t see my own blog and a whole range of other websites, saw the migrant workers working twelve hours a day throwing up buildings for the Olympics, breathed air that gave me pneumonia in two months.

But I learned more in that year than I’ve learned from any other experience, hands down.

So I ask – do you seek out ethical places? Avoid unethical ones? What is your travel ethic?

Remember that feeling you had when you were just beginning to learn a language, or had just moved to a foreign country, and everything you heard sounded like an indecipherable code with bizarre, mysterious intonations? I remember when French sounded like an imperious serious of declarations, and Spanish resonated like a landscape of rolling hills. Now, it’s hard to remember when those languages were just strange sensory impressions, and it’s near impossible to think of hearing English this way.

Thankfully, we’ve got this amazing video to show us what it’s like. Enjoy.

Above Photo: Sarah Menkedick Photos: Jorge Santiago

There are cultures, then there are cultures within cultures, and then there are more cultures within those cultures. Cultures within cultures within cultures. Yes, I’m repeating this that many times to make you feel like you’re watching a spinning top, because that’s what culture starts to look like if you peer at it too closely – all the lines blur together and your head starts to spin and whir. Just when you think you’ve got it and you start to say:

“Mexico is…” some cultural entity pops up and smacks you in the face. Scratch that, you think. I don’t know. Don’t know what this culture is, and don’t know how I feel about it.

That’s why it seems to me that culture shock is the real constant in all of the exploration and exchange that happens traveling. It happens on the first day of your first trip overseas in a foreign country. It also happens on a regular basis in your eleventh year of living abroad. It’s ubiquitous and inevitable and it creeps up at the most unexpected moments.

Even after several years in Mexico, there are still little things that jolt me, sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, most of the time in a confusing gray zone between the two.

Why is it that so many men riding in cars feel the need to bark at my dog? At first I thought it was just the street sweepers in a pathetic, bored, macho pick-up attempt. But then it happened again, and again, and I realized, men notice the dog, they pay attention to the dog and…they bark.

I could make attempts to analyze this through the lens of machismo, which wouldn’t be too hard (man sees big dog, man sees girl walking big dog, man feels slightly less manly, man barks) but I actually think it goes further than that. I think it’s about contact.

If you establish some sort of connection to a person, paying attention to their kid or their dog or something about them, you’ve got to follow through with it. I think it harks back to a time when Oaxaca was still a pueblo, and social norms called for a “buenos tardes, señorita,” or its equivalent for everyone you passed. Now those times have (mostly) gone, but still, passing people on the street, I feel a strange obligation to take them into account like I don’t feel anywhere else.

There’s less of a personal space barrier here overall, and when you’ve made eye contact, you’ve made contact. There’s this pressing, suppressed need for acknowledgment. I feel that a lot, and the dog barking incidents are the most recent manifestation.

So when I came across this gorgeous, bone-deep photo essay on culture shock, I immediately related to it. Yep. As a traveler, this is a familiar feeling, sometimes jarring and unpleasant, sometimes thrilling, but indispensable to that experience of being outside one’s comfort zone.

Thus in all of that squirming around you’ve done trying to get comfortable in other cultures, what sorts of shocks and surprises have you had? What have you found traumatic, exhilarating, or both? Please share your culture shock stories below.

Feature Photo: fleno Photo: TheAlieness Gisela Giardino

I saw them before I set foot in the pharmacy. They had the bunched up foreheads and overly neat appearance of lost tourists in Mexico, and they were stopped in the middle of the street, staring vaguely off in opposite directions. I gave them a sidelong glance and stepped into the pharmacy to use the ATM. It was broken.

I tried again and again to jam my card in while the man stepped gingerly inside the pharmacy and said in French, “Banque? Banque? La banque?” It was the standard technique of repeating something over and over in the hopes that the person who doesn’t speak your language will spontaneously understand. The girl at the counter shook her head and the man walked out shrugging.

I am sometimes skeptical of offering help to tourists because half the time they look at me as if I’m insane, or as if I’m one of those know-it-all expats who says smugly, “Oh, you don’t know where the bank is, you poor things? Well, I speak fluent Spanish and have lived here for years, so let me just share my expertise with you.”

But I know I am always so grateful when I’m standing on a street corner in some distant country and someone, anyone, steps up with a little guidance.

“Vous allez à la banque?” I asked in French, using my rusty French skills for the first time in four years.
The woman’s eyes lit up. “Oui!” she replied quickly.

“Follow me,” I continued, “I’m going there too.”

They fell into line behind me on the narrow Oaxacan streets, and I slowed my serious dog-walking pace a bit for the two blocks it took to get to the bank. We paused at the light across from the bank entrance and chatted a bit. They were from Paris, on vacation for a week in Mexico. I told them that I’d studied in France seven years ago and that my husband was Mexican and I lived in Oaxaca now.

It was one of those brief, street-side exchanges that is sometimes so much more illuminating the the long regular conversations you have with people you see everyday. One of those little exchanges that seems to reaffirm who you are in two minutes.

When I said goodbye to them outside the bank, I heard the woman say, “C’est une américaine très gentile”: she’s a very kind American. It reminded me that for as absurd as it may be to think one person can represent a country, at least these small interactions and gestures can do something to alleviate resentment against the U.S and perhaps sow affection where once there was scorn.

Walking home that old why-I-travel question nudged itself to the forefront, and I thought, as usual, it’s about the little things. Two-walk blocks to the bank. Brief swaps of who-are-you? And perhaps little seeds of curiosity and compassion, planted.

Community Connection

What do you think, Matadorians? Do you feel the responsibility to represent your country when you’re traveling? What are your stories of brief encounters from the road? If you’ve got a good story of such an encounter, send it along to sarah@matadornetwork.com with “brief encounter” in the subject line. And please sound off below about the little moments and interactions that have changed you on the road.

Feature Photo: author

NAFSA: Association of International Educators and Abroad View, the global magazine for students, are holding a video contest to select the next student diplomat. If you’ve studied abroad from 2005 onwards through an accredited college or university, you’re eligible. All you need to do is submit a 1-3 minute video about how your study abroad experience has helped to advance global understanding.

What do you mean by “global understanding”, you ask? Well, if you’ve got stories about how your study abroad experience has created cross-cultural understanding, made you a better global citizen, and/or positively impacted a local community where you studied, you’re set. Craft those experiences into a moving narrative, tell it to the camera, and you’ve got a shot at $300 and student diplomat status, which would certainly look sweet on any traveler’s resume.

More guidelines can be found on the contest’s official website. The deadline for all submissions is Dec. 15, 2009.

In the meantime, why not go weigh in on the debate about the $120 million study abroad bill that is currently on it’s way to debate in the Senate? Do you think study abroad is inherently a good thing, and if so, why?

Feature Photo: sara~’s Photo: marmouzet

According to an overview of the 14 most popular language course offerings in the U.S, the U.S state department groups languages into three categories:

Category 1: The Latin and Germanic languages, the former requiring approximately 600 hours of study, the latter 750. Grammar and structures are similar to English.

Category 2: Slavic, Turkic, Indo-European languages such as Persian, and a handful of others including Hebrew and some African languages. Around 1,100 hours of coursework.

Category 3: Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and the Chinese languages. 2,200 hours of coursework.

The difficulty of a language here is established according to several factors: linguistic complexity and similarity to English, accessibility (meaning, do you have to go to a tiny town in the middle of Tanzania to practice it, or can you find somebody on the next block to have a conversation with you?) and cultural factors (for example, in Japanese and Korean honorific language can be confusing and strange to learners coming from cultures that do not have separate terms to distinguish social, economic and/or cultural hierarchies).

el monstrito

I learned Spanish with only three weeks of formal study; the rest of the time I was piecing it all together on the road, on buses with Argentinians, in apartments with Colombian roommates, hiking mountains with Ecuadorian friends. I already spoke French and the grammar between the two languages was so similar that Spanish seemed to come naturally. I attributed learning Spanish so quickly to already being familiar with how to learn a language – sure, once you learn one, you’ve got the skills, right?

Ha! Try picking up Chinese on the road. It’s virtually impossible. A year in China and it was still a minor miracle when a waitress understood my order for cold beer. Granted, I could’ve studied a lot more, but the enormous learning curve for tonal languages can be disheartening, and for as much as I studied and practiced, studied and practiced, I still seemed to be staring dumbly at the summit of a distant peak. I found Japanese much, much easier, with characters that correspond to pronunciation and many words adapted from French, Spanish and English.

And you, Matadorians? What languages have you studied, and which do you find most difficult, easiest, most rewarding? Please share your thoughts and tips below.

Community Connection

If you need to get out of the grammar box, check out five metaphors for language learning and find out why you should get motivated. If you’re willing to take on the major challenge, get some tips from Matador on how to learn a tonal language.

Feature Photo: kevindooleyPhoto: longlostcousin

“Travel like a human” is the motto of AirBnB, a website devoted to hooking up travelers with lodging (from rooms and apartments to tree houses and castles) around the world. The site now boasts accommodation in 101 countries and has been getting all sorts of media hype in The New York Times and The Washington Post, among other places.

So what’s this all about, anyway? Essentially, you sign up for AirBnB and post information about the lodging you’re offering, plus photos that make the place look like a drool-worthy boutique hotel. Make sure there are huge windows giving out onto the Champs Elysées or the Tokyo skyline, and funky leather couches with nice end tables and avant-garde lamps in gorgeous lighting. Or aim for a different market and take a straight-up shot of your dog-eaten couch, offering it to poor, weary backpackers for twenty bucks. AirBnB offers a range from the backpacker to the deluxe.

That said, the site is not necessarily a place for the hard-core budget traveler getting by on Greyhounds and ramen. Most of the accommodations are below market rates but still hover in the $50-150 range, which means that if you’re usually dependent on hostels or Couchsurfing, this might not be an alternative.

Photo: striatic

At the same time, the quality you get for that price is most likely going to be infinitely higher than what you’d get in the smoke-stinking ancient hotel with yellowed mattresses that charges a fortune based on location alone.

The apartments, houses and rooms on AirBnB are downright, well, homey…they are, after all, where somebody lives year-round, not some dank pit that houses passerby after passerby.

As for hosts, the site looks like a great way to make some extra cash from your place. If you’re living abroad in a remotely strategic area, with a remotely decent apartment, this is a sweet way to drum up some extra income.

But what stops me is always the awkwardness factor. Do I need to make chitchat? Coffee? Invite the guest out for beers with my friends and I? Feel guilty about having friends over for beers? I don’t like navigating those host/guest boundaries, especially when there’s money involved and I have just met the guest in the last twenty-four hours.

And, I wonder, what sort of issues do these people face with their landlords? I’d like to give hosting a go, but I wonder what my neighbors would say about new sets of foreigners coming and going every week or so. The site doesn’t seem perturbed by rental issues thus far, maybe because most people don’t live with their landlords or interact with them, or because many people are renting apartments and houses they own? I’m not sure, but it seems some sort of legal ramifications might creep up somewhere.

All in all, sites like AirBnB and Couchsurfing are changing the traditional way in which people travel.

What do you think of this, Matadorians? Would you use this service? Would you rent a room, house, bungalow, mattress? Do you like the way these kinds of services are changing travel?

Feature Photo: Mr. Throk Photo: Anosmia

The Senator Paul Simon Study Abroad Foundation Act has passed in the House of Representatives and is currently moving on to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. If passed, the act would provide 40 million dollars in 2010 and 80 million in 2011 to colleges, universities, individual students, and nongovernmental organizations that provide study abroad opportunities.

The stated goal of the act is to broaden American students’ understanding of other cultures, to increase the number of minority and low-income students who study abroad, and to encourage students to study in developing countries (more than two thirds of American study abroad students study in Western Europe).

At first, it sounds great. Studying abroad is a jarring, lingering lesson in increased awareness for many American students. It can arguably create a paradigm shift in the way they see and understand the world, and the way they see and think about the United States and its government and media, and I certainly think this is a good thing.

It can, of course, also be a great way to have a hot fling with a French girl and get wasted every night for a year, but we’ll try to be optimistic here and assume that for every ten kids hanging out with the other Americans getting blasted on cheap wine in the plaza there are one or two who are going to come back changed, and perhaps slightly more compassionate and curious about, other people and cultures.

Photo: rachfog

But is that what this plan is really all about? The description of the bill on the website of Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) quotes Marlene Johnson, Executive Director and CEO of NAFSA: Association of International Educators, as saying:

“[Senators Durbin and Wicker] understand that the global education of our college students is absolutely essential to strengthening America’s position as a responsible leader on the world stage and ensuring its competitiveness in the global economy. Now more than ever, we need to invest wisely to meet these national needs.”

It goes on to mention the importance of study abroad programs to our “economic competitiveness, future diplomacy, and security.”

Sounds an awful lot to me like sending kids abroad to…discover new markets? Convince everyone of just how compassionate and warm and big-hearted America is, and how it’d be just fine if the U.S came to dominate their country and say, their economy a bit more?

Call me cynical here, but this sounds a bit less like “perhaps we should understand other countries more instead of invading them” and a bit more like “this is a good and effective way to spread U.S dominance!” After all, what exactly does study abroad have to do with economic competitiveness?

I can understand security, perhaps; there’s the vaguely naive, long-shot hope that well-meaning study abroad students might do something to alleviate resentment against Americans, or that through a combined effort to create mutually respectful study abroad exchanges and not to alienate the rest of the world politically and diplomatically we might change some of the more negative views of the U.S – but the thought of study abroad for the purposes of increasing competitiveness in the global economy I find plainly disturbing.

Plus, if we follow that competitiveness to a logical end, well, wouldn’t we be shopping at Nike in Sub-Saharan Africa, eating McDonald’s, watching the latest Hollywood flick at a mega-plex in an air conditioned mall in Dakar? Meeting friendly people in Laos and Angola and the Ukraine who work for massive American corporations, wearing American clothes, driving American cars, eating American food? Here in Mexico you can already see this global competitiveness taking place – in Sam’s Club, whole avenues of American chain restaurants, mega-malls, and enormous superstores superseding local markets. In ten more years of study abroad, imagine the cultural exchange that awaits American students!

What do you think, Matador readers? I’d be curious to know your take on this bill, and whether you slant towards hope or cynicism, or hover somewhere between the two.

Feature Photo: garryknight Photo: author

Over at Anderson Cooper 360, Chris Guillebeau wrote a post about the things he wishes he’d known before he went traveling. Some of the items on the list? Be aware of different notions of personal space, be firm with people who haggle or follow you, always carry cash, and don’t speak out against the government.

I particularly liked the points about being tolerant of smoking (I would add being tolerant of meat-eating) and not being a colonialist and assuming people who don’t speak English aren’t as intelligent as you are. For as obvious a point as the latter seems to be, many people miss it.

I know I still throw out “the locals” all the time without really thinking about it – it took my husband, a bonafide Oaxacan “local,” mocking me constantly before I grew wary of the phrase. (He proposed setting up a booth on the main pedestrian street with a sign “Ask A Local! 10 pesos.” The travelers quest for contact with “the locals” is a whole separate can o’ worms I won’t delve into here, but suffice it to say that both glorifying and pigeonholing The Locals are bad ideas).

I seem to have moments that linger somewhere between nostalgia and regret after each experience abroad. In China, I wish I’d known just how intense the censorship would be, and psychologically prepared myself for living in a country saturated with propaganda. I certainly wish I’d known to never, ever separate myself from my passport in South Africa, when I had everything stolen in what was a guarded parking lot (it was no longer guarded when we returned from Table Mountain).

