tales of wander

Remember that long travel day of missed train connections? Well, it kind of set a theme for the end of my trip. I didn’t mention it, but I had another missed train connection on my way to Pompeii. Then, on the first leg of my journey home, my plane from Naples to Paris was late, forcing me to miss my connection to the US. What was supposed to be a quick 2-hr flight turned into a day-long ordeal and an unplanned night in Paris. I was rebooked for a flight the next day, which was…friends, let’s say it all together!…late and for some reason, the airline gave me an itinerary with a short connection on my Customs stop. Being late on a Customs stop gave me all of 30 minutes to get through US Customs, then security, then a mile to my gate. To make matters worse, I actually received a notification that my connecting flight to Portland was running 5 minutes early. I mean, really?! If any connection was scheduled to leave early, of course it would be that one. 

Though the likelihood of me making it to my gate in time was slim-to-none, I ran off the plane and was third in line at Customs, so that motivated me to give it a real go. But then, I was detained (let’s be real here—don’t you agree this stuff always seems to happen to me?!). The border agent had me scan my passport and look in the camera three times and his system decided I wasn’t the same person each time. I was asked to go into an empty room with a Customs officer for extra questioning.

I’m going to be honest: when I walked into that room, I just kind of lost it. Realizing there was no way I could make my connection now, all of the stress of the last two days came spewing out of my mouth in a torrent of frustration. I’m not proud that I was incapable of being my normal, polite self in that moment. I was someone else—frustrated, tired, and angry that I was being detained at a time when it was crucial for everything to go right. Nevertheless, the Customs officer was unperturbed by my searing display of honest emotion. After questioning, he was satisfied that I was who I said I was and let me go. Then, of course I was flagged for extra security checks at the security stop. I looked down at my app. It continued to say that my flight took off at 3:01 and it was now 3:18. After clearing security, I didn’t even bother to run to my gate. Utterly defeated, I slowly went to the airline’s customer service desk on the other side of the terminal. When I got there and spilled my tale of yet another missed connection, she started typing away and said:

“Your flight hasn’t left yet.” 

By some miracle, there was a last-minute maintenance failure on my plane—it was delayed and my app hadn’t updated yet. In the end, I was able to make my connection after all…and my two-day travel ordeal finally came to an end. It was a rough and turbulent flight. As I was literally gripping my vomit bag, I thought to myself  “Oh great, I made the connection only for the plane to go down”…but the plane stayed aloft and I eventually made it home safely. Bedraggled and queasy…but safe.

All of this extra travel gave me a lot of downtime to reflect on something that has been rolling around in my mind for the last week. If you’ve been following me a while, you know that I often read something new on every trip. On this trip, I read a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a #@%!, by Mark Manson. Though the book isn’t about travel, there’s a part where the author reflects on his experience living in Russia. He wrote:

“Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values…forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.“

The author applies this to communication. At first, he found communication in Russia difficult because in that culture, people are more brutally honest and say things that we in the US keep silent. Reflecting on this, the author considered that our own culture’s “bullshitty-fake nice communication” style was actually working against us, making us more “insecure” and “worse at intimacy.” The author shared these thoughts with his Russian-language instructor, who took this theory even further: 

“Having lived under communism for so many generations, with little to no economic opportunity and caged by a culture of fear, Russian society found the most valuable currency to be trust. And to build trust you have to be honest. That means when things suck, you say so openly and without apology. People’s displays of unpleasant honesty were rewarded for the simple fact that they were necessary for survival—you had to know whom you could rely on and whom you couldn’t, and you needed to know quickly.

But, in the “free” West, my Russian teacher continued, there existed an abundance of economic opportunity—so much economic opportunity that it became far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if it was false, than to actually be that way. Trust lost its value. Appearances and salesmanship became more advantageous forms of expression. This is why it became the norm in Western cultures to smile and say polite things even when you don’t feel like it…the economic system promotes deception.”

When I read this, it felt heavy handed to the “polite Westerner” part of me who just doesn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, but it resonated deeply with the other part of me—the part that is getting a little less polite (and more honest) as I get older. It especially resonated when, during my trip, I learned of one of the latest (more personal) lies told by the leader of my country: that the city I live in is “a war zone” that requires military intervention. I’ve lived in my city for over 20 years and while it’s certainly seen better days, it’s far from being a war zone. It’s just another in a string of blatant lies, but in a culture where truth and honesty is worth less than appearances and salesmanship, then anything goes…and no one knows what to believe anymore.

When I finally made it to my last, connecting flight and had a moment to decompress and reflect—reflect on my trip, on the cultural value of truth, and even on the temporary loss of my polite self in favor of a brutally honest display of emotion, it finally occurred to me—what that nebulous “something” is about Naples and places like it. It’s just honest. Naples doesn’t have airs or try to sell you on a version of itself that only exists in propaganda. It has an in-your-face, no-holds-barred energy that you have to appreciate for its honesty, even if you don’t like the noise, grit, and bad graffiti. Naples has mastered the art of not giving a #@%!. For me, when confronted with the truth of a place over a pretty lie, I will take truth. Because then, when you discover the beauty underneath that layer of dirt, it feels even more rewarding. 

So here I am, sitting in my office as I write the final post of what has actually been a very nice trip. Over the last few days, I’ve discovered that I haven’t quite learned the art of not giving a #@%!, but I’m slowly getting there. I’ve appreciated how much I value truth and honesty in a culture. And, I am grateful: grateful that I’ve returned safely to my “war zone” of a city, grateful that I have the luxury to expose myself to new cultures when so many don’t, and grateful that there are still places in this world that feel refreshingly honest.