Repeat after me: “I am not special”. Can we instill this idea in our minds first before even venturing into a totally different world? After traveling for a few years, with most of my time paying attention to the world, and having a first-hand experience of being an outsider, rather than sipping a margarita by the beach or taking selfies in a fancy resort, I already know what to expect. People are people everywhere. They can be our best friends or our worst enemies. And if grouped with other ignorants, trust me the latter would always be the case. How truly unique and nonconforming people are!
What these well-pampered, confused and bored young travelers are saying has become totally unoriginal to me, that I could already generalize however stupid for most, which belong to which group. The problem is that individuals are rare, yes, they are so rare that it would be difficult to even find them out of these billions of people in the world. People just almost talk the same, with their beliefs just being repeated over bottles of beers, and lives being lived that are just almost the same everywhere - go to work, buy food, eat, sleep, make babies, repeat. It is quite hard to find a really unique or even a creative individual these days, as new things are mostly just formed from already known elements. We could even predict how feminists, travelers, artists, religious people talk these days. It turned out that we are not as unique and special as we all think we are. Let us just feel lucky if ever we really meet a truly unique and creative individual.
When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable. - Clifton Fadiman
These people travel to a country labeled as the “land of the smiles”, then becoming severely hurt when some people don’t smile to them? Believe me, I have met this kind of travelers and thanks to generalization, I can choose not to waste any more time and energy with them. Reading a couchsurfer’s profile description: Open-minded. BS! Especially if the first thing that person is going to do as he/she lands on a different land for the first-time is to complain. So then it is normal, but remove the label that puts everyone under this illusion of what we think we are. It turned out that people have preferences, likes or dislikes. We cannot say to ourselves that we like all groups of people because we have the freedom to live in peace and only associate ourselves with those who can contribute value to our lives, and not those who drain our energies.
And in the same way, we must let go of these illusions of people, like how we would like them to be. Because this is only prohibiting ourselves to see through people, and what if they don’t behave as we wanted them anymore? We cry like babies and run back to our mommies who showered us with kisses and love? People are not here to live up to our expectations nor we are here to live up to theirs. We are so conditional that we can only accept the good version of people.
I could even imagine how disappointing it must be for a country to be known as having the ‘friendly people’, that the people must have felt the pressure of living up to what the media, guidebooks, and tourism industry have set to them.
The reality is, if your standard of customer service didn’t match that in the third-world countries, it’s probably due to some locals are just take-this, pay me, go home, feed my children. Repeat. Why do you expect all these people to smile? They have bigger problems in the world than having to please just another whiny tourist. Try to reverse the situation, if these people visit, or worse, live in your countries, chances are, they might even experience severe unfriendliness or hostility from your people. That is actually what most people who choose to live in other countries feel everyday - unwelcomed. But hey the streets are paved with gold, so who are they to complain? Just swallow the pride because it won’t make their stomachs full. But here we are, crying like babies for not getting smiles from the locals, too bad, so sad.
Have you even experienced how it is to feel hungry in your life due to not even having the basic necessity such as food? I had experienced how to feel hungry and it was hard to sleep, and I had experienced how to feel full and it made me feel happy. And it just makes me feel disgusted listening to people who run out of legitimate worries in life. Wake up and be thankful for what you have. We are just tiny specks in the universe, and the reality is that we will all soon become equals, lower than dirt, ashes of the earth. Zero. Nothing.
Let go of these illusions of people and the world.