And yet, at the same time, knowing these things would’ve flattened out that learning curve that made traveling in China and South Africa so revelatory, and taught me hard and fast. Of course I’d rather not have had anything stolen, and obviously a little practical kick in the ass would have been preferable to the learning experience of weeping in front of a bombed out car in a parking lot. But sometimes the slap-you-in-the-face lessons you learn on the road are the ones that stick with you longest and teach you most.

So if I could choose a few things I wish I would’ve known when I started out, sure, there’d be the practical stuff about taking enough cash, and duct-taping my passport to my body at all times, and all that good stuff. But the stuff I really wish I would have known would be less tangible. Here are a few examples:

1) You don’t have to see or do anything. Follow your instincts. You don’t have to feel guilty for not seeing Machu Picchu if you don’t want to see it, or you have something else in mind. This isn’t to say it’s not worth it to go – but if it’s not in your plans or you improvise something else, that’s ok too. There’s no checklist.

2) Travel can be just as monotonous as anything else. If it feels monotonous, or you start to get disenchanted, stop. Take a break. Go home. Stay somewhere and get a job. But don’t assume travel will always be enlightening, or you should be able to do it forever.

3) You can do almost anything independently if you have the time, patience and perseverance.

And you, Matador readers? What do you wish you’d known? If you could look back through the wormhole at your greenhorn travelin’ self, with wide eyes and an overstuffed backpack, what would you tell him/her? Please share below.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

There’s a lot of griping in travel about a golden age when guidebooks and backpackers didn’t give you the full picture of some middle-of-nowhere off-the-beaten-track town and you got there shimmering with innocence, sleeping on the floor of a poor local’s house, getting fed plates of food unsullied by foreign tastes, possibly being ripped off or wandering cluelessly for a few hours, the town to yourself, not a shred of info or a single other tourist to de-authenticize your experience. Ah, the good old days.

But now, of course, one devastating little word or two on Google opens the Pandora’s Box of travel, and you’re no longer the Only One, no longer pure. You find out not only have so many other people been there, but they’ve written so much about it that before you even set foot on your journey your head is crammed full of expectations and preconceived notions about everything from cafés to the local language to the right bus to take where.

The question is: is this a bad thing? Andy at 501 places does a good job of feeling out the ups and downs of this outpouring of (nearly unavoidable) travel knowledge. On the one hand, it’s nice to know what hotel is an overpriced, falling-down brothel; on the other hand, the meticulous research and googling that reveals every detail about lodging options obviously does away with the unexpected – out of which, arguably, some of the most interesting travel stories and insights emerge.

So on the one hand, sure, I’d like to know how to take the bus in Buenos Aires and how to survive a Chinese banquet; on the other hand, some of the greatest experiences I’ve had on the road have come from total ignorance, and the often slapstick, sometimes poignant efforts to learn and navigate a place from the bottom up.

I remember crossing Borneo by bus – that was the first time I had ever traveled without a Lonely Planet, which in retrospect, is fairly amazing. Four years of living, traveling, and working abroad, and I’d always had a Lonely Planet. Many travelers, including myself, come to take that particular book – or other substitutes – so much for granted that traveling without a guidebook feels like walking around naked, exposed, for a little while.

But in Borneo it was incredibly satisfying – it forced us to get on the ground knowledge everywhere we went, to piece things together on our way, to pay close attention to things we might otherwise have taken for granted. It ultimately took us to a middle of nowhere jungle town, where the only ways out were a forgotten Brunein border post (where we had to battle for hours for a visa for my Mexican husband) or weeks of jungle trekking.

That – meeting the Indonesian mafia, seeing the Brunein officials who cross the border into Sarawak to get wasted on weekends, exploring the strange distorted jungle underbelly of a Borneo that otherwise sells itself as an exotic paradise – was unpredictable and straight-up educational, because we went into it with zero expectations whatsoever.

At the same time, we could’ve very simply have gotten lucky, and we might’ve missed out on all of those experiences by taking one random turnoff. The payoff of maintaining a blank slate of expectations is that every place you reach is felt and absorbed on a different, deeper level since you haven’t been primed for it. The downside of this blank slate is that sometimes it hides places and information that could actually make a trip much richer and fuller.

Maybe your asking around or your luck leads you somewhere remarkable other tourists would or wouldn’t discover; but maybe it leads you randomly here and there, on cow paths that bypass some truly phenomenal places. I suppose it all depends on how you like to travel, how much time you have, how you balance out the experience of the journey with the need to find and see something in particular.

What do you think, readers? I’d love to hear with the Matador community has to say about this. Do you feel the Internet has enriched your travel experiences or somehow simplified them? Do you travel with guidebooks? How much research do you do? Please share your comments below.

FEEL IT ALL AROUND from Northern Lights on Vimeo.

Feature Photo: D’Arcy Norman
Video: Feel It All Around
Travelers: Chase Heavener, Jovanna Sayan, Matt Staker, Chris Heavener
Music: Washed Out, “Feel It All Around”
Produced by: Fiction

The following will get you started on the quest for your ideal teaching job abroad.

Sometimes the sheer number of teaching jobs abroad is overwhelming. Korea? Kyrzgystan? Mexico? Lithuania?

A google search for ESL jobs will pull up a cluster of potential resources which takes time, patience and a discerning, critical eye to wade through. Some, of course, are much more trustworthy and useful than others.

In my four years of experience teaching overseas, here are the ones I’ve found most helpful.

1. Dave’s ESL Cafe.

Simply classic. Yes, you’ll find the old salts in the forums whining about anything and everything – the food, the bureaucracy, the students, the pay, the visas – so think twice before you turn down or accept a job based on what you find there. At the same time, those forums can be an excellent way to gauge the legitimacy of certain language schools and to get a sense of the average pay and visa regulations in a region.

Before I took a short-term teaching position in Japan, I consulted the forums at Dave’s and got several private messages from previous instructors telling me what to expect, which was enormously helpful in preparing materials and adjusting my expectations.

Plus, the International Job Board is much more reliable than many other online job feeds and contains a wide range of jobs all over the world. I’ve found two out of four teaching positions via the International Job Board.

2. Tefl.com

Another extremely reliable site for jobs which tend to be more professional, for teachers with a TESOL, Delta or Celta certificate and experience. There are some jobs for novices on here, including plenty in China, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia, but many of the jobs are in Europe and require certain credentials.

Photo: J.C Rojas

The site also tends to favor teachers from the UK – be careful when reading the job ads to check if the little blue “EU National Preferred” box appears at the bottom. If so, Americans, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle for that position, and you’ll probably be in charge of dealing with visa issues.

One major perk of Tefl.com is that they allow you to apply for jobs directly through their website by uploading your information into a portfolio. They also give you the option of applying for a daily feed of jobs – which I ultimately had to unsubscribe to, because I couldn’t deal with the constant temptation to move to, say, Kazakhstan.

3. Transitions Abroad’s Teaching English Abroad Portal

This is much more than a simple job site. If you’ve ever wondered about TEFL courses in Vietnam, short-term teaching positions in Italy or the ins and outs of getting a university job in Chile, this should be your first stop. The site has an unbelievable amount of useful, detailed information about teaching abroad.

I could spend hours simply wandering dazed through the possibilities, and you probably should if you’re new to teaching and thinking about taking a job in a place you’ve never visited.

4. Esl Job Feed.

Jobs. Lots of ‘em. Straight up.

5. The University of Michigan’s sites for Teaching Abroad Without Certification and Teaching Abroad for Qualified Teachers

These sites offer an extremely well organized compilation of information not only about teaching jobs, but also about programs like Fulbright teaching assistanceships for recent graduates or graduate students. They contain extensive guides to teaching in countries on six continents (Antarctica is woefully underrepresented) as well as articles about cross-cultural exchange in the English language classroom, teaching jobs with government organizations and NGO’s, and teaching at every level from elementary to post-graduate.

There’s no reason not to do research before you take off on a teaching adventure, especially if you’re thinking of accepting a position with a gigantic language school with branches all over Asia or Latin America. If you’ve got a set idea of what you want to do and where you want to go, all it takes is persistence and research to get you there.

Community Connection

Matador offers its own set of ESL resources, including The Insider’s Guide to Teaching English In Asia, The Eight Hidden Benefits of Teaching English Abroad, Top Ten Places for Teaching English Abroad, and the classic Meet Your ESL Coworkers.

]]> http://matadorabroad.com/5-essential-online-resources-for-finding-esl-jobs/feed/ 12 http://matadorabroad.com/does-travel-abroad-less-conspicuous-consumption-at-home/ http://matadorabroad.com/does-travel-abroad-less-conspicuous-consumption-at-home/#comments Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:15:33 +0000 Sarah Menkedick http://matadorabroad.com/?p=2521

Feature photo: Phillie Casablanca Photo: permanently scatterbrained

I often hear talk about how travelers made a bold and courageous move to “leave behind the American dream” or “escape from the rat race” to travel abroad. Well, great, I think, but what happens when you go back?

Perhaps in contrast to many travelers and travel bloggers, I’m not sure I see the act of getting temporarily out of the 9-5 grind as inherently courageous or life-changing. Sure, in some contexts it is – but in others, it seems like a vain and pompous way of, well, to put it bluntly, slumming it, playing at poverty and adventure for a certain period of time before settling snugly back into a world of Western plumbing and three dollar lattes.

Photo: colros

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with taking a break from work to travel (nor, I should add, is there anything wrong with Western plumbing), and I think escaping daily life for awhile can lead to some perspective-altering experiences, but I just don’t buy that it’s always an act of nobility to leave a cushy job with a pile of savings and hit the road for a bit; I don’t buy the frequent argument that this automatically creates a life or society changing perspective.

But this piece about how adventure travel kills conspicuous consumption changed my mind for a bit. I cringed at the opening line about ditching the American dream, thinking isn’t it the “American dream” that’s allowed you to save up for this whole adventure and to appreciate it from the distinct perspective of someone from the land of plenty?

But the article humbled my cynicism. The author talked about coming home to an overflowing storage unit of stuff she realized she didn’t need. She discusses the changes in her lifestyle in San Fransisco after more than a year traveling around the world, and how she doesn’t feel the need to fix things that aren’t broken. More interestingly, she notes how before resistance to materialism felt contrived, whereas post-trip, it feels natural.

Photo: chopr

Thinking about this, I experienced a full-on surge of travel optimism.

I have my personal opinions about how traveler quests for “authenticity” or “simplicity” often enough end up reinforcing the same dichotomy between noble poor paradise and wicked material wealth, but this article offered an alternative: taking an awareness of the enormous gap between wealthy developed nations and poor developing ones -between the excessive haves of the former and the often desperate lack of the latter – back home and crafting a different lifestyle out of it. Yes. That’s good.

And you, reader? What do you think? Do you think travel abroad -adventure or otherwise- curbs consumption? Share your thoughts below.

Feature Photo: Andrew Currie Photo: akechi

I still remember the sinking feeling I had getting off the train in Guangzhou, China, at 1 a.m. You think that perhaps arriving in the middle of the night in the middle of winter might spare you from the onslaught of shouting pushy people waving laminated fliers, but no.

“Hotel hotel HOTEL HOTEL hotel hotel CHEAP CHEAP good price!!”

The refrain like a cacophony of badly tuned horns, reinforced by jostling elbows and hands grabbing at our coats. These situations require a big deep breath of centered calm. Otherwise, if you’re anything like me, you’re likely to freak out and start running as fast as you can in the opposite direction.

Guangzhou isn’t the only place this happens in the world, of course. At those charged Destinations with a capital D where travelers arrive in swarms with obvious needs to be met (spiritual, commercial, basic, or otherwise) there is inevitably a waiting mass of locals looking to fill those needs, or create them. The Age recently ran a piece about the top cities where you get hassled as a traveler and I can think of many that aren’t on that list.

For me, this is a nasty feeling. I dislike fighting through the crowds, dislike the pulling at my clothes and the shouting, dislike the feeling of being in a full-on, unmasked consumer interaction with a place and it’s people. It’s like pulling that pretty little shear veil of “authenticity” or awe off of a travel experience and a place to reveal the simple, ugly framework of money beneath.

But then again, is it really my place to whine about this? After all, in China or Peru I am taking advantage of the low cost of living and searching out my own version of the authentic (Chinese living in traditional hutongs? Peruvians walking llamas through the Andes?) and there’s no reason the local people need to comply with my vision of an idyllic authentic getaway, right? To many of them, I am a way to make money – perhaps a nice and friendly way to make money or a slightly hostile one, but in any case, a path to the cash. Does this make them bad, cynical, sinister people? Perhaps some, but not all.

From yet another angle, however, one wonders if this sort of unregulated full-on assault throwing all sorts of random goods and services at tourists really benefits the “sellers” or “touts” or “locals” or however you’d classify them in the end – it often creates a popping resentment and hostility between them and visitors, it can end up damaging tourism to the area, and it frequently leads to rampant development in the form of hostels and backpacker joints and, to use a controversial term here, “cultural pollution.”

Yet how do we and they prevent it from happening?

What do you think, readers? Where are the places you’ve been hassled most? How do you deal with it? What do you think could be done about it? Let’s get the discussion going.

Perhaps, being a traveler (or someone at least vaguely interested in travel), you are as obsessed with maps as I am.

I find old maps nostalgic and achingly beautiful. They seem to bring up a swirl of memories, subterranean memories about exploration, fear, fascination, curiosity. The delicate borders of continents like the veins of leaves, and place names in fine print emanating the smells and sensations and mysteries held within their borders. Brazil, China.

It is hard to find the vinyl-ish film and gaudy greens and yellows of modern maps as romantic, but I still love a good map, before, during, and after a trip. A map, arguably, brings a trip into tangibility – you start with the anticipation and the plans, tracing lines on the map, pointing at dots, and then, at some point, the lines become rivers you’ve walked and the dots a city you’ve wandered and slept in. Maps are the most concrete and primitive artifacts of a journey – I was here.

Maps are also, of course, somewhat relative. Early cartographers drew their dragons and monsters on distant seas and used images to suggest the native flora and fauna that might be found in a place. Colonial maps tend to reflect the interests of the colonizer, electing colonial place names and highlighting material resources of importance.

Aerial photography greatly altered map-making to suit the interests of colonial powers at the turn of the century – once resources could be mapped from above, maps could be constructed solely for the purpose of showing where the loot was. A cynical perspective, but one that certainly aided in the colonial mission.

So maps are powerful, subjective tools, which got me thinking that as travelers, how would we construct maps of the places we’ve visited or would like to visit? What would our maps reveal about what interests us in a trip?

There is this beautiful gastro map of India, for example, for the traveler who discovers place through food. Then there’s the brilliant Worldmapper, creating cartograms of the world and individual countries according to criteria ranging from female literacy to radio usage. A really useful way of understanding a country through terms other than physical boundaries and topography.

Maybe you’d map the world by mountain ranges, maybe by deserts – the idea is, all maps are, to a certain degree, subjective in travel, and the way we interpret and use maps depends on the places and ideas that interest us.

To start us off, I think my maps would include a gastro map of Mexico, with a detailed guide to street-side taco stands. And then, perhaps, a careful map of Andean villages tucked between peaks, and a map of small, out of the way passenger train routes in Japan.

So tell us, travelers, what maps would you draw?

Feature Photo: Paul Stevenson Photo: gabyu

There’s plenty of reasoning about why Americans don’t travel abroad. Travel bloggers speculate on whether it’s fear of a big, scary world, or ignorance of other cultures, or short vacation time, or the simple fact that there’s a helluva lot of stuff to do in the U.S alone. It may be all of those factors combined, but that’s not what interests me. What interests me is the assumption behind all this speculation – the assumption that Americans should travel abroad.

