ANOTHER COUNTRY

The aspects that most intrigues me about living in another country other than England, are the little details. The habits by which we tie our lives together or tie them up - we rise at six, breakfast at seven and start work at eight. Those many familiar unconscious expressions by which we mark out our space in the world. We are all aware of the different names of countries, the fact that they have different languages, currencies, customs and climates. And in pursuit of adventure we devour travel books and histories and inundate our minds with the silver-screen images of new lands with fresh, crisp, green grass.
Our first steps on that new soil, however, are invariably met with profound irritation over the petty disparities of very ordinary things. As we are disgorged into the curious mass of humanity leering on airport rails, we are struck immediately by the different scent and movement in the air. Our defenses are alerted as we look to smoke out the assailant. However, as our stay becomes more permanent these disparities become exasperating to the point of obsessive national snobbery. In the course of my own travels, which have included most of Europe, the Middle East, North and West Africa, Canada and North America. I have been constantly dumbfounded, bemused and frustrated by what appears to me to be a conspiracy to be different just for the sake of it.
Why, I ask myself, would anyone go through the trouble of designing and marketing a thousand-and-one different types of toilet paper, when one size fits all? Here in America one has a multiple choice of soft, super-soft, super-super-soft, and new improved extra-soft, ad infinitum! To what purpose, I ask? In England the range is truly staggering, from the down-right coarse to the silky velvet(possibly commissioned by Royal charter), toilet paper refining has become ‘class conscious’. I met an American woman, in London, who was making a collection of these choice articles. Her fascination was incredulous; she believed the folks-back-home would just love these cultural curiosities.
In Arab countries toilet paper is sometimes not used at all. Man’s left hand is responsible for this function. This can come as a most disconcerting shock to the newcomer, especially after he is mid-way through his performance, thinking of everything but the inconvenience of being paper-less! What replaces the familiar roll is a cup or bucket of water to wash your hand with. After the initial horror of such fecal indulgence a certain logic explains the situation. Firstly, no child or adult, for that matter, can escape the ‘throne-room’ without washing their hands. Unless, of course, they like the pungent odor of waste-matter about their person. Secondly, toilet paper cannot then add to the pollution and blockage of the commode environs, creating that all too disagreeable nausea which reminds us of our entrails workings. Thirdly, with no consumer demand, many more trees are saved the ignominy of having their lives cut short, turned into pulp and then paper to grace our posteriors. One word of warning should therefore be given to the would-be travelers to these lands of the crescent star: never shake the left hand of an Arab.

Travelers, in Arab countries or elsewhere, always have a new thirst for communications. What are these new sounds? Why the different hum? Where does one pay to hear? The telephone has become our ear to the world. Its universal conformity would thus be a definite advantage. However, the trifling distinctions of the dial tones have always perplexed me. In Britain the dial tone is pitched in a staccato E and comes charging out at you, seeming to demand why you have disturbed the systems inner slumbers. One inserts the coins after dialing and making the connection, by which time the system has relapsed into comatose. The dialing tone returns reminding us of the nerve-shattering key of E and we realize where the Sex Pistols got their musical training! In America the dialing tone purrs at the you in middle C, Cherishing your patronage and ringing gently, as of a Crystal Cathedral, bestowing wisdom and comfort. The workings of foreign telephone systems exasperate Americans the most. Coming from a land where a telephone is practically a birthright, a preferred substitute to a pacifier, Americans battle abroad with coin openings which are jammed, the feistiness of operators, and the excessive cost and inefficiency of a common place utility.
Having been conditioned by a country’s medium of communication, the next great obstacle is to straddle the banal discrepancies between the uses of words. The differences between American and British words belies their common use of the English language. Not so much because they are so far apart but because of their trivial distinctions, for example; the American downtown is the city center in British English; subways are tubes; piers are quays; a duplex is a semi-detached; an apartment is a flat; elevators are lifts; the first floor is the ground floor. The particular literal definitions make one question, what is common about sense? Wouldn’t you agree that the sound of the word autumn is preferable to fall; wallet to billfold; cotton to thread; drawing pin to thumb tack; queue to line? one defines an item or situation, while the other defines its function.
There is a serious side to this dilemma which is more acute than the difference between TO-MATE-TOES and TO-MAR-TOES. One is constantly thrown off guard by the use of terms like cabinet for cupboard; truck for lorry; faucet for tap; muffler for silencer; and vest for waistcoat; we won’t go into cul-de-sacs being called dead-ends or that a fortnight is two weeks. The trivia mounts. But more succinctly the crisis can be summed-up in feet and inches. The metric inch of America is at serious odds with the centimeters of Continental Europe and the twelve inch foot of Britain. Therefor an American/British phrase-book would be a very useful addition for travelers to the United Kingdom.
Travel they say broadens the mind. However, the emotions take a battering in the process. On short stays in foreign lands everyone is granted the license of self-righteousness and cultural arrogance, but as your stay becomes extended on a foreign soil, that nation’s idiosyncrasies begin to seep into the newcomer’s sub-conscious, colonizing the instincts. Before long you catch yourself saying, restroom instead of public convenience, and asking the operator for a collect call person-to-person. Old habits die hard however, and occasionally you lapse back into the euphonic sounding words like biscuit instead of the jocular cookie, or chemist instead of the blatant druggist. But by then it’s too late because you’ve become a foreigner!