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Around The -Ists This Week
As noted previously, we're fans of the Uptight Seattleite persona because it seems to be gloriously, teeth-grindingly true. The Weekly's incarnation makes us laugh every so often, but the best gut-punch comes when we run across someone's real-life experience.
The September issue of Harper's captures a great moment in an article on Canada's stepped-up defense of a less-iced-up Northwest Passage. The Canucks have been steaming around up there with warships, pissing on islands to piss off the Danes and Russians, and at one point in the Harper's correspondent's trip, they stop at Devon Island the same time as a tour boat pulls up. The Canadian soldiers are humping gear to make camp when a tour guide, a bearded man from Seattle in full-on eco-hiking regalia, wanders over to remind them to "leave no trace," and to point out that the island's ecosystem is very fragile.
Being Canadians, they don't reflexively shoot him. Or even point out that the Puget Sound is dying and maybe he should hustle back and get his own ecosystem straightened out before he visits other countries to provide oversight.
Today we ran across Bjorn from Seattle, making us all proud by visiting the author of a travel book's blog to tell her:
If you're going to write about your travel adventures and expect other people to read them and enjoy it, please write about the culture, the people and the history of the countries that you visit and your experience in relationship to these cultures so that you can convey to your readers a sense of the country.Oh yes, get rid of the ego. Somehow Lynette Chiang must have not gotten the memo, and missed out on having the higher Bjorn experience.I have been to Cuba several times and my experience was totally different than yours. Perhaps because I didn't think solely of myself the entire trip. Get rid of that ego and selfishness and you might have something to report to your readers.
Being an Australian, Chiang doesn't reflexively delete his comment. She responds: "Thank you for writing. Yes, that ego and selfishness, that is certainly how I was ten years ago, and naive to boot."
Jesus, people-not-from-here. DO NOT ENABLE! It's just one courteous response to an obvious asshole to you, but we're stuck with the mounting levels of this total-moral-superiority horseshit. Forget bird flu, if this stuff figures out how to travel, we're all done for.
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He wasn't from Seattle, rather California (where Seattle gets much of it's uptightedness, if you ask me), but it's a classic pretentious ugly American story.
I was at a hostel in Verona, Italy and stuck up conversation with the other obviously West Coast kid staying there. We went down the street to get a bite to eat. I plied my rudimentary Italian I had picked up in recent weeks on the waitress, as it was clear she didn't speak English. I ordered my food, and she moved on to Mr. Cali for his order. He rattled off his order in English as if he was at home. "I'll have this and this, and maybe this or this, but I'm not sure, I'll tell you after I've had the second course," which was met with a blank stare and confused acknowledgment. When our food came, I got precisely what I ordered, but Mr. Cali got EVERYTHING he mentioned to the waitress, including the 2 dishes he was indecisive about. He threw a complete fit, saying that he never ordered those items and she should have understood him, and stormed out without paying, only after gobbling most of his food. Being the nice person that I am (and unable to arrive at the word for "douchebag" in Italian) I picked up the bill and had them wrap up his leftovers. The next morning, I waited by the door to see if I could get him to pay me back for the meal he ordered and didn't pay for. Instead he tried to pick a fight with me in the middle of the common room of the hostel and stormed out and never came back.
It's just yet another example of uptight West Coasters enforcing their expectations and passive aggressiveness on hapless locals elsewhere in the world. Shameful really...
Who's not from Seattle? Bjorn? The Harper's story goes like this: