Intercultural experiences 101

Many people pay a lot of money to attend “cultural sensitivity” workshops. For authenticity, such courses are usually facilitated by a two-cultured tandem of moderators, and include funny role-plays.

Anybody really interested to learn about cultural differences should invest his money smarter: Get a plane ticket to anywhere (the cheapest would do) and hang out at the airport lounges!

There they are: different nationalities, religions, skin colors, income brackets, and fashion statements. I'd say it's a representative cut through globalized socio-economic layers.

At an airport lounge in Nagoya/Japan it took me (German) 10 minutes to find out the following:

It takes two Americans, traveling individually, exactly two minutes before they are engaged in a lively conversation about football, their former colleges, and their most recent international travels and experiences.

Shallow chitchat? Of course! We are at an airport lounge! However, I'm impressed with the communicative nature of the Americans. In Germany this is rather unlikely to happen in an anonymous environment (bus, train, supermarket etc.).

To illustrate the stark contrast between chatty American's and Asians, let’s have a look at the male Japanese sitting opposite me. He is travelling in a suit (I assume he is on a business trip although it is a Saturday). His straight upright posture just sitting there strikes me. Very prim and proper! Cross-legged his eyes silently dart over his iPad carefully placed on his lap. I think I can read his mind: “Silence, I’m reading!”

The noise consciousness of the Japanese is remarkable. There are cell phone booths! You read correctly! People conduct their phone calls, even from a mobile phone, inside a booth that can be locked. Smart in two ways: keeps the noise away from others and your conversation private.

Remarkable, too, is the Japanese sense for cleanliness and hygiene. The whole airport is spotless. So is the restroom. I’m overwhelmed with the high tech toilet. Relieving yourself in Japan requires higher education to understand the various knobs and buttons next to the ceramic bowl that promise hygienic cleanliness. The heated seat is a given, things like bidee, water pressure, water temperature, and additional flushing sounds (flushing sounds?) are at my fingertips.

Less of a culture but more of a generation shock presented itself inside the plane. A 'Gen Y' asked the aging flight attendant (she is so 80's with her Peggy Bundy hairstyle!) if there is WiFi in the coach seats. Of course! It's a 12 hour flight! He can't be disconnected from his social network for a 12 hour eternity!

Home experiment

Trying to camouflage our big black transformers has been a challenging hobby ever since we moved into our house in Manila. Living in a 220V wired home using 110V appliances has already grilled some of our tech stuff, including a TV.

Violating interior design standards we started plugging transformers into every possible wall outlet. The big black boxes are a thorn in everybody's eye who shares a sense of "beauty".

We've become creative in hiding our heat exposing skeletons. Our latest attempt was to hide it behind the "Ex", our bloody knife holder.

Now we finally found a much better and even useful solution for the black Panthers! Necessity being the mother of all inventions, we realized the useful nature of transformers while venturing into yoghurt making!

Making yoghurt is rather easy: take milk (yes, even or especially "dead" UHT), add a slap of natural yoghurt, and maintain a 40 degree Celsius environment for 6 hours. Keeping a constant temperature seemed to be the most difficult part of our little experiment. We successfully moved the white ceramic bowl with our live bacteria around the house to the sunniest spots... until the sun set. Looking for a heat source (preferably indoors) we stumbled over our ugly room mates!

The result can be admired in the picture! The bowl perfectly fits onto the transformer (and makes the Ex look even sexier)!

As for the yoghurt taste: perfect! It lacks a bit of body (maybe that's because we don't add stabilizers) but the taste is just great!

I guess it's time to venture into frozen yoghurt next - which would also solve the consistency problem!

Season Greetings

Who says gifts can only be exchanged and unwrapped on December 24 (Germany) or 25 (USA, Philippines...)?

Seizing the opportunity to stuff a friend's bag traveling to Manila in December my sister Anja surprised us with early season greetings!

After contemplating for about 3 seconds whether or not to open our gifts already we decided plunge in!

Good thing we did! The mountain of freshly baked cookies might have gone bad had we waited another day or two, let alone until Dec 24/25! The early Glenn catches the ginger bread man! (Almost of all these cute little creatures found a crumbling end in Glenn's and my mouth though...)

The smell of home came quickly with original "Raeucherkerzchen", a cone shaped incense stick. The cones are placed inside a "Raeucherhaus" which releases the scented smoke through its chimney.

This is such a typical tradition in my part of Germany that during a home visit three years ago I unearthed my old "snowman" Raeuchermann and brought him to Manila. Since times immemorial this little guy puffed happily during the festive season. His nose broke off and got glued back on for I don't know how many times! (Of course, I also continued this tradition since he lost his wooden nose on the way to the Philippines.)

The greatest gifts, however, were two hand made calendars for 2011! My 4-year old niece Selina must have spent days and weeks carefully drawing a cool picture for each of the twelve months to come!
Anja is technically more advanced and compiled 12 great photos into a photo calendar.

Both are already decorating our house! Big hugs to Santa's little elves and human reindeer helping deliver all the gifts!

St. Nicholas' Day for Selina

I guess my niece Selina was lucky her kindergarten was chosen to receive sweets from a local bakery on St. Nicholas' Day! Selina is the cute girl in pink at the far right of the group of singing kids!

To all the women out there!

I know many of you want it but only few of you dare to do it! I just did it and it feels great!

I didn't think that opening up and giving in can be so satisfying! I feel light and inspired. It seems there is a new world out there waiting to be explored! My fantasy is running wild on all the things I can do with this newly discovered wide-open space!

I encourage all of you to throw conventional styles overboard and unleash a new feminine side of you.

Now that I cleared my closet of old dusty clothes, I’ll tackle my shoe cabinet next! :-)

Cirlces of Hope

All it takes is two tennis balls, two strings, ribbons, and two napkin-sized pieces of cloth, colored pencils, and the unlimited artistic creativity of 40 kids to make the most interesting Pois.

Introducing a new and fun activity to the children of Barangay Tumana was the goal of Planet Zips’ first community outreach program. For four hours, Planet Zips instructors, students, and friends assisted an energetic group of 7 to 12 year old kids to make their own set of pois and, of course, showed them how to use them during a Poi tutorial.

Barangay Tumana in Marikina City, has been severely affected by Typhoon Ondoy in 2009. Joining the Red Cross Rizal Chapter, we helped distribute donated goods and teach sanitary practices such as hand washing along with our Poi workshop.

Although I work in what most people would call the ”help-others-industry”, it was my first time joining such an activity. I was impressed how well organized the program was. The materials were given out to each registered kid individually. The kids were very well-behaved! No fighting over pens but friendly sharing and helping each other out. Most of them were super focused on coloring their individual Poi cloth!

I got a bit concerned when the first kids had finished their Poi sets and started swinging their new toys uncoordinated. Having gone through the learning process of Poi dance myself, I know how painful a tennis ball in the wrong spot of your body can be! :-) Time to teach the kids some basic moves!

And that’s what we did! I was impressed by a handful of the kids who picked up the moves quickly. Some of the natural talents couldn’t be stopped to practice whereas the majority was too shy to get up! This is where I saw the parallels to my work: All we can do is provide people with the tools and motivate them to use them. We can’t force them to do anything. They have to pick up the new tools out of their own motivation.

I’m sure we motivated some of these kids that day and gave them a fun tool to use. Now it’s up to them to practice and to get better.

World Aids Day, 2010

I found this ad in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on World Aids Day. I'm sure the "Catholics for Choice" appreciate the Pope's move towards condom use to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids as much as I do.