Trips and Tales (part 10)
Excerpt from the Trip Info Pack: Make it easy on yourself, you probably DON’T need to bring…
- Huge amounts of 35mm colour-print camera film (if you’re using a non-digital camera). Kodak and Fuji are available easily and at half the UK price.
- Bibles. Whatever you were told, the Bible – along with other religious literature – is now freely available in Russia for anyone who wants it, and at much lower prices than you can buy Russian-language Bibles outside Russia.
- Pot Noodles. (Not that me saying this will stop you, sigh.)
Dos and Don’ts… Ad Nauseum
Gifts! Now that’s something definitely on the DO list. As mentioned in the Trip Info Pack, a condescending “beads for the natives” mentality is not what it’s about. In Trips and Tales’ slaloming through the landmines of international embarrassment, we’d only got to mid-Mongolia.
“This is a Russian thing too. Guests are always supposed to bring presents. Not expensive ones. But particularly if you are going out to visit nomads or something, make sure you carry a few glittery lipsticks or a bottle of vodka. The value isn’t important, it’s ‘the thought that counts’. As with the Japanese, a small gift is a sign of good manners. Of course, you can’t be carrying gifts for everyone you might meet along the way, and they don’t have to be brought all the way from England. But if you know you’re going to be paying a visit, it’s nice to take a small gift along.”
There’s also this weird self-presentation thing, that you wouldn’t expect to experience outside of game shows or Alcoholics Anonymous:
Guests are supposed to announce themselves. The reason is that it would look very rude for a host to be so nosy as to actually ask them. You are expected to do it for yourself without being asked. It’s particularly a Mongolian thing. It’s not very serious. Mongolians themselves laugh about this kind of thing. All the same, if you do it, they’ll be very charmed. It looks like you’ve made an effort to understand their culture in a way that the majority of visitors don’t.”
Kind of like making an effort to speak their language?
“Yes it’s exactly that. Another mannerism you might try out (although it starts to look affected or pretentious if you do it too much): just like in Arabic countries, handing things from one person to another is always done with the right hand, because the left hand is considered dirty. In Mongolia they do it slightly differently, in that you cup your right elbow in your left hand, and then use your right hand to pass the object – your business card, or the salt pot etc. If you can do that convincingly, Mongolians will be absolutely charmed. It’s something out of the Buddhist tradition. I don’t make a particular point of doing it, but if I’m giving a present, passing something of value, or a business card, then they appreciate the gesture.”
What about dos and don’ts in China then? Don’t talk about the government? Tibet?
“Er yes, they’ll appreciate that. More than average, the Chinese appreciate compliments about their town, their museum: how interesting it is and how beautifully it’s been rebuilt. They genuinely appreciate the compliment. Often they will make some similar compliment back to you – ‘We are so charmed that you could find the time to come here’. There’s a deep level of politeness running through Chinese society.”
Apparently, much of this gets lost in translation:
“Translation can never cover the tiny niceties – in accent, or slight changes of words that imply the level of respect that’s being conveyed. I’ve made three attempts to learn Chinese, twice with native speakers, and I’ve got nowhere. These tones that they use: they say them to me and I just can’t hear the difference. They say it four different ways: I can maybe catch a difference between the first and the last, but I don’t get the two in the middle. There’s a further problem in that there isn’t really just one Chinese language. Of course, the government is working very hard to pretend that there is only one, but there are hundreds of different peoples in China who speak their own languages. The clever thing about Chinese languages is that the symbols have the same meaning across the different languages, so everyone can understand each other by just writing things down, even when they speak different languages.”
Brilliant! So is that what we call “Mandarin”?
“Sort of, yes, although you get into slight political difficulties with that: they don’t want to call it Mandarin any more because it has an imperial connection.”
Indeed, I remember looking after a couple of young Chinese exchange students. When I asked them about “Mandarin”, they didn’t even know what I was taking about. The term wasn’t on their educational radar.
“They generally call it ‘Han’ Chinese, which is the name of the majority Chinese ethnic grouping. It can also be called ‘Puttonhua’, which means ‘the proper Chinese language’ or ‘our national language’. There’s an official policy to try and make everybody speak it, and to abandon regional dialects in the process, although political matters aside, there’s also a very practical reason why you might want to do that in a big country like China.”
OK. Any other nuggets of info that I should be aware of?
“Raising your voice in public is something that they don’t like. Brits are usually OK with this because they are always walking around in whispers anyway…” – hmm, until you get a drink or two inside them perhaps – “…but Americans don’t quite manage it. I can’t think of anything else.”
Better quit there then.
Next time: Trips and Tales (Part 11).
The trip (at last!) and St Petersburg.
[Photo by AForestFrolic]