At first I wanted to question that assumption, since I’ve met plenty of Americans who could (and happily would) tick off all of the countries they’ve visited, list all of the trials and tribulations and predictable breakthroughs they’ve had, rave about all the artwork and trinkets and objects they’ve bought and swoon over the precious simple authenticity of “the locals,” and I find nothing particularly revolutionary or educational about this at all.

In fact, I think it’s pretty much the same old dynamic between the U.S and the world multiplied once more – simple consumable experiences, the commodification of culture, the seeing-what-we’ve-been-primed-by-the-media-to-see vs. researching-what-is.

But I hope I’m not so cynical or so pompous as to completely disregard the potential of travel abroad – while I don’t see it as the panacea for twisted U.S foreign policy or the distorted views many Americans have of the world, I also think it holds enormous potential to create positive, constructive change. By “change” I mean change in the way Americans think about, say, where their coffee comes from, or change in the way they think about an American food culture that relies on an unhealthy dependence on processed corn and the microwave.

Photo: tiltti

I’ve met plenty of people who have gone through transformations abroad and started, little by little, to see their world and the world overall from different angles. They’ve perhaps started to follow the news about China or Mexico much more carefully and to search out different perspectives. They’ve become aware of the affect of U.S corn subsidies on the people they met and talked to in Southern Mexican villages. They see that wow, I have a lot of stuff in my house and these people, they seem to be doing just fine without having to go to Target every other day for a new something.

This is not, of course, a given. I don’t think anyone has the right to declare what a traveler should or should not learn, should or should not see. But I have met plenty of Americans who have been prying into their own assumptions and accepted ways of understanding the world, taking apart their own cultural perspectives, and coming away with a much more complicated, empathetic understanding of the connections between themselves and the places they’ve visited.

And I think that process, of empathizing with people from vastly different cultural, social and economic perspectives, is at the heart of traveling abroad. That is what often distinguishes travel abroad from domestic travel – travel abroad requires so many more leaps into the unknown.

There are the major unknowns, the unknown languages and cultures and histories, but there are also the smaller unknowns; how rice or sugar cane is made, the herbs people use for medicines, the deserted villages where people have been forced to migrate to other countries. And traveling abroad is the process of excavating these unknowns, of bringing them up to the surface of one’s mind, in the hope of creating some new bridge of empathy and compassion.

So I’m not sure it’s the percentages and the statistics that matter, I’m not sure it’s the act of getting one’s passport stamped – I think it’s the way of seeing and questioning that makes travel abroad different, and that has so many people vehemently defending the act of crossing borders. It’s the push into the unknown, and the coming back humbled, contemplative, vulnerable, and yes, in ways both conscious and vaguely felt, changed.

Community Connection

What do you think, readers? Do you think travel abroad is inherently educational? What have been your experiences overseas? Do you think Americans are afraid of overseas travel?

Feature Photo: Robert S. Donovan Photo: The Alieness GiselaGiardino

Taxis: the cause of so much hand-wringing, street side bartering, frantic planning, late night shouting, anxious nail-biting, dread, fear, mystery and intruigue. Yes, taxis. As a traveler you may loathe, love, or fear them, but you probably won’t be able to avoid them.

Experiences with taxis and taxi drivers are some of the most common travel survival stories told – the taxi that took you in circles for hours around Beijing, the taxi that charged you 200 times the price, the taxi driver that told you about the past thirty years of history in Brunei, the taxi driver that took you home to dinner with his family. I’ve heard all of these stories, and more.

So with taxis being such a central travel experience, it’s understandable there’s such a wealth of travel lit surrounding them. First off, there’s taxi gourment, a definitively pro-taxi blog that simultaneously explores the lives of taxi drivers and the food and drink scape of Buenos Aires. Relying on the local knowledge and catering to the distinct personalities of taxi drivers, Layne Mosler travels round the city, using taxis and their drivers as a prism through which to understand the local culture.

On the other hand, there’s I hate taxis, a site that channels traveler’s resentment of taxis into a search for other forms of local transport. I hate taxis is inspired, allowing travelers to choose their destination and then investigate a number of transportation options from the airport to the city center (how many of us have gotten into the airport, thrilled to finally be there, only to be overwhelmed by taxi dread?). It’s not as anti-taxi as the name sounds, and is in fact a great source of info for navigating local taxi prices and policies.

These represent twin poles on the taxi spectrum – one appealing to the stress and fear surrounding taxis, the other to people’s fascination with and weakness for that gamble of personality and adventure inherent in a taxi ride.

So, readers, to kick off this weekend, I ask you to share a taxi story below. You can love ‘em, hate ‘em, or be all tied up in ambiguity about them – but I’ll bet no matter how you feel about taxis, you can trace some of your most memorable travel experiences back to them.

Community Connection

Give your opinion on Mexico’s new girly pink taxis. If you’re constantly paranoid about being ripped off, you might want to have a look at how not to get ripped off by a cabbie. On the other hand, if you’re worried about haggling to the point of exploitation, read When Does Budget Travel Become Exploitation?

Feature Photo: Marc Oh! Photo: didbygraham

The central Mexican city of Puebla has recently introduced a new fleet of thirty-five taxis for women only. The taxis are driven by women and are open only to female passengers; they’re also painted a Pepto Bismol pink and contain GPS systems and special makeup mirrors in the backseats because you know, women like to spend most of their time en route meticulously applying lipstick.

The taxis have received an enthusiastic and positive ground level response from women, but Mexican women’s rights organizations find the idea appalling. Vianeth Rojas, a member of the Network For Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Puebla, told the Associated Press “[The taxis] are absolutely not helping eradicate violence against women.”

The new cars are meant to protect women from harassment (or worse) from male taxi drivers, and come in response to frequent complaints from Mexican women of being accosted by male drivers. Yet one has to wonder, is creating a fleet of candy-pink cars with makeup mirrors really a step forward for women’s rights, or is it simply reinforcing the same macho attitudes that lead to these harassment problems in the first place?

Female-only taxis exist in many parts of the world, including Moscow, Lebanon, Colombia, and Dubai, in response to security issues and cultural attitudes about how women can travel and who can accompany them. In cultures in which contact between women and men is strictly regulated, such as that of Dubai, women-only taxis may be unpalatable to foreigners but at least seem fit the cultural context.

But in a country like Mexico, in which there are no taboos against women traveling with men who aren’t their husbands or brothers, the taxis seem to me a band-aid solution to a social problem, not an expression of an inherent cultural belief. The taxis announce, in pink, that women are girly, delicate creatures who need to be protected from the leering tendencies of men, who need a chance to pretty themselves up for their men in the safe company of other women.

The cars also imply that the men who accost women simply can’t help themselves, and should be separated from women instead of asked to change their behavior.

What do you think? Would you ride in a pink taxi? Do you think this is an effective solution to the problem of harassment? Most readers here thought it was a great idea. What do you think, Matadorians?

Kick off the debate below.

Photos: author

When we first go abroad, it’s often for the sheer plunge; the fear and thrill of falling. But when we stay, I think it’s for the little things.

Musculation.

A sense of smell.

The game of language.

Small, brilliant absurdities.

Walks (even better with dogs).

A refined ear for accents.

Getting to know the neighborhood.

There are so many others. For me:

Popsicles. Real popsicles with real coconut.

Light. The way the light changes from late afternoon to evening. I’ve never found a light like that anywhere but Oaxaca.

Graffiti. Bizarre, fantastic, local. Pedro Infante with an enormous sombrero. Dancing grinning orange skeletons.

The memela lady. The way the tortillas puff up on the comal.

The young dudes singing unabashedly to their iPods, walking down the street with a full-on groove going on.

The 5 o’clock coffee.

And you? Keep adding your own, below.

Photos: author

7:30 a.m. :

Wake up. Take the dog out, stroll down our cobblestone street that rises up slightly from the city, allowing a view of early morning clouds rising over churches. It’s chilly. The light is subdued shades of whale white and blue, sometimes a faint orange edging its way in at the horizon.

Come back inside, make coffee. Write. Try to ignore my email as long as possible.

9 a.m. :

Take the dog running. Up the brutal arching back of the Cerro Fortin to the dirt road that winds around the mountainside and up and up with a view of the pine-coated Sierra Norte to the north and the expansive yellow-green valley to the south.

There’s nobody up here at this hour. Let the dog off of the leash, think about how crucial running is to writing, how it’s this necessary physical and mental release.

10 a.m. :

Go to the market for juice. “Amigocha!” shouts the juice guy, “how’s the Stella?” Stella is panting on the market floor. He blends fresh orange and mandarin juice, sometimes with strawberries. People shuffle in and out of the market, in and out of the rising sun and the shade filled with smells and heaps of food; huitlacoche, chicozapotes, epazote, yierbasanta, things you can’t find in the U.S.

I buy avocados from the same woman everyday. She’s curt but sometimes she gives me a fourth for the price of three.

11 a.m :

Huevos con chipotle, our current brunch of choice. Brunch is the best meal of the day and I try to make it extravagant. Oftentimes it’s a big scramble of squash flowers, chile poblano, chipotle, huevos, red onion, tomatoes and avocado, complimented by red pepper bread from the German bakery.

We eat and watch the hummingbird, Fred, who we dubbed Fred at a party a long time ago and somehow can’t un-dub Fred despite the fact that she now has three babies, feed her children. We peek out the windowsill very carefully after she takes off to watch the blind babies maw at the air. We look for Fred up in the bougainvillas.

12 – 5 p.m. :

Write, read, research, catch up on emails and blogs and Matador, swap ideas back and forth over my shoulder with Jorge, look out in procrastination at the blue amphitheater of sky which shows no trace of the morning’s softness, coolness, ambiguity.

3 -4 p.m.

Popsicle man comes. One coconut, one walnut, with real coconut and walnut chunks packed in. We chat for a bit about the heat and he always says, “que te vaya bien, guera,” a Mexican goodbye I love, meaning, “may you go well,” with the implication that you’re always going somewhere.

5 p.m. :

Take the dog out for a walk. The city is relaxing now, easing into evening, and I get a coffee and stroll up the andador. Tourists, usually big groups of pastel-and-visor-wearing Europeans, are taking photos of Santo Domingo, and sometimes their guide ventures forth to pet the Stella.

The Germans love Stella. They come up and speak to her in what I can only guess is German baby talk. I never really associated German Shepherds with Germany, always figured it was one of those things like French fries that had roots in a place but had long since lost them, but it seems Germans and the Stella have a thing for each other.

We keep up the andador and pass the pirate CD stands where Lila Downs or Vicente Fernandez is playing, or sometimes a bizarre Mexican Bob Dylan cover, and hippie viajeros sell their leather bracelets and beaded jewelry. They have drums and dreads.

We pass the fruit man selling mangos, oranges, cucumbers, jicamas in chile. He looks embarrassed every time I say hello even though I do it every day.

We do a tour around the Conzatti park and the Llano park where kids stop riding their bikes and stare at the dog in awe, and where one day, only one day in all of our walks, a little girl came running up and said,

“Yo soy Angela Gloria Martinez Gonazales y amo los perros” and proceeded to grab the dog’s head and hug her. Stella is a sweetheart and loves affection but parents used to seeing dogs foaming at the mouth and hurling themselves against fences don’t assume this, and I thought her father was going to faint on the spot. But Stella and Angela Gloria Martinez Gonazales bonded, and the dad stepped back for a bit, cautious and curious.

6 p.m. :

Go the Miscelanea for beers. Carry a big green woven bag like the señoras carry to the market full of envases, the empty bottles you have to bring back to the store to exchange. If you don’t bring the envases you’ve gotta pay 5 or 10 pesos more per bottle. This is a lot for a young writer scraping bits and pieces together to get by.

I hand over the envases and the man brings a couple of Bohemias out of the big freezer and puts them in the bag. Sometimes I cave and buy garlic peanuts and jalapeño kettle chips.

7 p.m.:

Jorge and I have beers. Talk. Plan. Dream up road trips around the Oaxacan Coast and houses we’d build deep in the Sierra. Start cooking a big mix of local veggies and heating tortillas, or:

8 p.m. :

Go for tlayudas. The place is an old house with a big square courtyard bordered by the rooms and the kitchen where the family lives.

Grandma shuffles in and out of the kitchen in a woven dress, socks, and an apron while the middle-aged couple who run the tlayuda business spread the big tortillas with bean paste, cheese, sliced onions, and lettuce, and stick our chorizo wrapped in aluminum foil underneath the charcoal.

The kids meander in and out of their rooms and the kitchen, sometimes coming over to put salsa or napkins on our table. The tlayudas come twenty or so minutes later, the giant grilled tortilla crispy, the chorizo sizzling hot, the beans and cheese and onions with a poignancy you just don’t find outside of Mexico.

9 p.m. :

Walk back home. The lights on the hillsides glimmer against an enveloping midnight blue and always remind me of the first overnight bus I took to get here when I had no idea where or how anything was. I can still feel that initial surge of mystery and adrenaline walking home, even when I walk the same streets everyday.

10 p.m:

Firecrackers pop, the sound of horns from distant fiestas drifts over the house, and we fade off into sleep.

And you? I’m putting out a call for submissions for “A Day in the Life of an Expat in…” Where are you living? What’s a typical day there like for you? I’d like to explore the kinds of routines we develop living abroad; the ways in which the exotic becomes routine but also maintains a vividness, a foreignness, perhaps a trace of mystery.

Do not send thrilling tales of adventure on the high seas. Plunk us down into an average day in your life – sights, smells, sounds, experiences, popsicle men, bus drivers, neighbors, students. Send submissions, under 1000 words, to Sarah(at)Matadornetwork.com with “A Day in the Life of an Expat in ….” In the subject line.

Feature Photo: worak Photo: Just Taken Pic’s

Things are a little different in Mexico than in, say, the U.S or Europe. Here, the gas truck blares its jingle out of a gigantic static-y loudspeaker every morning; here, the term “ahorita” (right now) refers to an occasion 3-6 hours down the road (or maybe mañana).

It may seem pathetically obvious that yes, when one lives in Mexico, things—like time and noise and customer service—are a little different. But believe me, the longer the expat is away from home, the more shocking and abrasive this concept is. It’s a travel paradox.

You see, a pattern I’ve noticed with expats – and I’m referring here to expats who’ve chosen to settle in developing countries – is that the longer they actually live overseas, the more the differences get to them, until expats start referring to the locals with a condescending “they” as if they were an alien race that had somehow invaded the streets of the quaint, pretty little Mexican town or the upscale Beijing neighborhood where these expats had previously lived in much deserved tranquility.

I am terrified of becoming one of these they-sayers. It is a very easy trap to fall into. I think the longer expats stick around a place like Mexico, the more a sense of entitlement starts to creep over them (ok, fine, I’m including myself in the “them”) and the more they start to feel indignant if they’re not greeted with a smile and served their coffee within the allotted corporate three minute time slot.

This is scary for the following reasons:

A) because it reeks of imperialism

B) because it makes expats into hypocritical assholes

Why do many expats move to developing countries? I think for many, the answer is one of the following:

a) I’m tired of capitalist-consumer U.S workaholic culture

b) I want something more “real”: all sorts of problematic ideologies behind this but hey, I can identify with it. Some sort of relationship with people that feels more natural than, “And would you like a blueberry nut bar with that, sir?”

c) I like colorful walls/coffee/the laid-back pace of life/the challenge of another culture/the insanity of a big foreign city/the freedom to enjoy things like blue sky and learning another language and a sense of community

d) I want to be more aware of everything around me and want that jolt of travel and excitement that comes from sipping a 10 peso beer in a darkened Mexican cantina on Friday afternoon

e) Life where I’m from is boring, is a given, is simply too routine, and/or I don’t fit in

Great. So a second home abroad gives one or all of these experiences to expats, and also – many times – gives them an incredibly reduced cost of living and the freedom, in my case, to live as a starving artist without quite starving and with the ability to even afford a whole liter (!) jug of Corona from time to time. Cool.

