[travel] Changing mental habits

One of the interesting things about rapid traveling is that you have to constantly be shifting your mental habits because each country requires a new approach to interacting with its environment.  You have to stay creative in your methods for dealing with problems and opportunities.  However, there are some habits that are country-independent.  What's funny is seeing what happens when some of these assumptions collide with returning to the US:

Note the following thought pattern that I rapidly went through while standing at a St Louis ATM:

Ingrained habit: "How many more days am I going to be in this country?  (This determines how much money I pull out)"
Conscious mind:  "You're back in the US.  You'll be here a while."
Ingrained habit: "OK.  I'll pull out ~$200.  What's the exchange rate between this currency and the US dollar?"
Conscious mind:  "1:1.  You're back in the US."
Ingrained habit: "I should withdraw $180 to force the ATM to give me a lot of small bills since people don't like changing big ones."
Conscious mind: "You're back in the US.  No ATM spits out anything larger than $20 except in Vegas casinos."

Or me entering a supermarket:

Ingrained habit:  "How far will I have to walk with the food I buy?  Do I have access to a refrigerator?  When will I next have access to a supermarket?  Does my hostel have kitchen facilities?  Microwave?  Range?"
Conscious mind:  "You're staying at a friend's house in the US."

I had the same issue when I got to the UK a couple of weeks ago:

Ingrained habit:  "What phrase do I use to greet people in this country?"
Conscious mind:  "Hello.  Y'know, English?"

Given that the language-check habit disappeared within a couple of days, I'm guessing I don't have long before the other ones fade away.

[travel] American Re-Education camp

My arrival into the US happened to coincide with a holiday I hadn't been aware of until now - Flag Day.  It apparently was a big deal for my friends' parents though.  They asked if I wanted to come along.  The regular Matt probably would have said no.  The traveler Matt "this is just another foreign country and I should learn about its traditions" said yes. 

It did feel like a foreign country.  There were flags everywhere.  A secret society - The Elks - featured prominently in the celebration, as one of its Imperial Grand Viziers, who looked like a slightly younger Colonel Sanders, was the master of ceremonies.  Policemen, veterans, and firemen were revered, Army Hummers were flaunted, and drugs were reviled.  (There's a nice picture of me with the "This Car Was Seized From A Drug Dealer" car while wearing an Israeli Psytrance T-shirt.)

I have to admit the ceremony was a bit fun, especially if I just treat it as another bit of historical pageantry from a foreign country.

I learned some things about American history.  They took us through the Star-Spangled Banner and pulled apart its meaning.  Apparently during the night of the bombardment of Fort McHenry during the War of 1812, the hopelessly outgunned Americans did nothing but stand holding up the American flag all night while faced by the full firepower of the entire British fleet, and by morning the flag was still standing but only because it was propped up by the bodies of dead American patriots.  The story as told by Wikipedia is slightly different -- passive American harbor defense mechanisms kept.the British warships from getting close enough to do too much damage, and casualties were light.  

So, what have we learned?  America is highly patriotic, honors its veterans, and has powerful secret societies.   America also enjoys drinking watered-down beer, presumably so they can drink it more like a beverage.  Also, Americans are obsessed with proper care of their flags, but they're happy to put parts of the flag on shirts, pants and even bikinis, and they'll throw those flag-clothes on the ground with nary a thought.  One might say America is a land of contradictions.

Oh, did I just generalize to a whole country based on one day in one city?  Yeah, that's the problem with traveling quickly.  :-)

[travel] Nazi eugenics

In the Jewish Museum in Berlin, there was an exhibit on loan from the Washington DC Holocaust museum on eugenics. It was interesting to see how the Nazis took something extreme and justified it to a somewhat skeptical public. They basically mixed some reasonable (though still controversial) arguments in with increasingly extreme conclusions from those arguments.

For example, they produced graphs of demographic shifts showing how, by 1960, there would be a crushingly huge weight of old and infirm people to support. This was argued to mean that people (especially fit, productive ones) need to have more offspring to prrevent social collapse. Amusingly, the 1960 disaster scenario looks a lot like what developed countries have today, demographics-wise, whereas their 1900 historical scenario looks like a modern third-world country. Apparently that disaster didn't come to pass, though modern demographers are currently debating whether further demographic shifts toward an older population will bring down the social security system.



( More observations from the exhibit )