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Half-drunk with a bottle of Casillero del Diablo, sitting on the floor in the middle of Plaza Mayor, Madrid, having had a great lunch at Museo Del Jamon, and enjoying a spontaneus “Concierto de Aranjuez” interpreted by an anonymous street musician, it felt very close to the most perfect vacation moment I’d ever had. It was 4 years ago and I still remember the realization at the time of how that moment would not fade away. No fancy hotels, no tours booked that day, no galleries to visit in the area and no intention of standing up any time soon. As I try to deconstruct that moment, I now know that should one of the elements of such experience had been missing, it wouldn’t had transcended. So I’ll take a risk and generalize that a memorable experience has to appeal your senses in many ways. The dry yet tickling sensation on your palate, the stone floor warmed up by the sun rays, a belly full with exquisite cured hams and a well-known melody enhanced by flawless up-tempo execution, they all contributed to such memorability. Monocle has an article called Good Hood, in which Tyler Brûlé & Thomas Calvocoressi attempt to build the perfect neighborhood by aggregating the very best shops from around the world into a few blocks of this, their new favorite living quarters. But the key to the success of this cosmopolitan version of your favorite city corner is not the quality of the stores, as they position the article, but the variety: fashion, deli, bookshop, café, restaurants, banks, bycycle shops, consulting shops, studios, galleries, florists, technology, shoes, wine, laundry. They all work in tandem to cater to every single need you may have. Just the same, the traveler doesn’t need a guide to the 100 best restaurants in a city but a list of the few areas that provide a good balance of restaurants with shops, galleries and entertainment venues to enable a memorable experience. This could be finding the perfect patio after enjoying a good meal, buying an almost out-of-print book at a specialized stored, sipping an espresso right in front of a lively street full of beautiful people hunting for fashion bargains. It doesn’t take much. It takes variety. Barely a couple of weeks into my new job and I’m already finding myself immersed into fascinating research on why we travel. There are statistics by regions, demographics and other dimensions which are probably not too different from what is available out there. But so many numbers got us thinking about the soft side of the problem and the discussion became a revelation. If you look around in your local newspaper or the web, most resources will try to sell you a destination as the ultimate objective of your trip. This makes sense since you are boarding a plane to go to a different place. In some cases they will try to sell you exclusive experiences based on a destination that is mostly unreachable by other people. The majority of travelers will settle for this pitch as they have been programmed to assume that their vacations are all about visiting all those places that people talk about. People will only pay for packaged experiences that have been tried many times in the exact same way. There is another category of travelers that are investing more than their money and time into these experiences. They are allowing for that particular experience to affect them in more ways than most people would allow. Open to the possibility that being part of another culture, even if only for a short period of time, may have a catalytic power, these travelers are on a more meaningful journey. I often tell of the healing power of traveling to places like France and Italy where the culture of slow is an integral part of their life style. Taking your time to have a proper lunch with the right bottle of wine accompanying a selection of tapas, carpaccio or another appetizer while carefully understanding the choices for the main course. Not that you can’t get that in other places, but it seems that they do it as part of their normal routine and it feels like the only way to have lunch. After a few weeks of this process and you start to realize that you’ve been missing out on the important things in life. You come back a different person, a better person, a more complete global citizen that has decoded important knowledge about life. While this is a very mundane example, it is one that many people will recognize. The process of discovering yourself with each trip is a very personal one. Chances are that if you try to repeat the experience of some other person the effect on you will not be the same. At the same time there is the possibility that visiting different cultures and experiencing different places will awaken specific areas of your inner-self that you were not aware of. The beauty of this approach is that every travel experience, if calculated correctly has the potential to enhance your persona and lead to the shaping of yourself as a global citizen, well in tune with all your potential as discovered through your journey around the world. The tourist that never leaves the beaten path is likely only exposed to an esterile experience that has been washed out of all its original power. The best reason to travel is not to discover new places; it is to discover what you would become after being affected by your destination. Pick your destinations wisely. Let’s start with a powerful assumption: a panel of experts has used the vast resources of the web to determine who is the utmost global citizen. To keep thinks colorful, we shall call him Phileas Fogg. A British citizen with known addresses in London, San Francisco, Manhattan, Dublin, Tokyo & Istanbul; manages affairs in Buenos Aires, Mexico, Shanghai, Delhi, New