Mike is a retired engineer currently living in Okinawa, Japan, and also one of our regional contributors here at Pocket Cultures. Mike would describe himself not as an “expat” but as a “transplant”. In today’s interview, Mike tells us about his experiences travelling the world and getting to know other cultures and specifically his insight for how to blend and avoid behaving like a “high and mighty foreigner.” And above all, the best advice: listen to Louis Armstrong’s “What A Wonderful World.”
At age 17, after graduating high school, I left the farm in upstate New York to travel the world. My first taste of culture shock came soon afterwards. People, even in the USA, didn’t know someone from New York could be a farmer. People around the world, at least back in the 60′s, thought everyone from New York lived in a big city! Hopefully the internet has changed all that.
For 30 years, or so, I traveled the world as an engineer. I saw wars, peace and natural disasters. I saw people laughing and people crying, the filthy rich and the filthy poor, five star hotels and people living under bridges or in cardboard boxes. Culture and language differences aside, anywhere you go in the world, you’ll see children smile. That stuck with me. Even in a refugee camp, where they are half starved to death, kids will play and smile. Somehow, growing up, people get the idea their culture is better than another’s. It is a big mistake. No culture is better than any other.
Learning to understand, appreciate and tolerate another culture, everyone else’s culture, would make the world a better place. So, I contribute to Pocket Cultures.
There’s no such thing as a typical day for me. I like to start each day with a long walk on the beach with my dogs. And I prefer being out all day with my cameras. Then, spending the hours until late at night in front of a computer monitor. Everything is weather dependent. Usually, I’m on the computers until way past midnight. The Japanese call me a cameraman but, computer-man would better describe the work I’m always tied up with. My work with the cameras is fun. Time on the computers is work!
My advice to anyone traveling to a foreign land would be to research well in advance. Learn customs, traditions, history and enough of the language to be able to say some common phrases. Know enough about the culture to be able to blend in without appearing to be the high and mighty foreigner. Listen to Louis Armstrong sing What a Wonderful World. He knew culture.
In France shop signs served as house numbers until the French Revolution. The first signs appeared in the early 13th century and were coat of arms. Carved above the main entrance door, they indicated private houses or mansions.
Sign advertising a Salon de Thé - Tearoom
Inns and hostels soon followed the example so that their provincial and foreign customers could find them easily. The use of signs increased during the 14th century to become common a century later when every house, inn, restaurant, hostel and shop had its own.
Made of painted metal sheet, they were as large as possible to draw attention and advertise a specific trade and were hanging at the end of a metal or wooden pole.
Coat-of-arm carved above the entrance door
Shop and house signs became so popular that their overwhelming number eventually became a problem. Not only did they darken the narrow and busy alleys of our medieval towns, cities and villages, but they were also noisy and dangerous as they threatened to fall at the slightest gust of wind.
A Master Potter advertises his trade
It was not until the mid-18th century that these hanging signs were banned and were replaced with painted boards placed on the facades. House and shop signs then gradually disappeared with the numbering of the houses.
The Shoe shop!
But they reappeared in the last decades and shop keepers compete of ingenuity and creativity to produce the most original design. This series shows you some contemporary signs that are largely inspired by the medieval ones and seem to revive a long gone tradition, they are fun yet elegant, draw attention and represent perfectly the trade they advertise.
Like many of their compatriots, musicians Zhenya Kolykhanov and Sergey Vaschenko emigrated from Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. They have since established themselves in Texas, USA, and through the formation of a band called the Flying Balalaika Brothers and a non-profit called Musical Connections, they work to bridge cultural gaps by exposing Texans to international art.
Along with providing readers with a daily calendar of performances, music videos, and sound bites, the group’s official website elaborates on how the Flying Balalaika Brothers got established in Austin, Texas:
The Original Flying Balalaika Brothers were formed in Los Angeles in 1995 by Zhenya Kolykhanov (a.k.a. Z Rock), the former lead guitarist of the Russian surf/rockabilly group Red Elvises. The group started as a street band and later transformed into the group Red Elvises; which had a large history of performing for clubs, motion pictures, and tv shows in California.
After Zhenya set up shop in Austin TX, he reestablished The Flying Balalaika Brothers. The band represents a blend of traditional world music and original musical pieces. The group has found a home in the musically rich culture in Austin TX.
