2．
One often hears it said that travel broadens the mind: if you stay in your own country the whole time, your ideas remain narrow; whereas if you travel abroad you see new customs, eat new foods, do new things, and come back home with a broader mind.
But does this always－or even usually－happen? An acquaintance of mine who lives inEnglandand had never been outside it until last summer decided to go over to France for a trip. When he returned, I asked him how he liked it. “Terrible,” was his answer. “I couldn’t get a nice cup of tea anywhere. Thank goodness I’m back.” I asked him whether he hadn’t had any good food while he was there. “Oh, the dinners were all right,” he said. “I found a little place where they made quite good fish and chips. Not as good as ours, but they were passable. But the breakfasts were terrible: no bacon or kippers. I had fried eggs and chips, but it was quite a business getting them to make them. They expected me to eat rolls. And when I asked for marmalade, they brought strawberry jam. And do you know, they insisted that it was marmalade? The trouble is they don’t know English.”
I thought it useless to explain that we borrowed the word ‘marmalade’ from French, and that it means, in that language, any kind of jam. So I said, “But didn’t you eat any of the famous French food?” “What? Me?” he said. “Of course not! Give me good old English food every time! None of these fancy bits for me!” Obviously travel had not broadened his mind. He had gone toFrance, determined to live there exactly as if he was in England, and had judged it entirely from his own English viewpoints.
This does not, of course, happen only to Englishmen in France: all nationalities, in all foreign countries, can be found judging what they see, hear, taste and smell according to their own habits and customs. People who are better educated and who have read a lot about foreign countries tend to be more adaptable and tolerant, but this is because their minds have already been broadened before they start travelling. In fact, it is easier to be broad-minded about foreign habits and customs, if one’s acquaintance with these things is limited to books and films. The American smiles tolerantly over the absence of central heating in most English homes when he is himself comfortably seated in his armchair in his centrally heated house in Chicago; the English man reads about the sanitary arrangements in a certain tropical country, and the inhabitants of the latter read about London fogs, and each side manages to be detached and broad-minded. But actual physical contact with things one is unaccustomed to is much more difficult to bear philosophically.
There are some travelers who adapt themselves so successfully to foreign customs and habits that they incur (遭受) the severe criticisms of their more stubborn fellow-countrymen. If they are Asians, they are accused of having become “Westernized”, and if they are Europeans, people say they have “gone native”. Which is better: rigid, self-satisfied prejudice against things foreign (the idea “Thank God I am not as others are!”), or loss of your certainty that your own country’s habits and customs are the only right ones, and therefore the inability to be one of a herd any longer?
Perhaps the ideal would be that travel could succeed in making people tolerant of the habits and customs of others without abandoning their own. The criterion for judging a foreigner could be: Does he try to be polite and considerate to others? Instead of: Is he like me?