Only nine days till lift off. I'll be staying in Taastrup, which is in the capital region of Denmark. It's a town with a population of about 33,000 people. Just from checking it out on Google Earth, it looks tranquil, with tidy streets and groups of buildings separated by vast, flat fields. In my neighborhood there are mostly white houses, dusty orange tile or thick dark thatch making up their roofs. There's a church almost a millennium old down the street. The area is imbued with the elegant and timeworn atmosphere you'd imagine in Europe. Taastrup is very close to Denmark's capital city, Copenhagen. Go by bike or train and you'll be surrounded by the urban bustle of the Danish people. It's going to be awesome to explore as much as possible.
 |
| An example of a house in Taastrup |
I've gotten advice in the past year about integrating into the
native lifestyle, which means absorbing the language, food habits, social
conventions, and more. It's essentially going with the Danish flow. You still
maintain who you are as a person, while inhabiting another culture's way of
life. That's totally fine, but I believe that there's a crucial aspect of
becoming comfortable with foreign cultures that's often ignored. All cultures
originate from the same source: humanity.
Regardless of where you live, there are amazing and detestable
things around you, directly and indirectly influencing you. You may be in a
country that has abundant natural resources and spectacular landscapes, but a
dictator is brutally oppressing everyone. You'll find examples of this in South America during the 70's and 80's. You may be on vacation in another
country where you're extravagantly living at a low cost, though most of the poorer locals subsist in a society that doesn't care about them. This can be seen in various parts of India and Bangladesh. Getting more personal, during your childhood your parents could have
purchased whatever you wanted, but they were always busy and you were neglected, fueling emotional issues that you now struggle with. In the places I've stayed within the United States, I've known some people, friends even, who had to deal with this. None of these issues is clear cut. If you look carefully, the apparent heroes and culprits drift in a sea of grey morality.
Every person's life is a story with its own setting, languages, and
characters. Each one has its uniqueness along with a common quality that links
them all, that good ol' humanity. There's a reason why a person from Russia can learn Mandarin and someone from Peru can pick up Hindi if they're willing to put in the work. We can also acclimate to different customs and mindsets. We're
adaptable mofos.
My family's frequent moving when I was younger exposed us to
places with drastically different cultural backgrounds, from ratty tenement
buildings to government supported housing to a charming home in an affluent
suburb, what appeared to be so disparate in the beginning turned out to be endless iterations of that good ol' humanity. The guy on the street
with baggy jeans and the neighbor who argued with his wife every night and the
old couple who kept to themselves condensed into the bare essence of what it was
to be you and me. They were the same. The environment determined the languages they
spoke, the religion they practiced, the values they held...but in the end, they
felt in the same way and wanted the same things. How they acquired those needs and desires was where the dissimilarities
showed up. That's where culture, especially through family and peers, takes
control to form part of our initial emotional makeups and behavior.
How is this related to digging into a foreign country and getting
to know the people? For me, learning another language and understanding how
stuff works somewhere else becomes simpler (not that learning Danish is a
breeze…) when you're aware of that innate connection. The common political view
and the fashion matter plenty, but they're shallow compared to that good ol'
humanity (OK, no more saying that).
The funny sounds you hear in some language are sputtered out at
first with some hesitance, later with more confidence and skill, as you
continue. You become kinder to others, even if you don't understand their words
or crazy hand gestures. You're more motivated to connect with people and are
willing to embrace the frustration of being in an alien land. And after moving past those stages, you get to party party, aw yeah.
Top Picture Credit: Michael Dreves Beier
0 comments:
Post a Comment