NowPlayingAustin Blog, an affiliate of a 35-year-old non-profit devoted to promoting the arts in Central Texas, assessed the Flying Balalaika Brothers’ style in an announcement of an upcoming performance:
Russian, Roma Gypsy, Ukrainian and foot stomping original songs get hands clapping and feet dancing in a crazy blend of rock, bluegrass and traditional folk music from around the world. Now front man for the Flying Balalaika Brothers, Zhenya Rock was a founding member of the Red Elvises and penned some of their biggest hits including “Red Lips Red Eyes Red Stockings,” the full soundtrack for Six String Samarai and the full album “Bedroom Boogie.” William Michael Smith recently wrote in the Houston Press, “Austin’s Flying Balalaika Brothers are to Russian folk music what Béla Fleck is to bluegrass: Outside-the-box, no-boundaries, take-no-prisoners innovators. The FBBs combine jaw-dropping virtuosity with a masterful sense of mixing up genres ranging from rock to Russian folk to bluegrass; if that sounds weird, it’s also cool as hell.”
In May 2011, The Flying Balalaika Brothers appeared on 90.5 FM KUT, an Austin-based radio station. The Daily Grackle Blog posted a video of their live performance:
Coastal Bend College Blog discussed Mr. Kolykhanov’s and Mr. Vaschenko’s educational and professional backgrounds, including Mr. Vaschenko’s eligibility for Grammy Awards in 2003 and 2008:
Kolykhanov graduated from Tchaikovsky Music College in Vologda, Russia, in 1984. He later came to the United States to study critical thinking, reading and fine arts at the University of Delaware. In addition to the balalaika, Kolykhanov plays guitar, composes songs for television, and creates art for commercials.
Sergey Vaschenko earned a bachelor’s degree in conducting and balalaika from Lysenko State Music College in Poltava, Ukraine, in 1980 and a master’s in orchestral conducting, teaching and balalaika performance from the Mussorgsky Ural State Conservatory in Sverdlovsk, Russia, in 1985. Vaschenko’s experience includes: Dean of the Faculty of Arts for Perm State Institute of Culture in Perm, Russia; guest soloist for the Latvian Chamber Orchestra in 1989; music educator in Russia, Latvia, Spain, Dallas and Austin; and guest conductor for the Houston Balalaika Society. He won an international award at the music festival in Segovia, Spain, and was a contender for a 2003 and 2008 Grammy award in the world music category.
The post went on to elaborate on the group’s outreach efforts in area schools:
In addition to touring and performing, they began successfully presenting educational programs in three languages (English, Spanish and Russian) to students of Texas public and private schools, celebrating the arts in all its diversity by providing a unique approach to studying both the profound similarities and distinctive differences of people throughout history and around the world.
Mr. Kolykhanov and Mr. Vaschenko have formed a non-profit organisation called Musical Connections in order to fund and facilitate educational opportunities for young people. Musical Connections and The Flying Balalaika Brothers have a symbiotic relationship in that the non-profit provides an administrative foundation for the band’s artistic objectives, while the band personifies the non-profit. The non-profit’s official website articulates its mission:
Musical Connections is a Texas domestic nonprofit corporation, organized to promote a greater understanding of the music of the world through performances, cultural exchanges, musical history and heritage, and by educating the public about the multitude of music produced by cultures around the world. The founders believe that many people in this country fail to appreciate the great variety of music produced in the world today principally because they have not been educated about that music, or have not had chance to hear it performed.
As you most likely know, the French could not have a proper meal without bread! How would they eat their cheese, wipe off their plates or make the tartines they dunk in their café au lait?
Bread was discovered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors some 30,000 years ago! No need to tell you that we have had quite some time since to master our technique for producing perfect dough !
Wheat field
10,000 years ago, we domesticated wheat and barley in our green and fertile valleys and were producing a type of flat bread, a modern version of which is still baked in many Mediterranean cultures.
It was not before the Middle Ages that we adopted and institutionalised the art of producing leavened bread which had been “invented” many centuries earlier.
Why didn’t we adopt it earlier!? No one really knows…
French bread
Not only bread then became an indispensable part of our feeding habits, but we used large slices of stale bread as “plates” or trenchers. Once the meal finished we gave the trenchers to the poor… or to the dogs…and the beauty of it is that no dish-washing was involved!
Weren’t we generous and smart?!
The colour of our bread evolved with society. Until the late 20th century, wealthy people would not been seen dead buying and eating anything else than white bread, while the less well-off contented themselves with dark bread made from whole wheat flour.
The irony is that whole wheat flour is much healthier as it has superior nutritional values. It has now become the ‘thing to do” if you are health conscious as too many chemicals are added to obtain perfectly white flour!
Boulangerie - Traditional bakery in Paris
The whole world thinks that French only eat Baguette…well, it is not entirely true! We keep it for the tourists as it is what they expect to see in our boulangeries… and we buy grey or dark bread for ourselves and eat it with immense pleasure in the privacy of our homes!
