Being-a-good-tourist paranoia

Here's my office mate eating Japanese style risotto yesterday. You might ask why I went to an Italian resto in Japan, well that is just how it is... A couple older professors who were not too keen on exploring, decided we'll get Italian.

Usually when we walk into any Japanese building, including the dormitories, we have to put our shoes in a little cubby hole and wear the house slippers. This is also true for restaurants. We didn't have to do this in this place, so I remarked "we don't have to take off our shoes here?" to which one of the professors said "no, this is a civilized place"!!! Like one of my professors said in the past, 'don't ever argue with someone who says the earth is flat'.

And today then we went to a Sri Lankan resto - actually one of my bosses organized it. Now I understand people's desire to go to a resto with a local, but I would like to eat some Japanese while I am in Japan - is that really too much to ask for? It turned out to be a little less than mediocre a Sri Lankan restuarant...

At the resto the running joke of how my office mate can not ask me how to eat Sri Lankan food came up. This comes from an incident about a month ago at work.

Having brought SL food for lunch, my US office mate had a million questions about the proper etiquette to eat it. But the thing is, there are no million ways to eat Sri Lankan food. And sometimes you just do what makes most sense, what's easiest. And if I get asked too many trivial questions, I feel like there must be a way, but I just dn't know it. So now suddenly my office mate is making me second guess my knowledge of my own culture. So I invoked an embargo on the questions he could ask about how to eat SL food.

I love the Lonely Planet guide, but no one has to be stiffened with paranoia when traveling abroad. People will cut you a lot of slack, if you, for example, use your left hand to eat. On the other hand if you climbed up a Buddha statue, then you don't have to eat with your left hand to be called an ass...

You are not offended that they come to your country and speak your language with an accent. They are like you too in this sense - they won't be offended that you are not exactly like them in every whichever way... But, if you want to learn how to do something because you want to, that's cool...

Tomorrow night an authentic fancy schmancy Japanese resto is in the books...