Friday, December 16, 2022

First World Problems




Okay, developed world. Are you ready for a spray?

Auckland sucks. And it sucks in the same way that Sydney sucks. In the same way Vancouver sucks. Toronto. Seattle. London.

You all suck.

Okay, it's just 48 hours, between flights and layovers, since I've left Colombia that I arrive in Auckland, but all is fair game for what The Solonaut does—compare cultures.

I must still have the pulse of Spanish in me after a month in Latin America, as I seek out a tapas restaurant bedecked in bullfighting posters, Picasso's Don Quixote and pictures of Salvador Dalí's moustache. I keep instinctively thanking the kiwi staff gracias. They must think I'm a wanker. The ambient music alternates between flamenco and Latin rhythms, and two pints in I'm really enjoying myself. Then reality intrudes, jolting me back to New Zealand.

Two suits sit at the table next to mine for a social post-work pint. And what do they talk about? Music? Women? Family? The party last week? Conjecture on the concurrent World Cup? 

Nope. They talk shop. Seed funding for the project. Strategic investment. Cost projections and data corridors and team management and revenue. In fact, within five minutes of sitting down, one of them fields a ten-minute phone call from his team to whom he needs to give direction, leaving his disregarded table mate to resort to phone scrolling from boredom. This automatous race of beings are the dullest, most boring people in the world. They bore each other and themselves and everyone around them.

It puts me in mind of a Valentine's Day I once spent at a restaurant with my girlfriend. Specimen A dating a girl at the next table fields a phone call for which he leaves the table, going outside to laugh, guffaw and gesticulate, as observed through the big restaurant windows, for fifteen awkward, uncomfortable and humiliating minutes for his relegated date as he presumably effused over news of his mate's new PlayStation. It was hideous. I didn't know who to be embarrassed for.

But the team management phone call is only a brief respite: Robot 2 returns to the present with Robot 1 and resumes discussion of seed funding, strategic investment, cost projections and data corridors.

If this happened at all anywhere in earshot in Colombia I was spared by my ignorance of the language. But believe me—it didn't happen. From the life-embracing, war-emergent Medellinenses to the Costa Ricans' identification with la pura vida to the huge festivities in Mexico celebrating the dead who punctuate life, Latin America is too vibrant with the understanding of what it is to live to fall ill to that infection of fiscal thinking at a tableful of food and beer.

But this isn't the worst of the modern social dining experience. 

Now, I'm old and grumpy. Generation X, who saw in the Internet, are in their mid-lives now, and the cohort we share with Millennials saw in "Web 2.0" social media. But there's a Millennial-Zoomer phenomenon, egregiously shared by proud X parents and Boomers, that does my head in: TikTok on speakerphone. At least when Facebook appeared it shut the fuck up. People might show each other pics on their phones and blurbs in their feeds, but it was relatively silent, even if it did introduce the unsocial phone gaze. But now... honestly... is there any such thing anymore as a restaurant meal in peace?

Every bloody time I go to a restaurant, which has been frequent as I'm travelling—everywhere—there'll be at least one table where someone has the need to share their boyfriend's/best mate's/daughter's adventures/pranks/performance on TikTok. Headphones and Bluetooth are too protracted for sharing so it's always on disruptive speakerphone—tinny, jangling, attention-demanding, table-invading, distracting racket. In the hands of complete morons it's blasted at top volume. It is the perfect storm of social technology, corporatised default settings, and 21st-century autocentricity.

I don't know. People lose touch with how to socialise, how to behave, how to just be. We're all just another algorithm in the silicon economy. It sucks.

Just go away and let me eat in peace.

Thursday, December 01, 2022

It's the hat.


I've been at this Spanish thing now for a month. I speak a little, somehow. I've never taken a proper course in it or even studied it in high school, but there is a kind of facility between the Romance languages, and French I have studied. My good mate Kayo and I fumbled our way through Cuba and Mexico some years ago, leaning on each other's piecemeal comprehension, but this time I'm on my own. I even brought a grammar book with me to study but, as always when I travel, I pack books I don't read.

When I was in Costa Rica a few weeks ago I hired a driver to get me from San Jose to Arenal to climb the volcano. I manage to say roughly what I mean in my clumsy Spanish but my comprehension is poor, so he would answer me in his competent English. After an hour of this I asked him how are my Spanish skills. "Bueno!" he replied, but I'm not entirely sure he wasn't simply being polite. I did tip him.

Today in Medellín, Colombia, I was stopped in the street and asked right off the bat by an elderly gentleman carrying a cane where I was from. You know, I really try not to look like a tourist but it's hard to know what gives me away. Okay, I'm a gringo, but I'm not the only one in Medellín. Some live here, and some Colombians look like gringos. Carrying a knapsack usually adds to the tourist stereotype, but plenty of Colombians carry one themselves, and anyway, I've intentionally left mine back at the flat where I'm staying. 

Is it the fashion difference? Between my clothes and what you generally see on the street? It's not that I'm dressed up—again, I try to blend in—but the colloquial style of a people is often intangible, ineffable, and tricky to replicate. 

After first being stopped by a mohawked bracelet hawker in Poblado, Medellín's upmarket touristic quarter, with "Hey, Kangaroo Jack!" (yes, I bought a bracelet from him—his name was Daniel, he was friendly and amusing, and it cost $3), then later at a residential Laureles intersection receiving a thumbs up and verbal appreciation from a squeegee-wielding windscreen cleaner, I realised with some strike to the head by the bleeding obvious that it's the hat. My signature Jacaru Swagman. It's kind of a stupid conceit when I'm always trying to blend in, but this hat is as well-travelled as I am, and guys get attached to their hats, don't they? Baseball caps, for example. It becomes an expression of themselves. 

If hats worn here aren't baseball caps they're Panama hats, and indeed the elderly gentleman with the cane who stopped me in the street was wearing one. I answered him where I'm from (Australia and Canada) and tell him in Spanish that my command of the language is weak. And yet we then commence chitchat in Spanish, and he helps out with his passable but heavily accented English. Granted, many of my small talk answers are practised but, nonetheless, I always amaze myself that I can manage rudimentary conversations. 

He's a friendly, old-school Colombian gentleman of 75 whose brother-in-law emigrated here from England as an engineer of some kind. He asks what I think of the women in Colombia, the beauty of whom I think Colombian men take pride in, given that this isn't the first time I've been asked. He asks if I'm married and says he is sorry to hear I'm divorced. Colombians are strong Catholics. It's too complicated to explain that this was 30 years ago and that marriage/divorce is not much relevant in my culture. "Maybe you will marry a Colombian girl," he says. "But be careful—they can be dangerous!"

After our amusing little chat ends and we wish each other well and part ways, I stop for some groceries and walk back to my flat. En route a woman stops me and begins asking in Spanish for directions. I'm all ready to open with No soy de aquí—I'm not from here—but while she's speaking she shows me the handwritten address of the supermarket on the piece of paper in her hand, apparently spying by my bags that I've just come from there, and I realise I can answer her. Pausing for a moment, I then point and steer with my hand the direction of the curving road I've just walked up and say, "al fondo!"—at the bottom, the end of the road. She smiles as effusively as I do, she pleased that she has her answer and I that I'm capable of delivering it.

Though it will soon be something of a relief to be able to express myself in a land of spoken English, I walk back to my room sure now of one thing: to blend in, ditch the hat, carry groceries and learn the bloody language.