If falafels, shisha pipes, rosewater drinks and Lebanese pastries don’t scream ‘Sydney’ to you then you may be spending too much time in the city’s swankier, leafier, beachier addresses. Sydney visitors, and indeed residents, can experience a taste of the Middle East on their own doorstep just a short train ride away.
Sydney, in case you haven’t discovered, can be a tribal kind of place. There is the glamourous, beach dotted east, the leafy and prosperous north shore, the bohemian inner west, the parochial south and the sprawling expanses of working class suburbia and culturally diverse suburbs to the west. Sydney residents often stick to their own tribe, to the extent that crossing the harbour bridge can evoke accusations of ‘crossing over to the dark side’ – the dark side being the opposite direction to where you dwell.
More open minded and adventurous Sydney-siders are branching out and discovering neighbourhoods beyond their backyards, whether influenced by a local food show on TV or a passionate food blog, or even by joining a food tour to a particular part of the city with interesting eats.
One suburb well worth exploring is Lakemba, found 15 kilometres south west of the city. Home to a large Muslim population, Lakemba’s residents have origins from the Middle East to Africa, to the subcontinent and South East Asia. Arabic is the suburb’s most spoken language according to Australian census data, followed by English and then Chinese.
By taking a stroll along bustling Haldon Street, Lakemba’s main drag, it soon becomes apparent this is a great place to eat, particularly for lovers of all things Middle Eastern. There are Lebanese sweet shops laden with sweet and sticky baklava, halal barbeque chicken shops, delis purveying nuts, dates, and spices, and there’s even an Egyptian gift shop featuring drums and toy mosques.
Some of Sydney’s most revered (and cheap, and generously portioned) Lebanese food can be found at the legendary Jasmin’s, with similarly delicious fare at Al Aseel. There’s even a café devoted solely to falooda’s, a rosewater based milk drink of Persian origins which is popular in the subcontinent. Among the mix is a Hyderabadi biryani restaurant, an Indonesian ‘warung’ and possibly one of the city’s most unique eateries, Island Dreams Café featuring cuisine from Christmas and Cocos Islands (think Malaysian style food, with a tropical twist).
The people watching in Lakemba can be just as fascinating as the eating and food shopping; with residents hailing from all over the planet found lounging at a streetside café or stocking up on fruit at one of the market-style fresh produce shops with amazingly cheap prices. Some are getting their hair braided at the African hairdressers, while others are trawling the fabric stores for headscarves or flowing robes.
Lakemba offers a window into the world of multi-cultural Australia, and through the universal language of food (and its close cousin, shopping) offers the opportunity for some fascinating cross-cultural insights and exchanges. The beach can wait for another day.
Meet Ana from Argentina! Ana, shown below at the historic train station of the town of Capilla del Señor in the province of Buenos Aires, is from Argentina but currently lives in Dallas, Texas with her British husband. Talk about lots of very different cultural experiences! Ana is a contributing editor here at Pocket Cultures, and also writes her own blog too, Ana Travels.
Where do you live? Where are you from? If those are different, can you tell us a little about what inspired your move?
I’m currently living in Dallas, Texas, which is very different from where I grew up, Argentina. We moved to the US because of my husband’s job in the fields of telecommunications.
If you would describe yourself as multi-cultural, tell us a bit about what culture you most identify with and why.
We definitely have a multicultural household since I’m Argentinean and my husband is British. And we live in the US, which is a whole different culture from either of ours. We managed to blend some of our customs and create new ones but sometimes there are glitches in communication. I most definitely identify with my own culture.
Why did you decide to become a Pocket Cultures contributor?
I thought it would be a great way to clear some misunderstandings about my country and share different aspects of our culture.
Can you describe a typical day for you?
When we’re not travelling, I’m a full-time housewife so I don’t think readers will be interested in how many times a week I do laundry or what we have for lunch! I’m also on a tennis team and compete locally, and I spend some time editing and writing for PocketCultures and my own blogs.
What is the best part of living in your country? The worst?
It’s difficult to be objective here. I love my family and lifelong friends, so being close to them is very important to me, it partly defines who I am. The worst part of living in Argentina is probably the economic instability.
What books or films would you recommend someone who’d like to know more about your country?
Here’s a PC post I wrote a while ago about Argentinean films: http://pocketcultures.com/topicsoftheworld/2011/07/06/argentina-through-film-2/
What’s something that visitors are often surprised by when getting to know your country/culture?
The European influence on architecture, food, way of life and even the way we look is something that surprises visitors. Also, the mix of European and Latin American sometimes takes them unawares.
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