This week, on a Zoom call with some colleagues, I told the group that I have been traveling around Europe and the Caucasus since May. One of my colleagues responded with a flattering shout. Wow! she said. You’re not just a tourist, you’re a traveler! Which was gratifying, of course, but also made a complicated distinction.
People who think of themselves as travelers are the kind who start measuring distances in kilometers before the plane even lands at Schiphol. And when it’s hot, they fan themselves and sigh, wearily, “My God, it must be almost 35 degrees.” When you get right down to it, the difference between a tourist and a traveler is probably just that the latter carries a pretentious, expensive notebook.
But I’m quibbling. Travel — whatever you want to call it — is one of life’s great joys. What can be more pleasurable, or transformative, than visiting other places and cultures, seeing the world through very different eyes, taking part in richly unfamiliar experiences, meeting people who begin as strangers and develop into friends, and, especially, noticing all of the things weird foreign people do and eat and say that are incorrect and inefficient and that we do much better back in the United States?
This summer, for instance, I attended church services everywhere from London to Paris, Istanbul to Tbilisi, Athens to Rome to Tunis to Malta — a broad sampling of Christian expression across two continents — and at every single one, there came a moment when I thought to myself, “Huh. This is very nice, but they’re doing it wrong.”
This is a very Episcopalian thing, I should say. Not scorn. (Nothing so vulgar.) Just a gentle noticing — a mild, charitable awareness that the Georgian Orthodox Church, say, does a prayer kind of thing a certain way, a way they’ve been doing it for roughly 1,300 years longer than the American Episcopal Church has existed, followed by a private wondering whether they’d like to know the actually correct way to do it. I never said anything, of course. It’s not my place to pull a foreign clergyman aside and say, Hey, Padre, I have a fix for that thing you’re doing that doesn’t work.
I don’t want to give you the wrong impression. The summer wasn’t all me, in churches, making lists of theological and liturgical errors in my $250 notebook. I wasn’t spending all of my time noticing that foreigners do church wrong. I noticed that they also do ice cream wrong, too.
Here’s what I mean: When you buy ice cream in Europe — which, this summer, with temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius, you will — they do this weird and annoying thing, especially in Italy. You go first to the lady at the cash register, where you order your ice cream size and delivery device. “How many balls?” she might ask. “In a small carton or a cono?” Then you get a little receipt, which you present to a second person behind the array of ice creams, who handles the flavor-choice phase of the operation. None of this makes any sense, and on a hot afternoon, you’ll find crowds of (mostly) American tourists cheerfully baffled by this quintessentially European extra layer of bureaucratic intervention into the summer ice cream cone.
WHEN A SLOW TRIP CAN HAVE GREAT REWARDS
Until you realize — or, more likely, until a local friend explains it to you, condescendingly — that it’s a lot more hygienic this way. One person handles all the grubby, sneeze-and-God-knows-what-else-encrusted bills. Another person, with pristine hands, does the food manipulation, and eventually hands you your cono. The system I had privately diagnosed as inefficient turned out to be smarter than the one back home, where a pierced-everywhere teenager takes your cash and then builds your sundae with the same 10 fingers he or she used to count all of the ways his or her parents are totally toxic.
So I had to admit: I got the ice cream “mistake” backward. Which made me wonder, licking my hygienically served stracciatella balls in the shade, what else I’d gotten wrong. Maybe the Georgians, who have had 1,300 extra years to work out the kinks, were doing it right? Maybe I could say the same about the church services I attended in Malta, Athens, and North Africa? But as I finished my ice cream, I realized that these were impossible questions to answer. Those church services were conducted in languages that I do not speak or understand, and that, I think, is what they’re really doing wrong.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.