I never cease to be amazed at both the enormity of the world and at the flatness of it- in the most pop nonfictional sense of the word.
To be totally honest, before starting to travel I was still somewhat taken with many of the ideas espoused by the media in America, that have since propogated to the point of becoming “common sense”. It’s dangerous in South America, there are health risks everywhere in Southeast Area, language issues, cultural issues, political issues (thanks Dubya!), and any one of a dozen other potential problems.
After all, other countries don’t really show up in the American media unless something is blowing up or on fire and about to blow up.
Yet, shockingly enough, it turns out that differences trend towards minute. English is the language everyone in the middle at, fulfilling Esperanto’s dream of a worldwide auxiliary language more effectively than any synthetic linguistic construct. It’s not uncommon for a German to start up a conversation with a Chilean in English- the German doesn’t know Spanish and the Chilean sure as hell doesn’t know German, but damn if they can’t meet in the middle at English.
Language is pretty much a nonissue. Cry culture imperialism if you want, but that’s the way the world works, and, as a native English speaker, I’m certainly not complaining.
Then you have cultural differences- again, cry cultural imperialism if you want, but most people grow up watching the same movies (Hollywood), listening to the same music (Warner, Sony, EMI, etc), and watching the same TV shows (whatever trash MTV is peddling as entertainment this week). The amount of cultural bedrock we all have in common, and I mean we in the broadest sense of the word, is mindboggling.
Best example I can think of is from back in Buenos Aires- heading back to the hostel from dinner in a taxi, I was talking with a friend from Brasil about music. We listened to a lot of the same bands, pretentious indie ones, for the most part- and started talking about indie bands breaking into the mainstream. I mentioned Modest Mouse as an example, and, just then, their single “Missed the Boat” came on the radio.
In an Argentinean taxi.
With the taxi driver singing right along in broken English.
That is a flat world right there.
Another example, also from a taxi- one night I’d been working late at a Italian restaurant near Obelisco and hailed a cab coming out. Getting in, the taxi driver turned and asked with a slight manic glean in his eye…
“Frank Sinatra?”
“Como?”, I asked, not understanding.
He asked again, this time pointing at the radio- “Frank Sinatra?”
Getting it, I replied in my embarrasingly awful Spanish, “uh… oh! Uh… muy bien, muy bien!”
He smiled, turned the radio on, and suddenly Frank Sinatra was blaring on the radio. He rolled down the windows, turned again, and let out, in his best Mario voice, “leeeeeeeeet’s gooooo!”- and screeched off to head up Corrientes Avenue.
Whenever someone mentions Thailand being exotic, or Argentina as somewhere far-off and hard to imagine visiting, I can’t help but feel a bit guilty- because I know that the foreignness of foreign lands is greatly overestimated. The world is flat, the world is big, and travel is cheap. Might as well dive on in.
