I hate this
pseudo-intellectual talk of ‘experiencing other cultures’.
Few backpackers will
actually leave tourist-centric locations.
It seems that as soon as we
go over an 8 hour flight, our ‘scenery, beach and beer’ holiday gets
reclassified by popular convention as ‘travelling’ and adopts a pretentious new
identity as a socially-respected journey of personal development and cultural
enlightenment. How nice.
But let’s face it, however
much we feign having been spiritually affected by ‘new perspectives’, we’re
gonna be back in the west before we know it living equally as hedonistic and
self-obsessed lives of vacuous unappreciation as before.
If we think the apogee of worldly
learning, knowledge of the human condition and being a ‘better cultured’ person
is getting near-mute locals with few other job prospects to dash around like
slaves serving beer to rich twenty-somethings acting like disrespectful drunken
delinquents, then I am ashamed of our values.
It seems ‘being cultured’ no
longer means reading the western canon but drinking a beer and getting a photo
of the sunset in each of The Guardian’s Top 20 Backpacker locations.
Is such an attempted
demonstration of world-wise culturing deserving of any greater merit than if one
used their holiday money to lock themselves away in a darkened room and inject
crack?
Spending some time with
people may be moderately edifying but I consider the importance of their
nationality or ‘culture’ to be overstated. In fact, humans are the same
everywhere, with the same trivially predictable issues of life on their minds
most of the time.
When one ‘goes on holiday’
they shouldn’t expect me to call it anything else or to be considered more
cultured upon return from their antipodal beer-fest.
And if they really want to
‘broaden their mind’, I still can’t help but think the first port of call
should be to read a book.
“There is
no frigate like a book. To take us lands away” –Emily Dickinson
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