So why all the bitching? And why does it increase the longer one is away from home, when one should supposedly, be increasingly tolerant of cultural differences?

I remember a fellow teacher at the language school where I taught in Oaxaca going on a rampage about a BranFruit bar. BranFruit bars, for your information, are nasty, mangy little turds of granola bars cemented together with neon-colored “jam.” They are mass-produced by Bimbo, your friendly neighborhood junk food corporation. Why in the world it occurred to this girl that BranFruits would be a healthy local breakfast, I don’t know. Is Mexico known for specializing in fibrous granola bars? No.

But these are the kinds of things that, after awhile, get to expats. She was ranting and raving about how unhealthy the food was here and how they couldn’t even make a frickin’ granola bar right. And the thing was, I sympathized with her. I was irritated because people walk veerrrrrrryyyy slowly and I walk with the rapid, every-second-of-my-day-is-filled-with-purpose stride of the Busy American. I’d zoomed around who knows how many meandering grandmas and school kids on my way to work (after leaving home, as usual, with exactly 16 minutes for a 30 minute walk.)

So I could identify with the BranFruit rage. But at the same time identify it as disturbing. This is my Number One Fear as an expat: the creeping sense of entitlement, the outrage, the sense of being offended by the very same things—cultural differences—that caused me to come here in the first place.

Of course, I should insert a disclaimer here saying that some things, of course, merit complaining—serious racial or sexual discrimination, being harmed or mugged, being manipulated or taken advantage of… But I think the average expat has the intellectual capacity to distinguish between basic cultural differences and these other, more individual or wider societal issues.

So what is an expat like myself, worried about falling prey to the expat conundrum, to do? Remember why I came in the first place—because I can spend Saturday afternoons playing Scrabble in old railway stations surrounded by palm trees, because I like the way “ay, cabron!!” can have ten different meanings, because people are honest and funny and straightforward and because really, there is nothing better than a sizzling clay pot of chilaquiles after a long night on the town.

Community Connection

Is travel really just consumption, anyway? Add your thoughts at Travel Torture: Personal Implications of Cultural Consumption. Are you an expat with animosity towards tourists? Take a look at Tourists, Expats, and That Fragile Sense of Belonging. Seasoned expat? Do you know the six characters you’ll meet at every expat bar?

Photos: Jorge Santiago

Mexicans have a way with expressions. They use Spanish the way a bullfighter uses a flag – to grab your attention, to add a little romance and drama and flair, to turn a dull conversation into artful swoops of language.

1. caerle gordo a alguien

Used to refer to someone who rubs you the wrong way. For example, that friend of ours who never returned the book I lent her, and who’s always gossiping about everyone else, ella me cae gorda. You can use “caerme …” to describe how you get along with someone in general – “me cae bien, me cae mal” – with the literal, direct translation being how well someone falls on you. In this particular version, my favorite, someone falls fat on you.

2. pintarse de colores

Get the hell out of there. As in, what my Mexican friends do when I try to convince them to go trail running, what kids do the second the last bell rings at the end of the school day.

3. echarle ganas

Throw some life into it. “Echale ganas!” you might say to someone who looks like they’d rather be doing anything other than what they’re doing at that moment.

4. tener ganas de

Crave, have a desire to, have the urge to. Applies to cravings big and small, culinary and otherwise. In my case, tengo ganas de viajar por Belice, tengo ganas de comer chilaquiles verdes, tengo ganas de arriesgarme.

5. creerse mucho

Brag, think too much of oneself. Se cree mucho is said with a derogative tone, as in, he thinks he knows Spanish fluently but really he’s all arrogance.

6. echar la hueva

The opposite of “echarle ganas.” Instead of giving it your all, you give it an egg, the ultimate Mexican symbol of laziness. What am I doing on any given Sunday afternoon? Echando la hueva.

7. comiendo moscas

Literally eating flies, figuratively dazing out. So when someone’s staring off into space while you’re explaining the basis of your thesis project you can call them out with, “Estás comiendo moscas!”

8. Irse el avion

Lose your train of thought. You’re talking about one thing, and suddenly you say, “se me fue el avion:” my plane just took off.

Y ahora, me pinto de colores, damas y caballeros.

Community Connection

If you’re studying Spanish, or just curious about what “que cabrón” means, take a look at our quick and dirty phrasebook of Mexican slang. If, for some reason, this post made you crave tacos, you might want to check out the foodie primer for Mexico.

Photo: Sarah

Paletas Popeye

Everyday sometime between three and four (imprecision being an ongoing theme of life in Mexico) the Popeye’s Popsicle man comes up our street. We listen to his cry get closer and closer. The same stress is always on the same syllables – pal-let-ahhhs pop-ay-eeeeee, pa-let-ahhhhs pop-ay-eeee, like a birdsong.

We wait, shifting eagerly in our chairs, wondering how this brown, brown old man can sound this cry for hours every afternoon. Once you actually talk to him, his voice is surprisingly normal, no sign that he’s been digging into the depths of his vocal chords for so many afternoons over the years.

“Guera!” he says, “cómo está la guerita?”

“Bien!” I reply, and we talk about the dog, how big she is, about the heat, how strong it is, about whether I want una de coco and una de nuez, which I always do.

He opens the door on the small metal cart, reaches in, and produces two paletas and a few wisps of cool fog from inside the popsicle den. I hand him my peso coins and he nods, slips them in his pocket.

“Que te vaya bien,” says the popsicle man.

“Igualmente,” I respond.

Riding in the Back of Trucks

Last weekend we went to a lake outside of Oaxaca City. Jorge and I rode with Stella the dog in the back of a friend’s truck. Stella was in olfactory paradise and Jorge and I were just plain happy.

Riding in the back of a truck in Latin America is, for me, travel. That is it. Punto y ya. There is no similar traveling sensation. I get this rush and this nostalgia and this sense of contentment and I think, let’s go, I don’t care, just keep going to Ushuaia and don’t stop.

But, we stopped, and we picnicked and swam and then it started pouring rain. So we headed into a little restaurant on the side of the lake with big windows, ordered beers and peanuts, and watched the rain pour down over the pines on the mountains and into the lake.

I thought about how many layers there are to traveling. I live in Oaxaca, but it is so familiar now that it’s hard to feel the same jolt of awareness and vivid sense of place one does in traveling. Yet it still feels like travel, in subtler ways.

The Paletas Popeye man, for example, is a layer of traveling, a traveling-in-the-everyday. The walk I take with the dog every evening is a layer of traveling, perhaps the most satisfying part, where the familiar meets the foreign, allowing for two simultaneous types of appreciation – that of the outsider, and that of someone who belongs.

The lakeside beer in the rain is yet another layer, the thrill of traveling and of being outside of something. Obligation? Routine? Daily life? Givens? As much as I dread the connotations of the word, this layer of travel has overtones of escape. Escape in the best sense – escape from monotony or drudgery or accepted notions or fixed ways of seeing and being.

So many layers. Maybe this happens once travel becomes, inadvertently or purposefully, the paradigm by which you live your life.

And then we came back to the city, the air chilly and the sky already clearing for one of those twilights so blue it hurts. Back to another layer of travel.

This is what I’ve been up to in Oaxaca as of late.

And you, readers?

I’d love to know what content you have enjoyed recently here at Abroad, and what you’d rather see less of. What do you want to get out of this site? What sorts of information would you like to see here? What discussions would you like to be having here? Please share your ideas and opinions in the comments below. I want this site to be a reflection of the thoughts, needs, and questions of the Matador community.

Photos: author

Normally “routine” – at least in my world – has negative connotations. It invokes a dread of dull, grinding monotony. There is no more depressing expression than “day in, day out:” as if life was just going through the turnstiles, again and again.

But routine has entirely different meanings traveling. It’s a new learning curve, it’s paradoxically novel. I think sometimes you can learn more from establishing a routine than from jumping from here to there on a frenetic traveling binge. And the process of settling into a routine is one of the most gratifying and revealing processes that unfolds after moving to a new place.

In Japan I loved the morning subway ride to work. There were the blank-faced salarymen hanging onto the loops dangling from the ceiling. The perfectly made up girls in sheer pantyhose and heels, fast asleep, lolling ever so slightly side to side in some restless underground dream. The school kids in uniforms staring into space, staring down at their feet.

I never thought I’d work 9-6, and three months was probably the threshold for how long I could stand it without becoming one of those blank-faced types walking in circles in the subway station whispering to herself. But while they lasted, those three months were brilliant – I loved the feeling of being done at six and coming out of the Sakae station into a bustling evening, feeling exhausted and relieved and still somewhat alert since everything, even after months there, was still so new.

Eventually that newness was paired with familiarity – a paradoxical combo that creates, for me, the greatest traveling feeling.

Weekends captured this like nothing else in Japan. After so many strange teaching schedules and a year of freelancing, weekends were unexpected gifts this new routine had coughed up.

Saturdays were precious. In the summer in Japan it gets light around 5, and I always seemed to get up around this time, despite the debauchery of the night before. I suppose this has always been a Sarah curse/blessing. Mornings are my time of day.

The city felt so quiet. I’d to the Circle K to get milk, or roam a bit in the Osu Kannon area, waiting for the supermarket to open. An occasional bike would breeze by, the sun would do its morning thing, coming out and disappearing behind clouds, and I’d get this detached, luxurious feeling of freedom.

There are lots of ways to define the passing of time, and weekdays vs. weekends has never been my preferred method. But I must say that in this routine, weekends were sweeter than a fat persimmon. Than a beer after six straight hours of classes. Than finding black sesame at the 100 yen shop. They were the crème de la crème of luxury.

But now, back in Mexico, weekends have faded into a wider swath of time. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – just another routine that’s petered out and become part of the nostalgia for a particular place from the past.

Transitory routine. A travel paradox. At some point I’ll have to reconcile the love of getting settled with the love of leaving, the love of routine with the love of novelty, the desire for newness with the desire for familiarity. Or not.

Feature Photo: siddharta Photo : ivanx

It’s the eve of Mexican independence day.

Almost exactly 200 years ago on the 16th of September 1810, priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla gave the famous “grito de dolores” or, as it’s commonly referred to “el grito.” Priest Hidalgo gathered his congregation at his church in Dolores, a small pueblo in Guanajuato, and proceeded to give the sermon credited with kicking off Mexico’s 10-year war for independence.

The sermon culminated with cries of “Death to the illegitimate government! Long live the the glorious pueblo Méxicano!” followed by the emphatic ringing of the church bell.

This grito is replicated each year on the evening of September 15th, in the Zócalo of Mexico City and in plazas, cities, and pueblos around the country. The president and other public figures initiate it with three or more shouts of “Viva México!” followed by a “Viva!” for every Mexican state and for Mexican revolutionary figures. Massive fireworks are set off and the pueblo Méxicano goes nuts in shades of red, white, and green.

In honor of el grito, I give you “Mexico Lindo y Querido,” sung by Mexican singer and actor Javier Solis (1933-1966).

Any mariachi in Mexico will be able to sing this for you. I most recently heard it on a road trip in Ohio, when Jorge gained control of the Ipod and used it to shout, weepy and unabashed, “México lindo y querrrrrido!” out onto the open road.

If you want to follow along, find the lyrics below:

Voz de la guitarra mía,
al despertar la mañana
quiere cantar la alegría
de mi tierra mexicana

Que digan que estoy dormido
y que me traigan aquí
México Lindo y Querido
si muero lejos de ti

Viva México!

Feature Photo: Jen SFO BCN Photo: sethw

Living abroad is the act of cultivating a sense of superiority to “the tourists.”

Travelers (who often consider themselves the cultured half of the supposed traveler/tourist dichotomy) try to pull off this superiority to tourists as well, but at the end of the day they have to admit that they have no idea what the price of tomatoes per kilo is or how to pronounce zempoalxochitl.

It’s those who are quasi-local, who have plants, cook and have managed the general grid layout of the town, who really perfect their scorn for tourists.

Expat treatment of tourists ranges from gentle condescension, as if the tourists were dense, pitiful, overweight children, to outright contempt, as if the tourists were an invasion of parasites sucking all the authenticity out of local culture. But in very rare cases does the expat actually see a reflection of him/herself in a tourist.

Photo: Ed Yourdon

Ah, but the reality is, folks, that at some point in time even the most seasoned expat was standing on some street corner looking dumbly in each direction and being silently condemned by Those Who Got There Earlier. Yet expats seem particularly quick to throw together a hierarchy, and they defend it like dogs defending the pack order.

The eager study abroad student is at the bottom of the ladder. Then come the English teachers, then the newer retired people, then the older retired people, then the newer retired artists, then the older retired artists. You can jump a few rungs in the hierarchy by virtue of participation in revolutionary politics or marriage to a local.

So what’s the purpose of all this if, at the end of the day, the study abroad student, the artist with his eco-hacienda, and the group of straw-hatted retired folks who’ve been here for twenty years are all foreigners?

I think it has something to do with a sense of vulnerability inherent to the experience of living in another country, in another culture. For as much as you may dress in huipiles and explain the subtle differences between mezcales, you’re still an outsider. Even the huarache-wearing down-with-the-people revolutionary living in the barrios outside of town is, at the end of the day, foreign.

Photo: another sergio

And while, in my experience, Mexico’s got nothing on Asia as far as making foreigners feel foreign is concerned, there are still walls—economic, social, cultural. And occasionally, foreigners bristle at the presence of those walls.

Hence, the vulnerability—who knows when that occasion will come, just when you feel that you’re in the intimate little cave of culture, huddled round the campfire with everybody else, when suddenly BOOM a wall goes up and you realize that nope, you’re actually outside looking in.

I don’t want to give the impression here that expats can never truly belong to or be part of a local culture. No, not at all. But belonging is a precarious and fluctuating state of being, not a constant.

And perhaps feeling that, consciously or unconsciously, expats throw up an extra wall between themselves and tourists. So that at least if the wall gets thrown up between them and Mexicans, well, they’re still not outside the moat yet. There’s a big ol’ wall between them and the tourists in white tube socks and sandals.

And an even bigger wall, expats are quick to point out, between them and the big dude in the San Diego T-shirt drinking Negra Modelo out of a can in front of Santo Domingo at 3 p.m. and shouting “Honey! Take me a picture!”

Photo: Garry Knight

All those tourists are reminders, sometimes subtle, sometimes painful, of the essential expat vulnerability.

I’m waxing on about this because yesterday was one of those days when that vulnerability came on sudden and unexpected.

I went roaming around Oaxaca’ s various libraries, searching for inspiration in old atlases and yellowing history books. Didn’t find inspiration, but definitely confronted my outsiderness.

I can’t describe exactly where the feeling comes from, but suddenly it’s there—standing in the weighted silence of a library room with a bunch of school girls giggling and whispering behind their hands, the librarian staring out of the corner of her eye, people shuffling past and casting a sideways glance…and the vulnerability becomes palpable, like a shift in the air.

It’s hard to shake once it’s there, and it throws off one’s sense of balance. The urge is to mentally shout, but no, I live here! Really! I speak Spanish! I’m not….dum da dum dum…a tourist!

But really, isn’t this vulnerability and this outsiderness part of what makes us go abroad in the first place? To see everything, the most minute details, with freshness, with exhilaration?

