Get A Room
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We arrived in Oaxaca yesterday, after a lovely week-long visit from Lane in Mexico City. I’m not tired of Mexican food yet. Is that even a thing?
Get A Room
According to the United Nations, our little planet is currently made up of 193 countries. I haven’t been to all of them, or even most. Nor do I intend to—apparently there are plenty of folks who are obsessed with going to every single country, but that has no appeal to me. I obsess over quite enough randomness already (skin care, the NYT Spelling Bee, chocolate, avoiding carbon monoxide poisoning).
One of the most fascinating things about our travel lifestyle, in my opinion, is the ability to take a thirty-thousand foot view. As I’ve said before, I love to compare and contrast, and I can’t help myself, even on the impossibly broad scale of how-is-this-country-similar-to-that-country. I’ve been to more than a few countries that seem to be radically different from each other. In my experience, though, the similarities are always there, if you look for them.
Take, for instance, Mexico and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. On paper, they’re pretty radically different. Not much in common at all.
I went down this rabbit hole of thought a couple of days ago, walking along the edge of Chapultepec Park at dusk. There were couples holding hands, strolling arm-in-arm, smooching at the bus stop, making out under trees. The first time I visited Mexico City, in 2013, I was struck by how common and frequent and normalized the public display of affection is.
On that trip, someone told us that it’s because of the lack of privacy at home. A lot of people live in multi-generational housing, sometimes in very crowded situations. There’s an anonymity to making out in the street, as opposed to in the living room with grandma and a five-year-old niece staring at you while Uncle John and Aunt Susie argue in the kitchen.
In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, there’s no public display of affection. Zero. Men and women don’t touch in public, at all. It’s illegal, even for tourists. This reserve creates a very different atmosphere.
But I wonder if it comes from a fundamentally similar place: there’s also a lot of crowded multi-generational housing in Saudi Arabia. Like Mexico, it’s a very religious, very conservative country, with some deep roots in traditional society.
I acknowledge that this is an incredibly simplistic interpretation of my own personal experiences in these two places—your mileage will definitely vary. One is a democracy, one is a kingdom. One is Muslim, one is Catholic. They’re polar extremes, in some ways.
But in other ways, they’re not. And that’s what I love about my bird’s-eye view of the world: being able to sift past the headlines to see the messy complexity of humans getting through life, finding ways to express their humanity, no matter where they were accidentally born.
Take care,
Lisa
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