Why Does Wonder Turn to Expectation?
While businesses promote DEI, is travel making our world less diverse?
Thanks for checking in on the Always Care Community! I’m grateful for your support. Please let me know your own thoughts on this week’s article. It was originally written as my annual greeting to friends and family a couple of years ago. If anything, I believe it is even more relevant today.
Before I begin, I want to give a shoutout to
. Justin is currently on a journey to visit 52 countries in 52 weeks. You can follow his daily posts on Instagram and he publishes thought-provoking updates from the countries he visits in his Substack publication, . He’ll educate, entertain, and help you see your own part of the world through a slightly different lens.Justin has been trying to find a quintessential food for every place he visits, but he has also spent time in an Irish Bar in Latin America because they were showing his favourite ice hockey team on TV.
That got me thinking about how much travel has changed and how the feelings of wonder, adventure and discovery have given way to an expectation that wherever we are, we should have the comforts of home.
I graduated from high school in Canada in June 1978. A week later, and likely still half-hungover from the parties, I found myself in a foreign, third-world, country. Hardly anybody owned a car, and many didn’t even have telephones in their homes. There was one, state-owned radio station and one state-owned television station. The TV came on at about 5 in the afternoon and stopped sending around 11 in the evening. People were shy and reserved. The language was different. Many learned some English in school but were uneasy, uncertain, or unwilling to use it.
Whenever I encountered someone who did speak English, I felt a deep gratitude toward them.
The name of this developing, emerging market country, where I would spend the first twenty years of what I now call my 4-decade gap year in Europe, was Norway.
It’s changed since I arrived, but I can’t take any credit for that.
If I was grateful for people that accommodated me and spoke English with me then, today I also feel grateful for the ones that didn’t. Thanks to them, I was in a sink-or-swim environment where, if not my survival, at least my happiness depended on learning their language.
Learning the language was key to integrating seamlessly into society. Yes, people who knew me always pointed my immigrant status out to others, but most people I casually interacted with never knew I was born and raised on the opposite side of the planet. Thanks to my paternal ancestry I had a light complexion and blue eyes to help hide me among the masses.
In my early years overseas, I watched children’s TV shows. The language was simpler. Repeats of shows were sent year after year, so I watched the same programmes that my contemporaries had grown up with. That gave me the same cultural childhood history that they had. How foreign could I be if I knew who Pompel and Pilt were?
Something happened during my years abroad.
As travel became more commonplace, the wonders of new discoveries started turning to expectations.
Why didn’t the waiter in Paris, the front desk clerk in Cologne or the taxi driver in Istanbul speak English?
The expectations went beyond language, too.
My Norwegian friends stopped taking brown cheese on their holidays to sunny Spain because they could buy it locally. Restaurants on the Costa del Whatever served pizza and burgers so people weren’t stuck starving or having to eat the spicy Spanish dishes.
The hotel I worked for in Oslo had always catered to an international clientele. Our restaurants were challenged when guests could wander out into the wild foreign city and find menus written in English that didn’t challenge them to eat “fårikål” or “smalahove”.
As the hotel group I worked for expanded, our hotels flew our home countries’ flags in foreign lands. We expected to see Christmas trees in our lobbies in December.
Sometimes I fear the wonder of exploration we once felt when experiencing new places, people, and cultures is giving way to expectations that the comforts of home should be available wherever we go.
Yes, it’s great that we can enjoy a sundowner on the plains in Africa, but are we really travelling if we cast our phone onto the screen in our glamping tent to stream Netflix before falling asleep?
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When gratitude becomes an expectation, we can lose a sense of perspective.
Sometimes it seems we behave more like conquerers and colonists than guests on someone else’s land.
Instead of being inquisitive, open-minded, adventurers, we expect our hosts to know at least as much about the countries we came from as we know about theirs.
We live in an interconnected, interdependent world but are we using it to learn more about each other or is it just driving an expectation that everyone we meet wherever we go should know more about us?
Stay safe, Always Care
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If you’re in hospitality, read our book, Spin the Bottle Service. A local server told us it should be required reading for everyone who works in a restaurant or hotel. Another reader also told us it helped her become a better guest when she travelled.
In addition to writing stories, I love to tell them.
As a multi-award-winning corporate leader in hospitality and global security, captivating keynotes, compelling coaching sessions, and edutaining, motivational workshops are all part of my repertoire.
Email me at paul@alwayscare.ca.
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