We just went to dinner where we ate Tajik plov, listened to Disney songs, watched Ukrainian comedy videos on YouTube, and had tiramisu.
Only in America
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
We just went to dinner where we ate Tajik plov, listened to Disney songs, watched Ukrainian comedy videos on YouTube, and had tiramisu.
Clarissa's Blog 
My wife made Kyrgyz plov the other night.
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Isn’t it cool how we have the same dinner almost at the same time all the way across the world?
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Almost all the way. Kyrgyzstan is 12 hours ahead of California where my mother lives.
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I don’t get the title (unless it’s irony – but i thought you were irony impaired?).
There are lots of times I could write that I had tajine or Hungarian porkolt for dinner, watched a Danish or Spanish movie plus american sitcom while sipping at Bulgarian brandy and then finished off the evening’s entertainment with some Albanian or Kannada music videos…
It seems that an evening with all the elements from the same culture is the exception now than the rule.
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“There are lots of times I could write that I had tajine or Hungarian porkolt for dinner, watched a Danish or Spanish movie plus american sitcom while sipping at Bulgarian brandy and then finished off the evening’s entertainment with some Albanian or Kannada music videos”
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And you are American, which proves my point. 🙂 Let’s not exaggerate people’s readiness to experience anything even slightly unfamiliar. Even here in the US people who are interested in exploring anything but the food and the entertainment they grew up with is very limited.
It looks like the server ate my comment.
No, you’re both first generation immigrants/expats who aren’t living in your home countries. This Saturday I watched a French film, had leftover penne with percorino romano for lunch and pad thai for dinner and dosa for breakfast. If my parents were around we’d be searching for Kannada/Hindi videos (sadly lacking on Youtube and Netflix). I bought my father scotch from Speyside because it was cheaper than the Japanese whisky for Father’s day. Last weekend I watched a Danish film, and last month I went to a Peruvian/Japanese place with my cousin and his family (delicious, by the way.) I am probably going to have the gluten free baclava from the new coffee place five minutes from my house for dessert tonight. I really want to see Red Cliff. I am the world’s most homebound person and I’m convinced that were it not for an accident of birth and circumstance I’d never be thousands of miles from my birthplace. None of this is terribly outside of my comfort zone.
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“No, you’re both first generation immigrants/expats who aren’t living in your home countries.”
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But immigrants are normally a lot less adventurous with their cultural experiences than non-immigrants.
Interesting.
Maybe it’s a class thing? To me my entire paragraph was ” I looked up things on Yelp and I wandered around a bit and I have an Internet connection and I live near a fairly large city.” My parents are uninterested in the novelty of French/Danish/fusion/gluten free, but otherwise it’s comfortable for them. The cousin I mentioned, immigrated from India as a five year old and immigrated as again as a child from England to America and he remembers both. My mother has another cousin who constantly travels for her job and she’s an immigrant based in New York and to her my entire paragraph would be “Tuesday night, meh”. My dad’s parents weren’t nearly as cosmopolitan as my mother’s but he loves opera (kind of) and went to see Shen Yun. None of the people I’ve mentioned are academics.
The people I’ve encountered who are most unwilling to branch out with food and entertainment are my paternal grandparents and a couple of white acquaintances and coworkers. And none of those people moved very far from their birthplaces, let alone immigrated.
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Immigrants often cultivate difference because it offers them a measure of control over their otherness. It’s a way of saying, “You are not the one who imagines me as the Other. This is something that I freely choose myself.”
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\ And you are American, which proves my point. 🙂 Let’s not exaggerate people’s readiness to experience anything even slightly unfamiliar.
In Israel probably more people experience unfamiliar things like that than in America because Israel received numerous Jewish immigrants from different countries, most recently from FSU in the 1990s. We have Israeli culture, American culture and also often some remains of a culture from which the family immigrated to Israel. For instance, there are Ethiopian and Kavkaz restaurants.
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