I ran into a group of tourists later that day on the andador in the center of town, and stood behind them as they took photos of Santo Domingo. For the first time in awhile, I stepped back and craned my neck to admire the cathedral. It was huge and imposing, glowing with late afternoon light, set against one of those impeccably blue Oaxacan skies. How could it have been so long since I’d looked at it?

Feature Photo: db*photography Photo: jakeliefer

The other morning I went to the market with the dog to buy some avocados.

There was a foreign woman buying veggies from the same stall. She cast a few glances at the dog, a big female German Shepherd, and asked,

“Amable?”

“Yes, she’s very nice, you can say hello to her,” I replied in Spanish.

The woman bent over and greeted my Stella, who responded with kisses and happy grunts and a near belly-flop. When she stood back up, I said to her in English,

“Have you tried huitlacoche?”

Then I got the look.

It’s the “why are you speaking to me in English” glare of wounded pride and condescension. The woman responded with something along the lines of “what how is?”

Photo: dionhinchcliffe

I tried to explain in Spanish about the concept of mushroom corn fungus and how to cook it, but that wasn’t going so well, so I took a risky political line and jumped back to English. The explanation got through then, but the woman was obviously insulted and we parted ways without either of us sharing any goodbyes or further info.

This got me to thinking about the politics of English overseas. Why, I wonder, are foreigners so often insulted when other foreigners speak to them in English? I’ve never understood the purpose of having a tedious conversation that one or both parties only half-understand when they both speak English and could glide on by just fine in that language.

I took a controversial stance on this in France, when I was studying abroad and it was all the rage to speak nothing but French all the time, even with a fellow group of Americans whose French sounded, at best, like a heavily accented Wisconsinte reading sentences by rote out of a grammar book and, at worst, like garbled, frustrated baby talk.

What are you learning in that encounter? I argued. How to mimic each others’ painfully flat American accents?

We’re practicing our French, they’d reply, with the same haughty and irritated look the market woman shot me.

And I’d contest, Do you really think it’s helping your French to talk about how many brothers and sisters you have with other American French students?

But still, I’d often find myself in situations in which I overheard several Americans having a brutally basic and torturous conversation like the following:

“What’s your favorite color?”

“I like blue. And you?”

“I like yellow. Yes, yellow. Yellow is be nice.”

I thought this was just the bane of overly eager study abroad students. But I’ve discovered that it’s a widespread traveler phenomena. Especially in Mexico, American tourists will get irritated if I speak to them in English, even if it’s to clarify something they don’t understand.

Once, I went to go grab a beer with a traveler who spoke basic to intermediate Spanish. There were plenty of things I wanted to talk about–Mexican politics, her perceptions and experiences, who she’d met…but she insisted from the beginning on talking solely in Spanish, and half the conversation was spent on waiting until three word sentences about what she liked and didn’t like came together.

There’s nothing wrong with speaking in Spanish or French or the local language, and certainly nothing wrong with squeezing in as much practice as possible when studying a language. And with native speakers, for sure, give all your energy to muscling up those language skills.

But what I find bizarre is the insistence of certain travelers on speaking a second language with a fellow native English speaker when the said travelers obviously don’t speak that second language well enough to hold a decent conversation or to understand their partner.

If you speak fluently or well enough to move beyond describing when you brush your teeth and what you’re doing tomorrow, great. But if you don’t, then in my opinion it’s waste of time.

Photo: William A. Franklin

Particularly if you’re passing up the opportunity to learn something or to get a useful explanation — like, for example, the other day in the coffee shop when a woman became increasingly irritated that they didn’t have eggs, and I tried to explain in English that they did have eggs but they were on another menu, and she insisted on switching back to Spanish only to get more frustrated. Why?

So I’ll draw up my Rules for the Use of English Vs. the Local Language When Speaking with Native English Speakers (RUEVLLWSNES-catchy, right?)

1. If you do not speak at the same level as your conversational partner, be aware of this when insisting on speaking in the local language.

2. If you do not understand what your partner is saying, it might be time to throw in the towel.

3. At parties or meetings or other social events where native speakers of the local language are present, by all means speak only the local language, even with other English speakers. But if it’s just you and someone who shares your native tongue, and your level is not high enough to have a worthwhile conversation, then scrap language practice time.

4. Keep in mind that for expats, speaking the local language isn’t exactly the most stimulating experience ever.

And that’s all for today, folks, from the land of rant. I’d be interested to hear your experiences on this front–are you one of these English-leery people? Why? Are you a practice-my-French-with-American-friends kind of gal/guy or does this make your skin crawl? Why? Does it drive you nuts when you try and explain something in Chinese or Italian to a tourist who obviously does not understand?

Fly on the wings of rant, travelers. Sound off below.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

The first dilemma hit when I tried to choose a chair.

Faculty members did an awkward shuffle, turning this way and that like confused middle-aged couples in salsa classes. I loitered over a seat and pulled back, loitered and pulled back…

Then the deans strolled in with grace and unconcern and seated themselves in the two seats closest to the door of the banquet room. Somehow, everyone unraveled neatly into seats around them without further ado.

I later learned that the seats closest to the most important guests are occupied by the second most important guests, and then the ensuing chairs are filled in the same way, with the least important people being furthest from the guests of honor.

The university staff must’ve known this and waited for the cue from the deans, and the other professors swiftly slid into their places accordingly. I, being the youngest and newest professor, sat squarely across the table from the deans.

It was our first university banquet. I was new to everything in China and I took in the scene with an air of intrigued bewilderment that didn’t leave me the whole time I lived and worked in Beijing.

The younger dean was in charge of the menu. This is a great honor and an even greater responsibility. Unlike in American restaurants, in which each person studies a menu and chooses a dish, in China one person orders a variety of plates for everyone to share. This ordering must be done according to several cultural givens:

There must be way, way too much food for anyone to eat.

There must be a mix of hot and cold dishes, sweet and spicy dishes, meat and vegetable dishes, and dishes cooked according to the different styles of Chinese cooking.

There must be rice and/or noodles. The rice should follow the meal.

There must be soup.

The dean ordered a cold wood ear mushroom salad, a cold Spinach salad, a plate of crunchy chrysanthemum greens, a plate of cold, firm tofu, and the ubiquitous cold cucumber salad with grated garlic.

The dishes kept appearing after that. Again, unlike in an American restaurant in which the entree dutifully follows the appetizer, in China all the dishes come out as they’re prepared. Just as the gong bao chicken is put on the table the sizzling platter of fish with Sichuan peppercorns comes out. Then, three waitresses in qipiaos bring in over-the-rainbow ribs and the Peking duck.

All of these dishes are placed on the revolving banquet table. Guests push the table gently so that each person has access to the array of dishes.

This is when mad chopstick skills come in handy. I had been mastering mine, eating peanuts in the house with a precise pinch of the chopsticks, picking up slippery cashew nuts between sticks of stir-fried celery. I could sneak in and snatch a piece of passing broccoli before it was lost to my neighbor.

The visiting English department head was not so lucky. She knew, however, how to handle the situation with grace. She asked a Chinese staff member to serve her, and the Chinese woman placed small portions of each dish on her plate. She did a fine job of not making the two major cultural mistakes I’d been warned about: stabbing portions of food with a chopstick, and sticking chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice or a dish of food.

The soup and rice presented she and I with less possibility for peril. I swooped in with my spoon and served myself each after the main courses had been sufficiently depleted. A small bowl is reserved for rice and another for soup, and I learned by example that it’s important to serve each in its proper place. It’s also critical to hold off until the meal is wrapping up; soup and rice are generally reserved for after a meal, as they’re considered to aid in digestion.

Luckily, this banquet was not one of the alcohol-drenched affairs which end with someone stooped over a bowl of fish soup and others gesturing in flagrant, drunken revelry at the waitresses. But I’d heard stories from enough people about this to know that my situation was the exception to the rule. In the case of drunken abandonment, my friends had advised sipping…sipping…slowly…and if necessary, pretending to pass out at the table so as to avoid further damage.

The banquet ended tranquilly, with the dean paying the bill and all of us pleasantly stuffed, sipping green tea. I was, above all, relieved. I’d survived the first major social experience in China, and I hadn’t dropped anything in my lap or lost face or greatly offended anyone’s honor or the group harmony.

I learned something tonight, I thought. I can do this again.

Each Friday, Matador Abroad features a new learning experience. Want to share yours? Check out how at call for submissions: learning experiences around the world.

Community Connection

Interested in China? Check out Christoph Rehage’s time lapse video about a walk across China. Or read our tales from the road from China and Tibet. And if you’re thinking of moving there, you might want to look into how and why to move to China during the recession.

Feature Photo: drunkprincessPhoto: dhilung

Ta da! Tim and I are psyched to announce the arrival of a regular Friday column called….

“Do It Yourself Study Abroad: Learning Experiences Around the World.”

The column will feature a new learning experience each week from a different part of the globe.

We want to highlight unique, local skills. We’re not so interested in how to study Spanish in Mexico, but we’d love to know how you learned to crush, roll, and fold the maize to make tortillas. And we don’t really need to know which university you chose for a study abroad semester in France, but we’d be into hearing about how you learned to play boules in Marseilles.

We’re interested in the skills that form the backbone of cultures, the learning experiences that’ve been passed down from generation to generation and are perhaps at risk of being lost as societies undergo rapid changes.

Tell us about the flower-arranging class you took in Japan or how you learned to conduct an Ethiopian coffee ceremony in Addis Ababa. Your experience doesn’t have to be a formal course attached to an institution, but it should be something other travelers can search out and replicate.

Remember to focus your story on the learning experience and not on explaining how to do something. Don’t tell us where to put our fingers in order to play the Chinese harp. Instead, tell us where and why you learned how to play it, and explain why other travelers should learn it, too.

Please send 300-800 word submissions in the body of an email with “Learning Experiences” in the subject line to Sarah(at)matadornetwork.com or Tim(at)matadornetwork.com. Don’t forget to include your full name, your Matador profile URL, and any photos and links related to your experience.

Show us what you’ve learned, readers! We can’t wait to kick off this new venture at Abroad.

Your editors,

Tim and Sarah

Feature photo: clinkerPhoto: Felixe

Mexico has its own language untaught by Spanish schools and phrase books. It’s a language whose meanings shift in a heartbeat from insults to compliments, a language Mexican people manipulate deftly and instinctively in all sorts of contexts.

It’s, in a word, cabrón.

Here’s a primer of your essential Mexican slang:

Cabrón.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

This sounds like a cliché. Sure, a cabrón is a guy who’s a sort of badass, right?

Sure, that’s one interpretation. But this guy can be a real jerk, someone you talk about with disgust or fear, or this guy could be, say, an internationally renowned artist who’s just completed a photo exhibition about indigenous cultures.

Either one is a cabrón. And don’t forget about the feminine version, cabróna. Same standards apply: there are the bitchy, detested cabrónas and the revered, awe-inducing ones.

Then there’s que cabrón, which is used to describe a thing or situation as opposed to a person. This, too, can be positive or negative, but it’s gotta have a particular edge to it. Real life examples:

a) Narcos entered a popular restaurant and collected the cell phones of all the customers, warning them not to make any phone calls or act out of the ordinary. The narcos ate peacefully, returned the cell phones, paid everyone’s bills, and continued on their way. Que cabron.

b) You ran out of water, and the government isn’t sending more water to the Centro Historico for three days. You just had a party and now have a sink full of beer glasses, skillets full of chipotle sausage residue, and greasy plates. Que cabrón.

Insider tip: For added flair, add an “ay” before cabrón when used for people, and mix it up with an “esta cabrón” instead of “que cabrón” in the case of situations.

Destinations

Community Connection to Mexico

Madre

In the quintessential Mexican read, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz has a great passage about the significance of la madre (the mother) in Mexican slang and culture.

The madre is identified with all things negative, the padre with all things positive. This, argues Paz, is a reflection of two historical and cultural factors in Mexico.

The first is the idea of the “long-suffering mother,” the passive recipient of pain and burden who is, to use another classic Mexican slang term, chingada (screwed, for a polite interpretation).

Photo: descamarado

The second is the historical resentment and resignation towards the woman whom Paz claims is the mother of modern Mexico—La Malinche. La Malinche was a Nahuatl woman who aided Cortéz in the colonization of Mexico, translating for him, offering insider information, and…giving him a son, one of Mexico’s first mestizos.

So la madre is not treated kindly by Mexican slang. Whether you feel squeamish about it or not, be prepared to hear at least one of these expressions on a daily basis:

Que madres: what the hell? As in, the sudden explosion of firecrackers on any random street corner, the drunken antics of your friend after so much mezcal, the thing floating in your soup.

Que poca madre: literally, how little mother, as if mother was a quantity added with an eye dropper to a particular experience. The less mother, the better. So if Mexico kills in soccer with a 5-0 victory, it’s definitely poca madre.

Or, on the flip side, it’s padre—meaning cool, awesome, interesting.

Hasta la madre: utterly sick of something. Your boyfriend’s behavior could drive you to feeling hasta la madre, and so could consistent rain every afternoon or the incessant barking of the dog next door. You’re at the end of your rope, the breaking point—you’re literally, to translate the phrase directly, almost to the point of motherhood.

Huevos.

Photo: procsilas

There’s a whole linguistic universe surrounding huevos here, so I’ll just stick to my personal favorites.

Que huevon/huevona: What a lazy egg. This expression is one of the principal reasons for my deep affection for Mexico. The mental image rocks, and the insult rocks. It is soft and prodding and so accurate in so many situations (particularly for describing the morning after 10 peso beers and a night of salsa).

Similarly, there’s the expression que hueva, which translates literally as “what egginess.” Eggs here have the same association with laziness with an additional component of boredom. For example, you could toss out a que hueva at the suggestion of starting up a soccer game, and you could toss out a que hueva at the suggestion of watching one on T.V.

Que huevos! A brilliant expression that translates most accurately as “what balls” but really, contextually, means so much more. In the most literal “what balls” sense que huevos can be used to express admiration for some great courageous act; for example, throwing your half-eaten mango at that guy who whistled at you in the street.

It can also be used, however, to express repulsion for rude behavior, such as tearing around a corner in your SUV and nearly killing a couple of pedestrians.

And finally, it can be used without the “que” to lament a minor tragedy—spilling beer all over yourself, tripping over the sidewalk, forgetting to buy the one thing you went to the supermarket to buy.

You can’t really go wrong with these three overarching expressions—cabron, madre, huevos—used in one variation or another. (Obviously, when you’re having a chat with the polite grandmotherly señora on the corner you don’t want to bust out with “ay, cabrón!”….common slang sense applies in Mexico as in most places).

So the next time you find yourself grappling with the differences between ser and estar, why not sprinkle some huevos into the conversation and save yourself the effort?

Community Connection

Planning a trip to Mexico? Check out the three part series on Mexican cantinas: Wrestling, Pig Skin, and Beer, Life is Worth Nothing, and Tequila and a Song. Also, take Matador editor and Mex-pat Teresa Ponikvar’s advice about spending summer in Baja California Sur. And if urban life is your thing, read up on the top 10 nightlife spots in Mexico City.

Feature Photo: Verity Cridland Photo: Hamed Masoumi

The three, identified as Sarah Shourd, Joshua Fattal, and Shane Bauer, have not been heard from since.

In the latest update, Iranian officials have announced that the government is interrogating the three and deciding whether to try them as spies. American officials are attempting to work through Swiss ties (the Swiss have represented the U.S in Iran since the 1979 hostage crisis) to obtain further information and negotiate the release of the travelers.

The incident has inspired a vitriolic and disturbing backlash against the three Americans, and revealed a common way of thinking in the U.S about travel and travelers.

