It's a cold rainy day here in the Bay Area. I'm one of those poor unfortunate souls who has to work today. I also had to go to class this morning. My body is hating me right now, and it wants to sleep.
I've been thinking about non-centric thought processes as of late, about how cultural bias affects our viewpoints and the choices we make, and the outcomes we recieve.
A friend of mine last week expressed amazement that ancient astromers in Mayan times were able to create an accurate calendar, using their knowledge of the stars and asked why the Europeans at the time were not as advanced in those sciences at the time. The answer I gave him was that they had been culturally indoctrinated to believe that the earth was the center of the universe, and everything in the universe revolved around them. While it's not the only factor -- I'm sure being burned at the stake as a heretic for claiming otherwise probably had something to do with it too -- I think that time in history was really a dark period, in which their closedmindedness really worked against them. However, it is now several hundred years later, and singular viewpoints still exist .
I think that many Americans are ignorant of the world outside their cultural bubble. I remember going to Japan with three of my friends two years ago. I learned Japanese in high school, and I, amazingly enough, still managed to retain enough to be able to read signs and menus and so forth. Of my three friends, only one of them (Lin) knew Japanese, which made the two of us translators. For me, part of the joy of travelling is experience the culture and the food. I like visiting traditional stuff, as well as going to places that are different that what I'm used to. Lin and I had no problems adjusting to life in Tokyo, but one of our two travelling companions, for most of the trip, refused to eat Japanese food. In general, the trip wasn't bad, and it opened my eyes in more ways than one. Personally, I think Mr. I-won't-eat-Japanese-food really missed out on the best food that Japan had to offer. I never made it to the Tokyo Fish Market -- where you can eat the sushi early from the morning haul right on the docks. There's always next time.
Cat told me a similar story today about Bill Gates -- when he went to Taiwan, Bill Gates refused to eat anything but McDonald's. Think about it -- one of the richest men in the world, in a country where he can have the best food prepared by the best chefs in the country... and the man only ate McDonald's the entire trip there.
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