Encounters

Or, "On Being Ridiculed and Underestimated"

7.22.08

Jana and I were having a glass of wine in a bar in Ceske Budejovice. We'd been on the road / rail for nearly 2 weeks and we had just made it back to "Home Base." Showered and more relaxed than we'd been in a while, we went into an empty bar. Empty was about our speed. We didn't really feel like socializing. Hell, we were even sick of talking to each other. A glass of wine, a bit of silence and then off to bed. I'd taken one sip when I noticed two guys walk into the bar and head our direction. They spoke English with an accent and asked if we knew where to find a pool hall. Jana told them and we hoped we'd be going back to our silent sipping. No such luck.

They didn't really want a pool hall, they wanted conversation. 2 Norwegians traveling around The Czech Republic for a month, one studying for his PhD in Engineering, the other a journalist for a Christian magazine.

The one who pulled his stool up next to mine and then proceeded to awkwardly reach in front of me to grab pistachios off the bar every so often annoyed me off the bat. He expounded on the virtues of black and white thinking and teased his friend, the journalist, for being stuck in the gray zone. Two strikes against the talkative pistachio nut.

But the comment that got me going was later in the conversation when he made fun of Americans for not knowing anything about world geography. I admitted that if he handed me a blank map of Europe and asked me to label Luxembourg, I may not be able to do it but I could quickly find out where Luxembourg was and within 15 minutes I could know some important facts about the country. In my 12 years of teaching I've found the most important factor for measuring intelligence, aptitude, and education is curiosity, not rote memorization. So it seemed to me that the tired, old poll, "How many Americans know where _________ is on a map" is completely outdated with the quick access we have to information. What seems important to me is the type of questions we ask about places outside of our experience and how we process that information - how we make sense of it.

I told our annoying friend from Norway that I was from Idaho and asked him, could he tell me where, in America, Idaho sits. A knockout punch. He could not. How about Kentucky? Down for the count.

I allowed myself a moment for pontificating (Jana yawned... had she heard all this before? Seemed likely). I explained what I was doing in that part of the world and where I'd been over the previous 2 weeks. I admitted that if I'd been tested three months ago on where, exactly, Bosnia and Serbia were, I would have been able to point to the general vicinity but I would have had no hope of accurately pinpointing their exact locations before I began my research. For me, the important thing about someone is not how many facts they've memorized about the map, it's how much curiosity they have about the world. Information, most of us have access to. Understanding is a much harder commodity to come across. In my mind, if you operate in the world allowing preconceptions (even funny, ha-ha, "harmless" stereotypes, "typical Americans") to guide your vision of the world, understanding of that world is nearly impossible to attain.

So, in my travels, often I flinched when I'd hear acquaintances and even friends make "typical American" comments. I not only flinched, but often, I took the bait (since I knew they were teasing me in many situations), but I couldn't let those comments go. Are there ignorant Americans out there? Absolutely. But one thing I do know about the world is that there is no shortage of ignorance and America certainly doesn't have a monopoly on it. Putting too much stock in stereotypes is one sure way to paralyze potential understanding. Curiosity is one way out of ignorance.