Category — Cultural Encounters

It seems that one can’t help but stumble upon a melding of culture in New York City. A mesh of food, music, and language—the vibrant colors of society are ubiquitous in this new found world. Even through my thickly paned window, the collision of past, present, and future can be observed: graffiti in more than one language emblazoned on the building across the street.

And the day only continues to amaze me with its “cultural encounters”–down the stairs and onto a street where I have to stop for a minute to just attempt to take it in. Chinese writings on the side of a building followed by a sign proclaiming “In God we trust” only ensure my wonder. Just the sounds of this place… A Spanish-speaker helping a Chinese-speaker find the airport would’ve once been but a missed event on the subway—but now, I can’t help but to stand agape at how well the communication actually works. And my insight into this success led me to even greater realization: these cultural encounters that I see every day in this city, regardless of ethnicity, origin, and societal bounds, are successful—and I can’t wait to see what else this place has to offer.

Sitting in Bryant Park, I gingerly turned the page of my book and took another sip of tea. Completely absorbed in my novel, I was not even taking breaks to people watch, as I tend to do. I was suddenly jostled out of my concentration by the movement of all the chairs at the table next to me. I glanced to the side and found myself intrigued by the collection of individuals who had taken seats beside me. All six members of the party carefully began removing Tupperware from their bags, silently placing them on the table. They sat in awkward silence for a few moments, until one girl spoke up.

“This is called inarizushi”, she said slowly, in a thick Japanese accent. “It is very popular dish in Japan”.

“Oh! I have tried this before!” said another, before she happily introduced her own dish, Pierogi, a type of Polish dumpling.

My book lay on the table, abandoned, as I continued to listen to the names of the foods, all said in extremely dense accents hailing from the same country as the dish brought. Although conversation was no doubt greatly stunted, everyone managed to communicate his or her thoughts, and each person listened patiently as the others tried hard to find the English words to express themselves accurately. And when they, trying so hard to find those words, still came up empty-handed, they simply smiled and said the food was delicious. After all, “mmmm!” is the same in every language.

This weekend, I traveled to New Brunswick to drop my sister and her luggage off at Rutgers University. Upon arriving, I couldn’t help but notice bright red, bolded letter “R’s” on most students’ attires we passed by.

As we lugged my sister’s supplies out of the car, we spotted a group of students standing outside of the door, all with anxious expressions on their faces. No student looked alike, as if they were from all different parts of the tri-state area. In my opinion, going to a college out of state allows you to meet new faces and familiarize yourself with new people and their interests; my sister is now able to become exposed to people outside of the typical Asian group she was with in her high school.

We entered the building, and when we passed her floormates, I noticed that many students were paired off with roommates who didn’t share the same ethnicity. Every door was decorated with the roommates’ names, along with varying pictures to depict the artists’ interests.  My sister’s name was decorated with a carousel and a pretzel, along with movie tickets lining the borders of the paper. I can only guess that the person designing the poster is someone who enjoys food and theater arts.

It was of no surprise to me when my parents announced during the summer of 2007 that the family was taking a trip out of the country. The surprise came when they told me that the destination was Armenia. I, by nationality, am Armenian. I was 14 when we had this conversation and had never visited my home country before in my life. I was anxious, excited, and scared all at the same time – comparable to how most kids feel about starting a new life in a new school.

Armenia is the type of country into which you can arrive unannounced with no money in your pocket and receive food and housing within the hour. Everyone there treats each other like family. My family, which did announce that it was arriving, was greeted by what seemed like the entire airport garage full of cars. To avoid offending anyone, my brother, mother, father, and I all got into different cars with our distant relatives.

The entire trip was one gigantic cultural encounter that opened my eyes to a myriad of new experiences; but one specific encounter that I will never forget in my life was one related to fuel.

Armenia is a developing country that does not have a very wealthy population. The economy is still primarily based on agriculture and the technology is sub-par. This was clearly evident the minute you stepped outside of the airport and this encounter solidified every assumption I had made about the country’s industry.

We all know that a car needs some sort of fuel to run and some of us even know the different kinds of fuel: gasoline, diesel, and electricity. One day, when a relative was driving around my brother, father, and me, he stated that he needed gas. This statement would have flown right past us if he used the Russian word “benzene” for gas. He, however, used the Russian word “gas.” We asked him what he meant and he explained that most cars in Armenia ran on gas – natural gas. To give you an understanding of what image this evoked in our minds, imagine hooking up your car to your gas stove, cranking up the dial to “high” and waiting a few minutes for the gas to flow into a special container in your car. Our visions became reality when we arrived at the special “gas” station 5 miles from the center of the city.

This entire time my mind has been obsessing over the idea of how Armenians, as well as other nationalities that occupy developing nations, have to constantly come up with, what to us seem to be ingenious, ways to overcome obstacles in life that we never even face. Compressing natural gas in a canister and rerouting the entire fuel system to run on it to save a few dollars every month seemed absurd to us; but for them, there was no way to afford a car without doing it.

If you want your post to show up in this category, be sure to “check” the Cultural Encounters” category box before you publish your post.