Take these comments on the website of ABC News, for example:

“Let them stew over there for a bit. For to be so educated (as it appears) these children certainly are naïve and STUPID!”

“Dude, the GPS say’s were in Iran.
Hey, lets go ‘break bread’ with the Iranians, we’ll show’em, Americans are goooood, it’s just our government that’s baaaaad…C’mon let’s do it ….we’ll be hero’s for world peace.”

“I hope they spend a couple of years in an Iranian prison thinking about their self-centered stupidity. And, when they get out, I hope the U.S government jails them for another couple of years. Idiots!”

“Ere is a real example of people acting stupidly, and now they ask us for help because of their stupid actions. I say if you want to vacation in the mountains of Iraq, summer in Afghanistan, or frolic in the waters off Somalia north coast then you should do it knowing (because the state department tells us so) that if your picked up on your own—stupid.”

“…they walk around with this dewey-eyed dream of the world…”

“…stupid aspiring writers…”

There are two themes here. One is that travel (outside of the U.S and perhaps Western Europe) is dangerous, reckless, and stupid. The other is that only starry-eyed, pot-smoking hippie backpackers are dumb enough to try it, and they get what they deserve.

One of the striking things I’ve noticed in comments on articles about the hikers is the way people are seething with contempt about the nerve of these “backpackers” to go “on vacation” in Iraq. The mainstream news media runs with this image and perpetuates it, etching out an image of the three as clueless, trust fund hippies singing camp songs round the fire on the Iraq-Iran border.

In actuality, the three were established journalists and experienced travelers, with bylines in the San Francisco Chronicle, the L.A Times, New American Media, The Nation, The Christian Science Monitor, Transitions Abroad and Brave New Traveler. Shane Bauer’s story on Iraqi Special Forces took him to Baghdad, where he did extensive research on the political infrastructure behind the special forces and interviewed Iraqi civilians, Iraqi military officers, and American military officers. He speaks fluent Arabic and has lived for years in the Middle East.

Sarah Shourd’s stories on Yemen and Israel also show an insight and skill as a journalist and a shrewdness for travel which betray the convenient idea that she’s a study abroad ingenue with a misguided sense of adventure. She also has lived and traveled for years in the Middle East and was studying Arabic in Damascus.

Yet most Americans would prefer to view them in line with a rhetoric that says, “Don’t go overseas. The world wants to kill America and America is damn smart to just stay at home and let the State Department deal with it.” Thinking this way maintains the neat dichotomy between hippie liberal backpackers who sympathize with those hostile foreign nations and clued-in Americans who understand that in the “real world” these nations all detest us.

The coverage of this story is a direct reflection of the way the U.S news media portrays travel to anywhere that isn’t Tuscany or Disney World: dangerous and inherently stupid, seeing as the rest of the world hates Americans and wants to attack them out of envy and hatred.

Perhaps this is why so few Americans travel and why so many Americans returning home from a trip to Latin America or Africa or the Middle East will be confronted with gasps and wonderment over how they survived.

Because the media doesn’t like to tell the stories of travelers who’ve come back not only in one piece but actually inspired and optimistic, the disaster stories will always reaffirm the same point about travel being for the green young idealist who has yet to get slapped by the “real world.”

And sure, there will always be a certain degree of naïvete and ignorance involved in travel: that’s part of what makes it so difficult and so rewarding. How can a person not be naïve in some respect visiting a different culture and trying to figure it out from square one?

But as most readers of this website could tell you, traveling is something you learn in the same way you learn to teach or to cook. It’s complicated and physically and emotionally trying, and this is part of what makes it addictive, particularly for challenge-oriented people. And oftentimes, the more people travel, the more willing they are to take on bigger and bigger challenges, and the less willing they are to think of travel the way the mainstream media and the State Department paint it.

Therefore, they take risks. And these risks are the basis of some of the most successful reporting and travel writing, the kinds of stories that crack open our awareness of and compassion for life in a particular place.

Photo: Desmond Kavanagh

This is what Sarah Shourd did with her articles on Yemen and Israel; she took risks and put herself in uncomfortable, unfamiliar situations and came out with stories that stick with the reader long after he/she has finished the last sentence. I can still imagine what it must’ve felt like to sit in prayer with so many covered women in Yemen, and I can feel her experience gnawing at my own given ideas about that country.

Yet if Sarah Shourd had been kidnapped in Yemen, I wonder how many people who read her story and enjoyed it would instead be saying, “How stupid!”

It is not only Americans glued to Fox News and spiteful of travel who scorn these travelers. There is also a vibe within the travel community that says, “well, you should’ve known better, too bad.” Whether that is true or not, where is the empathy for travelers when they need it?

Are we willing to marvel over travelers’ experiences when they get home, and dream about how we would’ve liked to have gone and done what they did, and look through the windows they open for us, but not to rally around them when they get into trouble?

This is not to say that travelers never make mistakes or get careless or cocky. This could have been what happened to these three hiking around the border; we still don’t know. There is plenty of potential back and forth about the logistics of their plan: North Kurdistan is a resort area and a relatively safe area for travelers, not the “war zone” people think it is. Other tourists have gone there in the past several years with no problem. The three spoke the local language and had traveled extensively in the region, which would have prepared them for travel in such a volatile area. Then again, one could argue that their experience should have taught them not to get so close to the border.

We don’t know. Traveling is always a series of decisions and oftentimes the travel that teaches the most, and leads to the best and most piercing writing, is a series of calculated risks.

So instead of degrading and condescending to these travelers, maybe we should show some compassion. After all, how many times have you been in a dicey spot on the road, how many times could someone have said to you days or weeks after a disaster, “what were you thinking?”

This is not to diminish the gravity of this situation, or to glorify their travels, or to say, “no big deal, so they made a mistake.” Rather, it’s to counter this widespread way of thinking that sees travelers as clueless, innocent idealists, and travel as an inherently reckless and futile behavior.

This story is more complicated than such straightforward conclusions, and merely writing it off as an example of naivete meets danger not only hypocritically insults these travelers when they most need support, but also degrades the act of travel overall and reduces it to simple formulas of safe vs. dangerous, smart vs. stupid, naive vs. experienced.

Community Connection

To read travelogues from Iraq and Iran, check out this post by Matador editor Tim Patterson.

Photo: wili

1. The further “off the beaten track” you go, the more authentic a place becomes.

Japan isn’t Tokyo, Thailand isn’t Bangkok, New York isn’t the U.S…to this refrain I say: what? Sure, U.S culture can’t be summed up by New York nor can Japanese culture be summed up entirely by Tokyo; but these places are as integral to their country’s culture as any tiny town in the backwoods.

And while it can be much harder to navigate cities and find local haunts amidst all the big, glittering tourist destinations, cities are by no means cultural voids.

Even Starbucks, the easiest global corporation to hate for sucking all the local rootedness out of coffee culture, is inevitably local. Japanese Starbucks serve Coffee Jelly Frappucinos, and have four different trashcans for sorting garbage.

This is obviously not a grand cultural revelation every traveler to Japan should experience—but it does go to show that local culture creeps up in a variety of places, from the apartment blocks taking over downtown Beijing to the ramshackle villages in the far reaches of Hebei province.

2. It’s always better to go independent.

This is a given truth for many travelers. However, there are times when a tour will give you access you couldn’t have as a solo traveler.

Photo: philliecasablanca

Be it a bike ride around Paris with a well-informed guide, a trek through the Ecuadorian Amazon to a village swallowed up by jungle, or a neighborhood tour of a Brazilian favela, it could offer views and insights which are difficult to come by independently.

This is particularly true when time is an issue. Sometimes, it’s simply not possible to spend the weeks or even months that might be necessary to get to know people and get a feel for the realities of life in a certain place.

Strong-willed travelers raised on the Lonely Planet’s how-to-go-it-alone philosophy often have an instantaneous, negative gut reaction to tours. I know I do. But sometimes it’s pretentious and blinding to think that it’s possible to really learn about a place on one’s own.

Well-designed, respectful tours run with the participation of and for the benefit of local people can be worth it.

3. Everyone who travels shares a certain sense of enlightenment.

There is undeniably a lot to be learned from travel, and in my opinion most of it is learned unconsciously and drifts to the surface only after the traveling is done.

However, travel does not inherently bring on some new way of seeing, and can in fact do just the opposite. Anthropologists have long noted how traveling frequently reinforces the same prejudices, fears, and biases travelers had before leaving home.

It all depends on the person traveling, his/her attitude, and the degree to which he/her is willing to alter assumptions and beliefs.

4. Travelers stay in hostels, tourists stay in hotels.

Putting aside the bundle of issues behind the supposed tourist/traveler dichotomy, this is just plain B.S. If getting wasted at the hostel bar with a couple cute British girls and an Australian surfer is your idea of a quality traveler experience, good on ya (as the Australians would say) but don’t lord it above hotel dwellers.

I’d rather stay in a crappy budget hotel in a second than come back to a dorm room full of backpacks and lonely planets and horny, hungover twenty-somethings.

Photo: idalodiskho

Full disclosure: haven’t stayed in a hostel since I studied abroad seven years ago, and believe me, I haven’t been earning any more money than I was then. I’ve just gotten smarter about choosing budget accommodation.

5. There is some sort of almighty List Of Things To Do (as in, “have you done the rainforest walk yet?”) that all travelers must uncover and dutifully check off.

The best part of Kota Kinabalu, in the Sabah region of Malaysian Borneo, was sitting on the corner of the same beaten down coffee shop every morning. Kota Kinabalu is the essence of unspectacular—boring architecture, tame seafront, tired-looking markets, laid-back restaurants that all serve the same things.

We went to the tourist office. We found out what there was to do. Giant flower here, mountain there, orangutans there. It sounded interesting.

But we went back to the same coffee shop every morning. Met a Filipino fisherman who took us to the water village where the Filipino immigrants lived, where kids jumped off wooden planks into the water and women cooked in tiny barren rooms suspended above the ocean.

Photo: Jorge Santiago

I went running on the hillside behind the city until its geography became so familiar that I felt the rush of having a pseudo-home on the road.

We ate durian at a night market underneath a pedestrian bridge.

We went back to the same Filipino fish market every night, to the same woman’s picnic tables, and ate cuttlefish with fern salad.

That was one of the first times I’ve traveled list-free, and Kota Kinabalu remains one of the favorite places I’ve been.

Surely these preconceptions are the tip of the iceberg—travel has become so widespread, and so picked apart and analyzed, that travelers hit the road now with a whole bundle of beliefs packed up in their head.

What are yours? How have your preconceptions changed the more you travel? Please share below!

Community Connection

Interested in the way people think about travel? Explore inner travel, read up on persistent travel myths and debate the nature of “real travel.”

Our good friend Benny, aka Benny the Irish Polyglot, is traveling the world to learn new languages to fluency. And making awesome video along the way.

His latest vid, published on his awesome new site, gives travelers some pointers on starting off learning Italian.

Have travel footage of your own? Dust it off and upload your own clips to our YouTube group today.

Feature photo Tim van Kempen

Community Connection:

Also be sure to check out Benny’s guide to efficient luggage packing

Photo by Damon Garrett

It’s July 4th.

I’ve got a red hot cup a coffee in my hand, and I’m stuffing socks in a backpack, getting ready to race out the door for a 7 a.m. slow train to Kyoto.

July 4th has been a bizarre holiday for me in the past five years—celebrated anywhere but “home,” if we define home in terms of birthplace.

It has reinforced that strange connection to Americans I feel when abroad, and the distance I sometimes feel from them when I’m at home. One of those traveling paradoxes I just can’t put my finger on?

In any case, today, I’ll celebrate it at a friend’s house in Kobe, with one fellow American, a Canadian, an Australian, several bottles of wine, and the dangerous, looming potential for karaoke.

And you?

Thanks for keeping up with us here at Abroad; we love your comments and your insight. Happy July 4th!

Feature photo: striatic Photo by Neil’s Photography

When you’re in that maddening spot where you can’t seem to put a comprehensible sentence together, look to these metaphors for inspiration.

1. A Desk Covered in Scraps

Language learning is like a desk covered in bits of fabric, old ceramics, shiny plastic buttons, rough pieces of recycled paper. You sit down before the desk and sigh. But then, inspiration strikes, and you start sorting through the bits and pieces and putting together a mosaic. And before you know it, all the disparate scraps come together, and you have….a conversation.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

The point: let go of your obsession with logic and order, and get scrappy. Figure out how to piece together what you know and make it work.

2. A Game-Playing Date

Language learning is like dating a coy, flirtatious dude (or gal) who strings you along a bit, making you feel so smart, so sexy, so cool, and then suddenly stands you up.

You find yourself completely lost in some restaurant, unable to put together a sentence, realizing how little you know. You go through a bitter phase in which you swear off men/women.

Then, you meet some cute, sweet thing on the street one day, and your faith is instantly restored.

The point: there will always be moments, no matter how confident you feel or how much progress you’ve made, in which you feel like the rug has been pulled out from you.

It’ll always be harder and more intimidating to speak with certain people, and there will inevitably be times when all the language you’ve been practicing goes flying from your head at the crucial moment.

3. A Department Store

Language learning is like shopping in a massive department store with countless floors and boutiques.

You try on suits, miniskirts, overalls, knee socks, baggy sweaters, heels, boots.

Some make you feel uncomfortable and constricted. Some feel so good it’s almost like an addition to, or slight alteration of, your identity.

The point: Not every language will fit perfectly.

Photo: erredoppia

I feel much more natural, much more like myself, speaking in Spanish than in French.

I’m still happy that I speak French and I love speaking it, but I can recognize that sometimes it just doesn’t fit with my personality.

Understanding that some languages fit you better than others can help you get beyond some of your frustration with language learning.

4. An Archeological Dig

Language learning is a process of cultural excavation. At first, you’re simply pondering over shards and fragments, holding them up to the light, trying to put them in context.

Little by little, the culture behind the medley of artifacts starts to come through.

The ways people think and behave – and have thought and behaved over time – reveal themselves through the bits and pieces you’ve uncovered.

The point: Language is culture. Culture is language.

This basic lesson takes some time to figure out.

The longer you speak a language and the more time you spend in areas where it’s the native tongue, the better chance you stand of getting access to a new way of thinking and a new way of seeing the world.

Little by little, you come to realize that phrases and expressions you use for the sheer practical purpose of communication are deeply cultural, and reveal cultural values and beliefs.

5. Driving through a fog

Language learning is like driving up a long winding road through a thick fog. You arc around curve after curve, hypnotized by the monotony and the concentration of driving, by the feeling of being totally lost and insulated in your little car world.

Photo: blyzz

Then you break through the fog. You’re at the flat peak of the mountain and a whole valley of undulating green, edged by a distant bay, spreads before you.

“Holy shit!” you think. This is what I’ve been approaching!?”

The point: Immersion is a fog.

If you’re really, truly immersed in a language and unable to escape it, you’re probably going to spend quite a bit of time feeling completely isolated and unsure of yourself.

You’re going to muddle through things and feel a bit lost in every conversation, just trying to inch up the road.

And then suddenly, there will be a moment, or moments, when you can sense how far you’ve come.

Community Connection

Getting started on that maddening, thrilling journey that is learning a language?

Get motivated, and learn to follow your intuition..

And if you’re not sure where to begin, why not learn the importance of eating a new language?

Burmese Curry / photo by jackol

Photo: David Hagerman

Does eating a searing red curry with a piece of buttery naan make you feel like a different person from one who normally eats, say, a baguette of Serrano ham and heirloom tomatoes?

