This is the first of a four-part series on getting to know the local people and their cultures as I traveled around the world.
In preparing a series of travel programs for Lifetime Learning, I was struck by how many of my travels have given me an opportunity to get to know people from a wide variety of cultures.
For most people, international travel is organized with a definite goal set at the beginning. On most arranged tours, the tourist doesn’t get much opportunity to meet and know local people. It is possible to take a 21-day trip through Europe and never have a meaningful conversation with a native. Tourists mostly get to see what sights the country has to offer and sample the food and entertainment. On many tours, the tourist is actively "protected" from contact with the locals.
I didn’t have my first international experience until 1972, when I was 42 and spent my first year as a civilian instructor with the Air Force in Europe. Because my wife, Carla and I and our four daughters lived on the economy - as opposed to living on base - we were in villages with neighbors who were locals. After our morning run through the countryside, we would stop by the local market for our bread and cheese and maybe a bottle of wine.
During our first three-month assignment in England, our two younger daughters attended the first and third grades at the village school. One day our youngest asked, "Are we Yanks?" Carla replied that it was common for people from the United States to be called "Yanks" or "Yankees" and that those were OK words.
"Well," she said doubtfully, "the way the kids here say it, it doesn’t sound to me like it’s OK." Mostly they had a good time, were grateful they weren’t required to eat liver and cabbage at lunchtime and adapted to the requirement that they wear dresses, not slacks, to school except on really cold days.
We were invited to parties that had a mixture of Air Force personnel and English neighbors. Learning how the English class system worked came naturally, as our next-door neighbor on our second three-month assignment was the gamekeeper on an English estate, and his children played with ours.
The master of the estate interacted with us and even had us up to the big house for dinner. A few days later, we watched the gamekeeper’s family beat the bushes as the master and his guests shot the pheasants that were flushed.
We had our own car and, with map in hand, felt free to travel between assignments and make our own arrangements as we toured different countries during our three-day weekends and the two-week breaks between quarters. We were driving a car that had frequent breakdowns, which helped improve my language skills by dealing with European mechanics.
In Spain, one of the Air Force intelligence officers who had worked undercover introduced us to some of his Spanish friends and took us to the "in" spots for locals, including restaurants with flamenco dancing.
I found that after a couple of glasses of wine my Spanish improved considerably, and I was able to carry on intelligent conversations - or so it seemed. It helped that the Spanish were very patient with outsiders whose language skills were not the best.
I found the Germans were not as patient as the Spanish when I tried my German, and not nearly as friendly. My conversations with several people who in the United States would be upper middle class gave me a feel for why the Germans considered themselves the master race. They were cool, thoughtful and excellent physical specimens.
Germany is the best organized country we have lived in.
Later assignments brought us to Holland, Italy and more time in Germany. Both the Dutch and Italians were especially friendly.
In Italy we found we could learn much about the culture by simply paying attention to what happened around us. The gestures, the excited speech and horn-blowing told us much about our hosts.
In Holland, I was warned not to use German with the Dutch because they still carried a grudge against the Germans for what happened during World War II. We were occasionally invited to dinners featuring homemade pasta and had an opportunity to learn about local culture. It was amusing to see how proud the Dutch were to be the middlemen of Europe, although Belgian residents, from a similarly small country, confessed to feeling quite inferior because they were surrounded by so many powerful nations.
Another culturally broadening experience came in 1989, when I taught a semester in the University of Missouri-Columbia Missouri-London Program. I met the English in a variety of settings, occasionally in their homes. I remember how defensive they were of the royal family and at the same time engaged in gossip about them.
The richness of the experience is shown by my oldest daughter, who as an 11th-grader spent a year in Europe with us. She took an advanced placement test at the University of Missouri-Columbia in European history and was given 5 hours of college credit.
All four of our children enjoyed the museums and read even more books than usual from the base libraries, as in every country except England they couldn’t understand the television programs.
In Thailand besides seeing the sights we got to meet
with doctors working in mental hospitals.
