How Friendships are Like Tourism

Experiencing China, November 2007

The way I see it, we are all our own culture.  Each individual person.  We have our own set ways of doing life, our own unique belief systems, our own styles of dress.  And we each speak our own language.

Some people feel familiar, like their nation is situated next to mine, like I'm Canada and they are the United States.  We watch the same television and movies, wear similar clothes, and think somewhat similarly.  But there is still a distinctly defined border between us.  I end at my skin, and so do they.

As a girl who loves to travel, and has lived at various times of her life in four different U.S. states and three different countries, I have a deep love and appreciation for intercultural mixing.  I am fascinated by the ways of life of people different from me, and enjoy sitting back and watching the spectacle that is another way of life.

(Life in New York, by the way, which is basically the world in a city, was like one big buffet for me.)

In college, I spent a semester in Italy, surrounded by some of the world's most renowned art, food, and culture.  I can still hear the lilt of our study director's voice as he took us through cathedrals: "THEEZ-uh arch shows the-uh DEE-ferinz between the-uh PHEE-zeecal and the-uh MEta-PHEE-zeecal."

But at times, because I am not Italian by birth, I went through the cognitive conflict known as "culture shock".  I remember one day being so angry at the fact that I didn't even know how to mail a letter.

And I've experienced this in my relationships with other people, too.  It's easy for us humans to view the differences between our individual cultures as problems, when maybe, instead, we could treat them as world travel.  What if we saw other people the way a tourist sees a new city?

Sure, the differences can make you tired or frustrated at times, because of the extra energy required for learning and growing and changing, but isn't that learning and growing and changing often worth it?

And when we encounter someone who really irks us, maybe we can treat it as an engagement in diplomatic relations in a far-flung, extremely foreign land.



All I'm saying is, what if we tried to give world peace a chance, one person at a time?

(Romans 12:18)