Does eating pickled vegetables on a daily basis start to get to you, make you feel a little differently about life after awhile?

Does standing in the narrow corridor of a Japanese yakitori bar, smelling grilled chicken and onion, watching smoke billow around a bandannaed man flipping the skewers, temporarily give you a new identity?

Like traveling, food can pull the rug – subtly or blatantly – out from under a given identity.

The transformative effects of food might not be as immediately obvious as those of a new cultural environment, but they’re just as significant.

Which is why I bring you my top five Asian food blogs.

Why Asia? Because the continent is fortunate to have some extremely talented and experienced cooks and writers dedicating their lives to exploring its cuisine.

These bloggers will help you navigate the overwhelming realm of Asian food. They’ll flesh out the context for you and guide you through the culinary metamorphasis that takes place in travel.

And they’ll make you so. freaking. hungry.

1. Yasuko San’s Home Cooking

Photo: I Love Egg

Poco is a Japanese woman blogging about her mother’s cooking. The aim of her site is to preserve knowledge of and respect for traditional Japanese cooking. She quotes her grandfather :

“You eat local cuisine and you’ll not get sick.”

The site is a food diary of what her mother cooks every day—literally, almost every day—as well as an extensive catalogue of Japanese ingredients and recipes. This is one of the best resources I’ve found on Japanese food and cooking.

I think Poco sums it up simply and sweetly in an essay entitled The Natural Style:

I never forget that our body is made up of foods.

2. Appetite For China

I cannot tell you how many times in Beijing I’d spend the morning devouring Appetite For China and the afternoon scouring the city for roujiamo (a kebab-like sandwich of pulled pork) or the perfect dan dan mian(spicy Sichuan noodles).

Diana Kuan grew up partly in Puerto Rico, where her family operated a Latin-Chinese “fusion” restaurant (before fusion became the most overhyped food concept of the century) and partly in suburban Boston, where the family ran a “Polynesian-style take-out and Cantonese bakery.”

Combine that family background with French culinary training, a stint as a pastry chef, years spent as a food writer covering everything from chocolate to Ethiopian food, and a move to Beijing, and you have one helluva perspective on food.

Appetite For China runs the spectrum from the traditional (mapo tofu) to the innovative (absinthe cranberry frappe).

And you can’t beat Diana’s 100 Chinese Foods To Try Before You Die if you’re moving or traveling to China.

3. Eating Asia

Photo: David Hagerman

Writer Robyn Eckhardt and photographer David Hagerman have been living in Asia for over thirteen years, and are currently based in Kuala Lumpur.

Their blog is equal parts travel, people, and food, and can’t be missed if you’re traveling to Malaysia.

The photos and the stories behind them invoke fields, valleys, smoky alleyways and street-side noodle stands where you’ve never been but can somehow feel and taste.

The writing is suburb and direct – as much about recipes as it is about local ingredients, people, and stories.

Even though I’ll be leaving Japan soon and don’t have another Asia trip planned, I visit this blog because I want to be there in the dumpling steam, sitting at a tiny plastic table beside a ramshackle stand, with the taste of scallions and meat and sharp vinegar in my mouth at 7 a.m.

4. Rambling Spoon

Karen Coates is the Asia correspondent for “Gourmet” and author of “Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War,” among other books. She and her husband have spent more than a decade living in, traveling through, and writing about Asia.

Rambling Spoon is as much about Asian politics, history, nature, and social life as it is about food. Coates writes:

Food is life (and death). It is history and politics and science and nature. It is everything, and it is not a subject to be taken lightly. After all, food is everything we are.

Photo: Jerry Redfern

I would argue, food is also essential to traveling, and it is part of the transformation that takes place in traveling.

What we put in our bodies links us to people and landscape.

And those links are evident in the stories, recipes and photos that come together on Rambling Spoon.

5. Sticky Rice

The bio on this site leaves an air of mystery about the authors:

“Eating, drinking, sitting, watching -these are the things we love about Hanoi. On this site we will attempt to eat our way through Vietnam’s northern capital and pass on the results.”

Despite the dearth of personal info, the writing has a distinct voice. It manages to be snarky, insightful, slightly pretentious and down home all at once.

It makes for great reading and stokes a desire to go to Vietnam that I didn’t know I had.

Photo: avlxyz

For anyone traveling to Hanoi, and Vietnam in general, this is the one blog that should not be missed, and for those of you for whom food blogs are porn, Sticky Rice is particularly drool-worthy.

Sticky Rice teleports you to the green banana stand, to the cluttered café, to the pho joint that haunts your dreams.

Again, these five blogs are the ones I find exceptional in the way they capture places through food. There are, of course, many more great Asian food blogs.

Consider food blogs as travel guides that give you another angle through which to experience culture. With these blogs as your guide, you can learn how to literally swallow up and digest a place.

Community Connection

For more about the connection between food and place, check out this author’s article about Tasting Place, or peruse Essential Cookbooks for the Culinary Traveler. You also might want to know how to eat a new language before you embark on your culinary adventure.

For up-to-date Southeast Asian restaurant reviews and trip planning information, check out TravelFish.

Student by foundphotoslj. Feature photo by Okko Pokko

There’s the guy who’s really interested in grammar and can’t stop asking you why the present perfect form of run is irregular.

He pores over his book every night and could present a thesis on the use of adverbs of frequency, but if he actually needs to bust out a comprehensible sentence in casual conversation, he’s floored.

There are the two or three middle-aged workers who’ve randomly decided they should learn English, gotten really pumped about it during the first week, and then promptly grown bored.

Now they recite new vocabulary words as if they were heavy rocks dropping with a thud.

There are the keen university students who want it, need it, soak it up with the desperation of a man trying every trick he knows to get the woman he wants.

They grapple with the language, play with it, try to please it and alter it a bit to suit their needs. They could use more practice, but they’ve got skillz in place for the moment when they actually meet a foreigner.

And then there are the rare students who soak up language like the proverbial sponge, who will always have a four-year old’s capacity for absorbing new vocabulary and grammatical structures.

There are, of course, many more types of language learners.

Which one are you?

Photo: Bredgar. Feature photo: foundphotoslj

“And so you need to put your three daily activities in order, and then tell your partner about them, and then cover them up, and have your partner remember what you said. OK?”

Three or four students — the ones who’ll fight their way through conversations in English until they get to the point of fluency — will nod.

Some students will tentatively look at their friends for encouragement.

A handful of others will stare up at me with traumatized expressions as if I’ve just sung an obscure Italian opera.

Florence by Deva.

This is when I can identify the natural language learners in my class.

They’re the ones who aren’t obsessed with hearing every word I say, with breaking down the grammar and analyzing it, or with trying to have a crystal clear native speaker’s appreciation for the exact meaning of a sentence.

They’re listening for gist—they want to get to the baseline meaning of what I say and follow it intuitively.

They know they’re blindfolded and feeling around in the dark, so they use their intuition and all the bits of language and memory they have to make their best guess.

The single most important skill any language learner can have is the ability to induce and intuit meaning, especially when one doesn’t understand every word—or even most words—a native speaker is saying.

Can you get far enough outside of your own cultural and linguistic box to divine what someone is trying to say?

Perhaps this is the most full-on plunge you can make into a foreign culture: giving yourself up to the language and letting yourself be carried along by it, even when you’re not sure, even when you don’t fully understand, even when you’re totally out of your element.

You’ve got to be confident enough to make a solid attempt at understanding and acting on that understanding, and yet you’ve got to be humble and perceptive enough to pick up on the speaker’s intentions.

Photo: Ed Yourdon

And most of all, you have to give up the need to make sense of every element of language.

You have to get to some deeper level of connection and communication, based on intuition, based on those skills you have when you’re an infant and you’ve got to figure out how to get milk and love.

Use whatever you’ve got – random vocab, frantic miming, raised eyebrows – to make communication happen. And be willing to accept the fact that you won’t know everything, and that you may be partially clueless for awhile.

After all, the struggle to grasp bits and pieces here and there until you can begin to make sense of the foreign world around you, is at the core of every travel experience.

Embrace the confusion!

Like so many things in travel, it makes the most banal moments — sending a postcard, ordering a beer — into grand tales of success and failure.

Please share your language learning tips and stories below!

Photo: peiqianlong Feature photo: Pratham Books

I’ve seen a lot of learners and a lot of strategies pass through my classroom in the past four years of teaching English abroad. In those four years, I’ve also managed to learn two languages and am working on a third.

How people successfully learn a new language is an elusive topic – one that academics have had cat-fights about for years.

What exactly are the factors that determine a language student’s success?

Yesterday at the Nagoya International Center I came across the single most important language-learning factor:

Motivation.

I’d been taught about the importance of motivation in my SIT TESOL course (one of the single greatest learning experiences of my life) but, as usual, learning the concept in the classroom and experiencing it in real life are entirely different stories.

The Nagoya International Center was offering eleven 90-minute Japanese classes for 2500 yen (25 bucks). The application and interview period was from 11:30-12 on Sunday.

We got to the NIC at 11:10, twenty minutes early for the interview period, figuring hey, nobody’s going to be that eager and we’ll probably be among a small group of language nerds.

Ha.

We took the elevator to the fifth floor. The entire place was jam-packed with people.

Photo: author Jam-packed NIC!

People squatting and filling out forms on the inches of available floor space. People milling around and chatting nervously. People bunching up around the desks where application forms were being handed out.

There was only one form left in English, so I let my friend have it and I filled out the Spanish one.

As we sat there, going through the requisite names-numbers-checking-boxes form, I soaked up the energy of the room.

It was a veritable U.N meeting of nationalities—there were Filipinos, Brazilians, Brazilian Japanese, Chinese, Southeast Asians, Americans, Brits, Africans, Mexicans, Spanish…

(I know because I kept peaking at the “native language” box on people’s application forms as we stood waiting in line).

All of us had the same eager, slightly nervous, first-day-at-school posture, and I realized that all of these people needed to learn Japanese. They were there because in their immediate, everyday lives, they had to use Japanese in some form or another and they’d jumped at the chance to do so for a bargain.

I’m sure if I’d asked them there, on the spot, “Why are you taking these classes?”

They could’ve clearly and specifically defined their goals:

“I want to work in an office and I need to learn polite Japanese conversation and basic vocabulary.”

“I want to open a shop and I need to interact with customers and officials.”

“I want to have conversations with people about Japan and Japanese culture.”

“I want to be able to read the newspaper and the subway signs.”

Clearly Defined Goals

And so, waiting in line at the Nagoya International Center with representatives of a dozen different countries, I saw again what I’ve seen throughout the years in my classes: having clearly defined goals and the motivation to charge at them makes all the difference in learning a language.

I’ve heard a lot of people say “I’d love to learn Spanish” or “it’d be great to speak Chinese” but their aims don’t go much further than that—which isn’t to say they aren’t motivated, but their motivation doesn’t have specific goals attached to it.

If you want to learn a language, ask yourself these three questions:

1. Why do you want to learn a language?

3. Why do you need it?

The more clearly and specifically you can answer these questions the more success you’ll have in learning a language.

Make a list of your goals and make sure you avoid general, vague statements like “I’d like to talk to people.” Be as specific as possible.

Once you’ve drawn up your list, start looking for programs or classes that fit the goals you’ve defined.

And stay tuned to Matador Abroad for where to go from there.

Feature Photo: L’osservatore Photo: Sir Sabbhat

“We’re more isolated from the world than ever,” wrote my Mexican partner in an email this morning. “Over 300 people were shut off inside a hotel in Hong Kong just for being in contact with a Mexican, and Japan has suspended the visa exemption for Mexicans. This is going to make travel even harder for us.”

My first response was a feeling of total deflation. As if it weren’t hard enough to coordinate visas and bureaucracy and paperwork for him whenever we travel somewhere, now there’s the added discrimination of swine flu paranoia.

I went on my morning mission of finding swine flu updates, article after article presenting what seemed to be hopeful news – “epidemic in decline”, “the critical moment has passed” – only to immediately clarify that that the danger is more imminent than ever and one should stay tuned to all future updates in a state of panic and high alert.

Then the feeling of deflation turned to anger and defiance. I’ve been in contact with my Mexican friends ever since the swine flu news broke, and none of them have ever said anything along the lines of:

“You don’t know who could be carrying this plague so it is best to just keep behind closed doors as much as possible.”

Or “It’s like we’re in a strange zombie movie or something” (conveniently said while “hurriedly stocking up on groceries.”)

My friends’ comments have been more fearful of the economic, political, and personal impacts that the swine flu panic will have on their lives and the lives of the people they love. Are they staying inside? Wearing masks? Yes. Are they paranoid and panicked and talking about plague and zombies? No. And neither is anyone they know.

To top it all off, a good friend of mine here in Japan works for the WHO and could not express enough scorn for the way the epidemic is being addressed.

“A pandemic simply means that the flu spreads to other places,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that it’s some sort of plague that will wipe out the planet.”

Sensationalism is nothing new, and is in fact pretty much the standard, in the global media. But I’ve been particularly irritated by it this time since it hits so close to home.

And yet towards the end of the day, after a long back-and-forth with friends in Mexico, my frustration calmed and I came to thinking that travel abroad is more important than ever in moments like this. I’d felt a rising panic, reading reports from Britain to Japan about swine flu, and then I remembered that wait, I’ve lived in Mexico, many people I love are in Mexico, and most of what they’re saying doesn’t collate with any of these frenzied stories.

And I thought about how much of the time that happens to travelers. How often do we read a story written in the New York Times or the Telegraph or any newspaper anywhere and think, “Hey, that has nothing to do with what I’ve seen and felt and experienced in a place?”

Which is why, instead of getting swept up in paranoia and letting the media enjoy a global fear spree, maybe travelers can step back and use this moment to appreciate the fact that they have the most important kind of information: local, place-based, human information. And if people continue to travel, and continue to rely on what they see and hear and understand through traveling, than perhaps we won’t be so dependent on the alarmist discourses telling us to panic and close our doors.

Ok. That’s all for today. I’m signing off now to go fight the zombies for more canned goods.

UPDATE: Swine flu might be overblown, but there are other health issues that don’t get enough attention in the mass media. Read “What Should Worry You More Than Swine Flu” at Matador Change to get informed.

Photo: mbell1975

Business Week features photos of ordered, neat, European urban-scapes: stoic cathedrals coupled with familiar brand names, skyscrapers, all the tidiness of money and “civilization.” Buildings are clean and quaintly historic, skies are blue, rivers are strategically running past postcard-friendly architecture.

Bravo. And?

The Mercer reports essentially calculate the “quality of life” in cities where companies are thinking of sending their workers. New York is the base city for all the reports–it’s given an index score of 100 and all other cities are judged around that.

The factors considered in Mercer rankings include:

Infrastructure: electricity, water, postal services, transportation, etc…

Cost/Quality of Living: how extravagant of a lifestyle can you get on a decent budget?

Accessibility: How close is the nearest international airport? How frequent/reasonably priced are flights?

Crime rates and economic and political stability: Are you going to have to worry about getting kicked out by a coup? Pick-pocketed on the subway?

There’s nothing wrong with these calculations, and they certainly do pick out safe, highly organized and developed cities.

…but….and in this but lies, in my opinion, everything fantastic about travel…

These are places where you can get all the luxuries of the modern corporate lifestyle for relatively cheap, where it pays the most to have bought into this whole vision of globalization that judges quality of life based more on Starbucks and tidiness than on…human connections? Bustling communities? Diversity?

Call me highly impractical and romantic, but I think quality of life should be a helluva lot more than this. For as great as these cities may be–and some of them are amazing and surely wonderful places to live–I think these criteria mostly reflect an expat culture that demands imported French wines and fully furnished apartments at a steal in whatever outpost the company has most recently invaded.

