Impending Culture Shock

Airports can be amazing places, with people from all corners of the Earth brushing shoulders and rubbing elbows in the security line, washrooms, and cafe's, trading languages and currencies, traveling far away as well as coming home. I like to imagine the international wing of airports as being like the trade-route markets of centuries past where the crowds barter and interact and you can sit and watch all these exchanges first hand.


While using the restroom I witnessed an elderly man from the middle east try to use the bio-hazard, needle disposal box as a hand dryer, I chuckled to myself while trying to maintain inconspicuous composure yet this got me thinking. Thinking about how many times over the next month people will laugh at me while I struggle to interoperate the small, subtle cultural differences that I am bound to clash with. Im currently writing this over Greenland en route to Amsterdam, where I'm sure that I will be confused with the small cultural differences that I will encounter during my short layover before my flight to sub-Saharan Africa. Europe is for the most part, a fully developed, westernized nation, they have luxuries such as indoor plumbing, bank accounts and well food-water-shelter. So the cultural differences that I may struggle with for the most part will by small and insignificant.

On my next flight I will cross an invisible boundary, a sort of "Mason-Dixon" line, into a continent where the simple things that we take for granted as a developed culture (food-water-shelter) aren't necessarily cultural norms. As I sit here writing this I am drinking a Dutch brand of bottled water from the Swiss Alps and I am wondering that when I get to Ethiopia what kind of water will I be drinking? will it give me diarrhea? or will there even be clean drinking water? These are more significant "cultural differences" then I will in counter while struggling to order food from Dutch menu in the Amsterdam international airport.

My next month will be spent curiously wandering though east African cultures all while entertaining the locals with my inability to understand even the most simple of cultural tasks. The real cultural interests for me are ingrained deep in the 'cradle of humanity' where we are all descended from. How did we evolve into being a developed nation of people who drink clean water, served on an airplane over Greenland, sold out of the Netherlands and bottled in Switzerland? Where I'm going some people will walk 5 km's everyday to fill their daily supply of murky, parasitic drinking water. We were all "born" in Africa yet we as citizens of a "developed" culture seem so detached from the culture that spawned us. So as the locals laugh at me I will laugh as well, but I will never give up trying to understand the cultures that I will be immersed in, as we are the distant children of these cultures after all.