Meanwhile all tourist-facing workers in every non-Anglo country have heard “I’M AMERICAN! SPEAK ENGLISH TO ME!!!” at least once.
I don’t travel. Is it common for the locals servicing tourists to not know at least enough English to get by?
Often, however:
- Tourists tend to seek out “authentic” parts of the country.
- Some places tend to German or French speaking tourists primarily.
- Tourist industries can have high worker turnover, so there’s always someone learning the ropes.
- Even perfect English might be unintelligible to a gammon if the accent is thick.
Ah, yeah that makes sense. It must be a nightmare to deal with Americans if you don’t speak English.
In essence, this quote is true.
Applied to reality though, in our day and age your results may vary. It is completely possible to travel and learn nothing that would open people’s minds especially when the traveling keeps itself within tourist zones and resorts designed to just give you a change of landscape and an illusion of cultural flavor.
You need to purposefully step away from that sort of thing and actually engage with the culture to get the benefits of the quote.
I wonder if it was more effective in his era, late 19th century? Leisure travel wasn’t as much of a thing then, especially to other countries/continents, and the tourism industry didn’t exist nearly as much
Definitely, when the traveling time alone is anywhere from a week to a month or more, with lots of required stops, then it makes sense to spend a long time in a place.
Looks like it took Bertrand Russell 6 weeks to get from England to Shanghai in 1920.
It was around this time that a white guy adopted the clothing of an Arab country and passed himself off as an Arab to learn more about a country (Syria, I think?). I learned about him in the intro to an episode of the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Travel was definitely different then.
I think it was ep 15, about the Nabataeans.
Edit: the Nabataeans were in modern Jordan.
I read it was some guy.
haha look at all those fucking bigots being too poor to travel
If you didn’t want to be a bigot, you should have been born rich and traveled more. That’s just science, don’t @ me.
I always hear people say this as a ‘gotcha’ but it doesn’t make any sense.
I have travelled while homeless.
People will be renting an apartment in a developed city, owning a car, going out to pubs/nightclubs, and then telling dirty backpackers, “God must be nice to have the money to travel!”
travel vs sedentism, neither one is necessarily more cheap/expensive than the other
It’s very similar to the “oh you have time to read books and educate yourself, you must be rich!” discourse. It’s very infantalizing.
May not work in all cases, seems like everyone that goes to egypt to see the pyramids comes back hating egyptians.
I’ve seen discussions where the topic was something like “Where did you travel to that you would never go back to again”, and the responses there heavily implied that travel can inspire racism.
I think Twain here is referring to travel less as tourism, ie short vacations, but more about spending time living in different countries and getting to know people and their culture, making friends, etc.
I feel like an adjacent one is having good conversations with people from very different countries (ideally face-to-face)
Having read Mark Twain’s autobiographical travel log, I love that he himself is a bit of bigot - stereotyping quite a few of those peoples he meets on the way.
Albeit in a fairly human way and with a bit of irony about it. Great writer interesting human.
That was after a visit from Madame Guinan.
I love those episodes.
Yeah, just think of all those famously unprejudiced travelers of history like Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes or Robert Clive…