And I find that, besides being somewhat sad, incredibly boring.

My criteria for the best places to live in 2009 would be:

1) A thriving coffee culture.

2) People who still love and care about and grow their own food.

3) Public places that are alive and teeming with activity. People who meet in these places.

4) A certain degree of unpredictability– non-conformity and non-uniformity. Can you find noodle shops or clandestine Nigerian record stores somewhere? Might you stumble across something unplanned, unprecedented, spontaneous, unruly?

I could go on and on…but I’m more interested in seeing what you all would use to judge “quality of life” in a place. If you had to rate the best/worst places to live in 2009, what would your criteria be?

It was a rainy day in Japan.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

I work a mad Monday-Friday 7-7 schedule, between the commute and a lunch “hour” that inevitably turns into a photocopying extravaganza with bites of supermarket sushi thrown in. Don’t get me wrong—I’m enjoying the job, my colleagues are great, and I seem to constantly be throwing myself into situations in which I’m over-stimulated, over-caffinated, and operating on a massive adrenaline rush.

But that said, work only leaves me Saturday and Sunday to explore Japan, and those two days seem like a giant candy store of possibilities. Orchid garden? Comic book café? Train to the countryside?

Yesterday, the candy store was closed. It rained. Poured. A friend and I tried to go out exploring, but peering at driving rain through an umbrella with wet shoes and wetter pants didn’t turn out to be an illuminating experience. So I sat in my apartment virtually all afternoon, feeling guilty for being closed off in my little bubble on my one free day, while Japan went on being Japan outside.

And then I took a bath with a cherry blossom bath bomb. Sakura is the Japanese term for cherry blossoms. The water turned a satiny pink. I sunk into the deep bathtub, the sides going up past my chin, and thought about Japan, travel guilt, and details.

It’s obvious that the best way to get to know a place is to roam around, see things, talk to people, eat things, be out and about and, in a word—immersed. And it’s natural for travelers to feel a sort of guilt for not doing so, or for not doing enough or doing it in the right way.

Yet at the same time, so much of a place seeps into a traveler through osmosis, through the slightest details that jar one’s memory years down the line.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

I thought about this in the bath. The shower in my Japanese apartment is softly lit and perfectly designed, closed off from the rest of the apartment by folding glass doors. The bathtub is deep, like traditional Japanese baths. The room fills up with steam as the bath is filling. That day, the steam mixed with the fragile scent of sakura petals.

Japan’s in my bathtub, I thought. Yes, I’d love to be able to walk around and roam into temples and yakitori bars, but Japan is here, too. In the details. In smells and bath bombs and the depth of the tub. In the view from my balcony and the smell that hits me when I open the door and step outside—the smell of trees, with industrial overtones and hints of Asian spices.

Photo: Sarah Menkedick

All of this is part of what attaches me to this place and teaches me about it. And it’s not so much about doing what I think I should be doing—chasing the shoulds and the pressure and the guilt—as it is about creating the mental space to see.

How do you do it, travelers? What are the details, unexpected or sought out, that have etched out places for you?

This happened to me this week. My parents came down to Oaxaca for a visit and I was smacked into seeing the city anew again. I saw bromeliads in the Sierra Norte and broken turquoise balconies on the second floor of crumbling buildings.

Photo: Sarah

The flavors of tortillas jumped out at me again and I remembered just how good the cappuccinos at café Nuevo Mundo are, and how good it feels to sit for hours there under a sky bluer than blue. I also remembered, seeing my family see, feel, and process the city, just how overwhelming and transformative travel can be.

Photo: Sarah

And then I found out that I’m going to Japan. I’ve been offered a three-month position training teachers in Nagoya. So right on the tail of a big family visit, still swept up in all the renewed enthusiasm for Mexico, I got bit again—hard—by the travel bug.

I can’t wait to get back to Asia and to see Japan. I’d be forever grateful if you, readers, would offer your experiences with Japan and Japanese culture. Anyone taught there? Lived there? Traveled there? Advice? Insight? Sound off below!

Your editor leaping into a new era at Matador (Photo: Jorge Santiago)

I spent the past weekend in the back of a truck, under a pile of sleeping bags pinned down with coconuts, traveling across Mexico’s Sierra Sur to get to the beach. It was a fitting intro to my new position here at the Matador Network.

Matador is taking a new direction, with a different layout and site design. Each site will have a unique voice and emphasis within the wider Matador vision. I’m thrilled to be bringing this new voice to Abroad along with the intrepid Tim Patterson (trekker of Cambodian jungles, fisher of Patagonian trout, leader of youth into the vast unknown, explorer of the wild rural dreams of countries round the world).

Tim is ready for anything

We’ll be mixing up our longer pieces with short, juicy posts for you to devour wherever you are in the world.

We want to get your feedback, readers, and to develop a thriving community here on Abroad. Roam around and let us know what you think of the new site.

Regale us with your experiences on the contributers page, and if you’re psyched about where Abroad is going, sign up for a subscription to Matador.

Welcome to the new version of Abroad!

Photo: Hyperscholar

I won’t deny that learning Spanish is both necessary and fun—I studied for a month in Quito before traveling around South America. However, as anyone who has trekked across Bolivia or Guatemala or Mexico can tell you, Spanish is not the native language of the region.

And while most countries have done a remarkable job of wiping out native languages through a mixture of brutality, exclusionary educational policy, discrimination and intimidation, some of these languages have managed to hang on, and some have even seen a revival in recent years.

Travelers now have a chance to get a more intimate look at Latin America and its diverse cultural groups, and to aid in the preservation of distinct cultures and languages in danger of being usurped by mainstream Hispanic culture.

The following is your guide to Latin America’s indigenous languages and where to study them. The languages mentioned below are only a sampling—there are literally hundreds more, but I’ve tried to select the ones that are still spoken by a large number of people and that are offered at fairly accessible language schools.

1. Zapotec

Zapotec is spoken by around half a million people in the southern Mexican states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Guerrero. There are more than 50 versions of the language, but the largest three are mountain Zapotec (spoken in the Sierra Norte and Sur), valley Zapotec (spoken in the central valley of Oaxaca), and Zapotec from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Of these three, the latter two are the most accessible.

Valley Zapotec can be studied in Téotitlan del Valle (a village a stone’s throw from the city of Oaxaca), and in the city of Oaxaca. In Téotitlan, you’ll need to ask around for private tutors and negotiate prices.

In Oaxaca, the Universidad Autónoma Benito Juárez de Oaxaca (UABJO) offers semester-long courses in Zapotec, with four evening classes a week, for 500 pesos (around $50 USD). These courses usually go from September-December and February-May.

Zapotec from the isthmus can be studied in Juchitán, Oaxaca, where the Casa de la Cultura offers courses. The University of California at San Diego offers a summer Zapotec immersion program in Juchitán which sounds wonderful, but costs $4,000.

But for those interested in anthropology or in working with indigenous groups, the price may be worth it.

2. Quechua

Photo: Quinet

The official language of the Incas, Quechua is spoken today by more than 10 million people from southern Colombia to northern Chile, with the largest concentration of speakers in Peru and Bolivia. In the latter two countries, Quechua is recognized as an official language.

The best place to study Quechua is Bolivia, where Quechua and Aymara (another official language recognized by both Peru and Bolivia) are as widely used as Spanish. Aymara and Quechua share similar structures and over one-third of their vocabularies, so learning Quechua is practically a two-for-one deal.

Sustainable Bolivia, an NGO based in Cochabamba, offers full time Quechua language study, as well as a host of volunteer opportunities in Cochabamba and the surrounding communities. For total immersion, this is your best option.

For more information about where to learn Quechua, this page offers plenty of information.

3. Mayan

Photo: spankmeeehard

Sometimes it is difficult to believe that those elusive, mystical places and peoples featured on National Geographic specials (the ones where the narrator speaks in booming tones and the dramatic musical score plays in the background) actually exist.

The Maya are one such example; much has been written about ancient Mayan culture, but few people actually get involved with the present-day Mayan community, which, like most other indigenous communities in Latin America, is largely marginalized and poor.

There are more than six million Mayan speakers in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and Honduras. By far, the biggest number live in Guatemala, which remains the best destination for full immersion Mayan study.

The Celas Maya language school in
Quetzaltenango, Gautemala, offers full immersion Mayan classes as well as local volunteer opportunities.

4. Guaraní

Photo: Nagillum

Guaraní is the language of the indigenous group of the same name. One of the two official languages in Paraguay, Guaraní is widely spoken throughout that country, as well as throughout parts of Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay.

Paraguay is an exceptional example of a country that has embraced an indigenous language and enforced a policy of bilingualism in education. All Paraguayan children are required to speak, read, and write Guaraní as well as Spanish.

Asunción is the best place to get started on Guaraní study. The National Registration Center for Study Abroad offers study abroad programs in Guaraní in Asunción (for a bit of a steep price!) and South America Inside offers slightly cheaper courses.

Both websites mention private language schools that I couldn’t dig up online, but I’d imagine that roaming around Asunción (or taking a glance at the Lonely Planet) you could find the addresses of these schools and save money by approaching them directly.

5. Nahuatl

The language of the Aztecs, Nahuatl dominated Mesoamerica for over a millennium, first as the lingua franca for merchants and politicians under Aztec rule, and then as the language favored by Spanish conquistadors for communication with local subjects.

In a policy that seems an anomaly within the larger history of colonization, Spain’s King Phillip II decreed in 1570 that Nahuatl would be the official language of New Spain.

During a period lasting over two centuries, Nahuatl spread from modern-day New Mexico to El Salvador. In the 16th and 17th centuries it became a literary language in which poetry, theatrical works, histories, chronicles, and administrative documents were written.

In 1770, a Spanish decree calling for the elimination of indigenous languages in Spanish colonies did away with Nahuatl as a literary language, but didn’t entirely eliminate it.

Today, it is spoken by more than 1.5 million people, mostly in Mexico. You can study it in Cuernavaca at the International Center for Cultural and Language Studies (CICEL), which also offers seminars on traditional medicine and “reality tours” focusing on Mexican traditions and foods.

So instead of signing up for a Spanish course, go further back into Latin America’s history and get a little closer to its roots by studying Quechua, Guarani, Zapotec, Nahuatl, or Mayan, and in the meantime contribute to greater cultural diversity in this globalized world.

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Matador offers resources for students of all languages! Check out 5 Questions to Ask When Picking a Language School, 5 Tips for a More Productive Language Exchange, or 10 Steps to Recovering a Language You’ve Forgotten, for a start.

Feature photo by scui3asteveo. Photo above by John Althouse Cohen.

Sometimes I wonder if my undergraduate degree, which gave me a solid foundation in the History of Science and has led to a lucrative career in international vagabonding, is worth the $10,000 of student loans I am evading by living in Oaxaca, Mexico.

I ponder this, sometimes wallowing in bitterness, as I pore over the websites of American universities in search of graduate programs that won’t leave me forever indebted and doomed to the life of a backpacker on the run.

There are very few such programs—American education is undoubtedly very good, but it is also very expensive.

So, for those of us who love the experience of delving into and becoming part of different places, doesn’t it make sense to look abroad? The world offers some excellent opportunities for graduate school that might actually leave you spare change to, say, eat, and travel.

Thus, what follows: a brief overview of seven countries where you can get a graduate degree at a fraction of the price you’d pay in the U.S.

Photo by Martin Dougiamas.

Spain

At around $2,000 a year, graduate programs in Spain are an incredible deal. The University of Barcelona ranks as one of the three best universities in Ibero-America (the other two being the UNAM of Mexico City and the University of Sao Paolo), and the University of Madrid is not far behind.

Masters degrees are diverse, going way beyond the simple categories of anthropology or sociology—how about an analysis of the history and culture of food? Or the management of cultural heritage? Why not get a degree in women, gender, and citizenship studies? And of course, there are plenty of offerings in the sciences, from an interdisciplinary analysis of water to the study of artificial intelligence and mathematics.

France

I apologize for giving way to cliché, but France, whether you love it or hate it, has an age-old association with intellectual life. Intellectuals have long been the Marilyn Monroes and Tom Cruises of France, and the quality and seriousness of French higher education reflects this cultural preference.

The Ecole Normale Superior de Paris ranks at number 28 in the list of the world’s top universities, and tuition for international graduate students is a whopping 190 Euros a year.

Photo by Riviera Kid.

Sweden

Graduate school is free. The website for Uppsala university announces this nonchalantly, as if the whole world lived in the calm socialist paradise that is Sweden.

Now, keep in mind that you’ll probably be paying about five Euros for a beer and who knows how much for any sort of classy lifestyle, but with free tuition, you can take down two Euro espressos right and left while you hit the books.

Plus, Uppsala offers a whole catalogue of Master’s programs in English, unlike other Swedish universities that require a good working knowledge of Swedish.

Germany

Yet another case in which very solid, well-ranked universities come in at around 100-500 Euros a year for tuition. You’ll have to contend with somewhat exorbitant living costs, particularly in the country’s financial centers, but by living like a good ol’ suffering grad student (think of a steady diet of comforting, hearty pasta) you should come out with a pretty good deal in the end.

German language skills are required for some schools; others, such as the University of Berlin, offer a selection of degrees in English.

Photo by mjmyap.

Singapore

Asian students flock to Singapore by the thousands to take advantage of the (relatively) cheap and high quality education. Singapore National University is ranked at number 30 in the world, and tuition stands at around $4,000 a year for international graduate students.

Potential students with interests in Asian studies can explore a range of Masters degrees, from broader studies of Asian civilization to critical analyzes of Southeast Asia or the Malay Peninsula.

For those deeply embedded in love affairs with Asia and wanting to further them in an academic setting, Singapore offers a melting pot of Asian cultures, a high quality graduate education, and ah, yes, the affordability that allows you to take a much-needed chill weekend from time to time on a Thai beach.

Mexico

With tuition around $1,000 USD a year, the Universidad Autonoma de Mexico offers a tempting alternative to rival schools just North of the border.

And with UNAM ranking as one of Latin America’s most prestigious universities (along with Argentina’s University of Buenos Aires) you are really, let’s say, getting what you do not have to pay for: a top-quality graduate degree.

For those interested in Latin American studies and history, the program recently initiated here is one of the best in the world. And if Mexico City seems to you like an experience in pure chaos, try Puebla, Monterrey, or one of the CIESAS research institutes located throughout the country, all of which offer quality graduate degrees at prices comparable to that of UNAM.

Photo by DanieVDM.

South Africa

The country in and of itself is an education, and provides a seething, transforming, highly charged backdrop to academic study.

Universities have taken advantage of the country’s post-apartheid opening up to promote academic and personal freedom, as well as the study of many disciplines banned or marginalized in the past. Cape Town and Johannesburg contain the most well recognized universities, each of which charges around $4,000 a year in tuition for international graduate students.

Add to this the fact that the cost of living in South Africa affords grad students a much greater degree of luxury than they would experience in Europe or the U.S., and voila, you have the tantalizing prospect of plowing away at a doctorate without having to survive on heaping bowls of spaghetti.

Keep in mind this list is only the beginning. Start doing research online: the aptly named International Graduate Schools website has plenty of listings of specific schools and programs, but in my opinion the Top Grad School site is even better, with rankings, statistics, and programs listed for most major schools in dozens of countries.

Good luck, and may you save as much as you learn!

COMMUNITY CONNECTION:

Still aren’t convinced that study abroad is right for you? Read Tanya Brothen’s article, Study Abroad: What Are You Waiting For?”.

Have you done grad work abroad? Share your experiences and insights below!