No Wonder I Keep Getting Everything About Everyone Totally Wrong

In a recent post on his Substack, Steve Sailer said, “The greatest pleasure in traveling is having your stereotypes confirmed...” And you know what? I suspect he’s right!

For many, perhaps most people. Not for me. Really, until I read that post, it had never occurred to me that there is something especially delightful about foreigners performing to specs. Shows how much I know about people who aren't even foreign.

My first overseas trip was to India. For such a faraway place, a set of standardized ideas inevitably exists, and I would have had some of those in my head. Mysteries-of-the-East stuff. Folks all philosophical, or doing yoga; airy-fairy obfuscation. Well, at least in 1980 the country was something else entirely. Mercilessly commercial, except when Indians were asking me how to get their immigration to America cleared. Their hustle was annoying, but then their country was horrible. It made sense either to try to get rich or to try to get out. Even as I disliked the place, I was glad that it definitely had a logic that was the reverse of arcane, as well as one I myself had never thought of.

My first trip to South America was to Ecuador in 1982, and I really wondered what I would find. The continent had an entirely deserved reputation for political instability, and if that isn’t a stereotype then it makes for some ready-to-go cautionary imagery. As with all my trips except maybe the months-long ones, however, either I showed up at just the right relatively peaceful time or the place just wasn’t as bad as might be expected. Ecuador wasn’t fancy but it was functional, not at all chaotic or violent. It was in Ecuador that I conceived my lifelong admiration of Latin American newspapers, or it would be lifelong if newspapers everywhere hadn't expired. Anyway, the country seemed like an achievement of sorts. Such preconceptions as I arrived with and left with were mild and went something like Those-Andes-sure-are-big and Where-a-river-meets-an-ocean-near-the-Equator-it’s-gonna-be-humid.

Elsewhere in Latin America, I might have entertained more sinister ideas – really, except for Costa Rica, was anyplace south of the Rio Grande not screwed-up? – but police and military checkpoints in Venezuela and Guatemala just seemed like gross exceptions that proved benign rules. I wasn't surprised by these roadway barriers, but I wasn’t gratified by them either. I wasn’t congratulating myself, sourly or otherwise, for finding what were in any case minor inconveniences.

But enough of whatever clutters my head. I would later discover, in Turkey, that other tourists’ heads are hardly messy. They certainly come with firm ideas of how their visit will turn out, and I daresay that what they expect, they get. Which is lots of history and antiquities, and they are smart to pursue those things. I have never sensed that Americans nurse many stereotypes of Turks specifically. Even with the star and crescent on the flag, and minarets evident everywhere, I’m not sure Americans really connect this scenery with the more ominous aspects of Islam. To the extent they do, they have found, as I have found, that in Turkey the link is hardly fatal.

And now, because I feel like belaboring it, a country about which Americans do nurse stereotypes, and understandably so: Canada. That country, and its citizens, really are agreeable. Canadians have never let me down. But what I’d like to mention here is something that occurred to me, not in Canada, but in Mexico. Waiting for ground transportation at Manzanillo’s airport, I stood near a young family, one that had just arrived not on my plane from Mexico City but from Calgary. Things weren’t getting anywhere. The husband said he was heading back inside the terminal to look for a beer, and the woman told him to bring her one too. As it happened, cabs started materializing, the line started moving and the man decided to stay in line rather go wandering. I was in line ahead of this family and just before my own taxi pulled away, I said, “I’ll think of you all after I check into my hotel and I have a beer.” This was received well. But what really interested me was, I could not recall any other woman ever expressing, not just in that weary end-of-day way but in any way, that precise I-sure-could-use-a-drink sentiment. So now I’m wondering if this is a Canadian stereotype in the making, or one which has long existed and I just never knew: young mothers who don’t need a cold brew right now but would be very pleased if you happened to hand them one.
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If you clicked the link I provided at the top of this post, and read diligently, you ought to have seen the full context for Big Steve’s observation. But if you didn’t click it, or did but were immediately and totally forgivably put off by the World Cup theme, I will reproduce here just enough to give you an idea why it was brought up at all:

If you ever visit Ireland, try to schedule it for the night Ireland defeats the reigning World Cup champs in the World Cup. On the other hand, don’t schedule your flight back to America for the next day. I dragged myself to the Shannon airport in time for my noon flight. But the Aer Lingus 747 to Boston was four times announced as being delayed, and on the fifth announcement was cancelled until the next day. All 400+ of us were put up in a hotel. The next morning, the local newspaper explained that the Aer Lingus crew had been still too drunk to fly. The greatest pleasure in traveling is having your stereotypes confirmed, and I don’t recall any tourism event more fulfilling than that.