100th Post: The world so far

The longer I live and travel outside the United States the more I realize how truly weird my home country is. Everything we do, everything we are, is so different from the rest of the world. I am sometimes amazed that I ever thought those things were normal.

Take, for instance, our money. In Hong Kong the $10 bill is purple and blue and pink with a transparent plastic panel. It's made out of a plasticy-strange material that is almost impossible to tear. Compare that to our bland green and gray American paper-cloth money. In my collection of money from around the world U.S. money wins the "one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others" game.

And then there's our food. American's are far more limited and far more unhealthy in what we eat than almost any country in the world. In Japan if you buy fruit flavored candy it's actually colored and flavored with fruit not chemicals. In Hong Kong you can buy a whole duck with the bill still attached, or a fish caught that morning and filleted in front of you at the out door market.

In America our places of worship are often locked between services for fear that some unscrupulous person will deface or plunder them. In Hong Kong, the shrines are open to the street and the public. A 100 foot tall Buddha stands at the top of a mountain, watching over the monastery and the tourist town below.

Many American's speak only one language. They might learn a second language half-heartedly in high school but it is soon left behind and forgotten. In every country I've visited, the people study English. They speak their own language and ours. We, generally, speak only our own.

In Hong Kong, Japan, and even Panama the cultures are older, far older, than nearly anything you can find in the U.S. the people live so steeped in tradition that they hardly notice its influence in their lives.

In a year, we will return to the United States, back to the world I once considered normal. I wonder if I will ever see it that way again.

I leave you today with a quote from Miriam Beard, "Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living. "