South Wales & Oslo; speaks fluent English, French, Spanish & Mandarin; feels just as comfortable drinking his morning coffee at a Paris bistro as bargaining for the best fruit in a street market in Oaxaca. A true global citizen with knowledge of world affairs. What would be the value of such a character? Are we to assume that the frequent business traveler gains knowledge of how the world operates beyond what can be learned through reference materials? Or that having the opportunity to interact for long periods with the people of a particular city provide a cultural learning beyond that which is acquired by casual tourists? Further to that, is it possible to quantify the value of this cultural baggage? Maybe to the savvy businessman there are plenty of ways to use this knowledge to create value by bringing new products and services unknown to the locals. Or maybe this knowledge is the foundation for creating new theories about our society, writing essays that create bridges across diverse cultures. In airports & tourists, I established the strong correlation that exists between the degree to which a country is considered more or less globalized and the expenditure per capita on tourism, suggesting that those people that invest in knowing the world eventually find ways to create value out of that knowledge. It is this same principle that I believe justifies the quest for finding and promoting the global citizens that influence our world. Many people will say that being a global citizen has been fashionable for two centuries. True. But it is the particular juncture at which we find ourselves today that demands from these people value beyond that which they can amass for themselves. It would seem that the fashionable trend today is for these globetrotters to find ways of giving back to the world. There lies the promise of this project: enriching our global culture with the experiences of those who have discovered it. As cosmopolitan as Mr. Fogg may seem, I’m sure my depiction of this character is not even close to some of the real people traversing the globe, fueling the global culture engine. My question is, are we not missing as a society on the incredible value that these people are capable of offering for the simple fact that we don’t try to mine their knowledge? Update: via The Thinking Stick comes a snippet on Maia, the Global Citizenship Award recipient for 2006: Maia comes from Japan but has lived in many cities around the world, including Lagos, New York, and Vienna. She is currently a senior and IB Diploma Candidate at the International School Bangkok [but has also attended the United Nations International School, the American School in Japan, and Vienna International School]. Maia is fluent in English, Japanese, German, and French. She serves as Student Council President and has been active in local tsunami relief. Maia is heading to Harvard University in September, where she will study Political Science and Economics. She was ISB‚Äôs recipient of the EARCOS Global Citizenship Award in 2006. Airports reveal a lot about the culture of a country and their people. If you have traveled overseas, specially to the developing world, you’ll agree that leaving the airport’s customs area to join the crowds at the arrivals lounge can be a shocking experience: There are just too many people waiting for their loved ones. Airports in North America have a very different rhythm, business oriented and very transactional. I believe the reason behind this dramatic difference is the intent of those who travel in & out of these airports. In most rich countries, travelers are mainly of two kinds: business people & tourists. In both cases they travel abroad with a very well planned itinerary and the intention to come back. Theirs is a round-trip, typically very short, that promises lots of rewards. The arrival at the lounge is nothing else but the last leg in the trip and as such it has been planned. There is no need for ceremony. The highlight of the trip IS the trip. In the developing world, aside from the types described above there are those who fear the airport as the gateway to an unknown world that, while full of opportunities, requires the sacrifice of leaving the family behind in order to chase after a better future. Theirs is a one-way-trip, that may or may not render the rewards expected. All those people at the arrival lounge are there to celebrate the return of a lost one, who may even consider that arrival as the highlight of the whole trip. Looking at data from the World Tourism Organization, it is obvious there is a strong correlation between the tourism expenditure per capita and the degree to which countries play in the global context. While the Top Spenders are Germany, U.S.A., U.K., Japan & France (see graph):
If we sort the list by Expenditure per capita (US$), the story is quite different:
… and somehow familiar: 8 out of 10 are also in the list of most globalized. While tourism in itself is an important economic contributor, the strong correlation tells me that an attitude of confidence when exploring the world has given these countries and their people an advantage when ideating new enterprises that mine the wealth of the globe. As a contrast, the two countries with the smallest expenditure per capita, China & India, are likely the ones that will be culturally more influential over the coming years. My explanation is simple: their people are leaving with the intention of not looking back, therefore they must pack their culture. It is the only thing they will preserve. P.S. Support Global Culture: Vote at the bloggies. |
 Global Culture Blog by Juan Gonzalez is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. |
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