“Let’s get ice cream,” Alessia said one night while we were roaming around in Bodrum, Turkey. The food in my stomach from dinner had started to move a bit, making room for ice cream, so I said, “Sure.” We walked down to the nearest ice cream parlor, bought a couple cones of our favorite flavors, and started to walk down the street again. Alessia took two licks of her ice cream and looked at the cone with the same sour look she gives a lot of foods.
To tell you the truth, I had predicted that face the moment she brought up the idea of ice cream.
"This is horrible." she said.
“Alessia, you come from the country with the best ice cream in the world. This is what ice cream tastes like in the rest of the world.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, this is pretty typical.”
Even though my taste buds have become accustomed to Italian gelati (there are two places less than a 3 minute walk from my apartment), I can still appreciate just about anything that falls under the category of ice cream.
It’s the same thing with other things too. I wanted to visit Ephesus in Turkey. It was a day trip from Bodrum and was relatively cheap. Alessia went last year so she said she didn’t want to go again.
“It’s not much to see."
“Well, I’m pretty sure I still want to see it. I've never seen anything like it.”
"Yeah, you're probably right. You should see it. It's hard for me because there are better ruins in Italy."
What is it like to be a person who grew up in a country with so much history and “the best” of everything? What is it like for these things, that are so breathtaking for the rest of the world, to become normal? Does it make it difficult to appreciate anything that’s not as superior?
My friend Roberto grew up in Rome. His university was less than a minute from the steps of the Parthenon. He used to sit and eat his lunch on the fountain facing the Parthenon.
As I examined the interior of the Parthenon for the first time, I asked Roberto, “What’s it like to grow up with THIS in YOUR city?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, “I’ve never known anything else.”
(Here's where it'd be cool to say that he has an odd obsession with parking garages and fabricated homes, that he's most-impressed by those things, but to my knowledge, he doesn't.)
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Alessia said she doesn’t understand why a lot of restaurants abroad, as in outside of Italy, don’t know how to make a good pasta.
“Pasta is so simple,” she says.
“It IS so simple, “ I think, “How can restaurants screw it up? Silly restaurants.”
Of course, I don’t recall ever eating a bad pasta in a restaurant...
She goes on to describe to me the process of making a good pasta.
“Have I ever made pasta for you?” she asks.
“No.”
At this point I recall having made it for her while we were working on a project together. I also recall her plate not being empty at the end of the meal. I just thought she wasn't hungry.
“Well, I need to make pasta for you,” she says.
But then I wonder if I will even be able to tell the difference between her pasta and something inferior (like mine), but I honestly don’t think my taste buds are sophisticated enough to know if she uses table salt or rock salt.
(cause she says it makes a difference.)
And that's actually okay with me.
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3 comments:
i'm of the opinion that like italy or turkey or japan or anything considered 'foreign' to us, such is the same for anyone outside this country.
why do you think it's becoming more common to see people in india driving more than one car, watching mtv and digging themselves deeper in debt to pay for it all? i think examples such as this one speak volumes about how influential we as americans are. our ability to have access to excess is pretty much what sets us apart, right? i mean, if you were to distill it all down to one thing {or at least try to, like i'm struggling to do this very moment} that's what i would suggest.
our lifestyle, our culture, and our habits, for good, better or indifferent, are profoundly interesting to people in other parts of the world. i am in no way suggesting we as americans are more interesting; the same could be said about ANY OTHER CULTURE in the world.
Ooh, I like this post. I'm sort of thankful I grew up in the mediocre place I did - where any theatrical production that came to town was somewhat laughable, our reuben sandwiches left something to be desired, and acrid coffee was hailed as sophisticated. It sort of gave me hope that - somewhere - things were better than this. Whereas, if you grew up in Manhattan and were surrounded by top-notch Broadway productions, that's all you would ever know. If you moved elsewhere and went to a play, it's highly doubtful that it would be any better than that which you've known all your life. No wow factor for you.
What makes something interesting or exciting or worthy of admiration? Why are the Great Pyramids at Giza so great? Maybe it's the scale of the object or the engineering and coordination that went into all of it. But then why is the Leaning Tower of Pisa so famous? It's a poor example of engineering, but a great example of uniqueness. And then you have the Mona Lisa, whose association with a famous person of extraordinary ability makes it famous. Hearing and seeing things over and over leads to complacency, and I think there are few things in life that are able to occupy a human's thoughts and admiration for a lifetime. Man's boredome with great things is not all bad because it speaks to the greatness of the object able to hold captive man's thoughts for long periods of time, and it speaks to the innate sense in man to be constantly seeking creativity.
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