Def depends on where you go. As a german who has visited most European countries at least once, and a bunch of others as well, I found my preconceptions confirmed more often than not.
Or in a case where I went without any due to deliberately not looking up any information beforehand I was severely let down. Looking at you, Serbia.
Meanwhile all tourist-facing workers in every non-Anglo country have heard "I'M AMERICAN! SPEAK ENGLISH TO ME!!!!" at least once.
I saw a tiktok of a Brit talking about this with the upcoming ban in the US, and he made an interesting point. The Americans who can afford to travel and take time off work, are more often the ones who have lived privileged lives, and as a result act more entitled than the average American. He commented how interacting with regular Americans on tiktok changed his perception of what they are like, because only interacting with the tourists makes it seem like there's a higher percentage of entitled a-holes.
I don't travel. Is it common for the locals servicing tourists to not know at least enough English to get by?
Often, however:
Ah, yeah that makes sense. It must be a nightmare to deal with Americans if you don't speak English.
In essence, this quote is true.
Applied to reality though, in our day and age your results may vary. It is completely possible to travel and learn nothing that would open people's minds especially when the traveling keeps itself within tourist zones and resorts designed to just give you a change of landscape and an illusion of cultural flavor.
You need to purposefully step away from that sort of thing and actually engage with the culture to get the benefits of the quote.
I wonder if it was more effective in his era, late 19th century? Leisure travel wasn’t as much of a thing then, especially to other countries/continents, and the tourism industry didn’t exist nearly as much
Definitely, when the traveling time alone is anywhere from a week to a month or more, with lots of required stops, then it makes sense to spend a long time in a place.
Looks like it took Bertrand Russell 6 weeks to get from England to Shanghai in 1920.
It was around this time that a white guy adopted the clothing of an Arab country and passed himself off as an Arab to learn more about a country (Syria, I think?). I learned about him in the intro to an episode of the Fall of Civilizations podcast. Travel was definitely different then.
I think it was ep 15, about the Nabataeans.
Edit: the Nabataeans were in modern Jordan.
I read it was some guy.
You need to purposefully step away from that sort of thing and actually engage with the culture to get the benefits of the quote.
I second this measure
Having read Mark Twain’s autobiographical travel log, I love that he himself is a bit of bigot - stereotyping quite a few of those peoples he meets on the way.
Albeit in a fairly human way and with a bit of irony about it. Great writer interesting human.
I feel like an adjacent one is having good conversations with people from very different countries (ideally face-to-face)
Yea, I can't afford to travel. I can afford to dick around on the internet with people from all over the globe. Assuming we can actually find a way to communicate. I certainly don't have the brain matter necessary to learn another language.
Yeah, just think of all those famously unprejudiced travelers of history like Christopher Columbus, Cecil Rhodes or Robert Clive...
May not work in all cases, seems like everyone that goes to egypt to see the pyramids comes back hating egyptians.
I've seen discussions where the topic was something like "Where did you travel to that you would never go back to again", and the responses there heavily implied that travel can inspire racism.
I think Twain here is referring to travel less as tourism, ie short vacations, but more about spending time living in different countries and getting to know people and their culture, making friends, etc.
Yeah I fully get the idea. A lot of racism is ignorance and fear. Humans are bad to take limited experiences of each other and assume that's the whole experience. When you don't have your own experiences with a different people, it's easy to latch onto stories of how bad they can be and form your whole opinion around that. The best counter to that is to have good experiences instead, preferably through friendship.
But some cultures/etc make for a bad travel experience, and that will create or reinforce negative opinions. Living there longer is probably better, but the fact that racism still exists in mixing pot countries like the US proves that living together isn't enough to make relationships good.
I've only been to another country once in my life. In 2018 I was invited to present at a scientific conference held in Sicily, and my workplace sponsored my travel and accommodation costs.
After 6 days there, my takeaway was an unfavorable view of the local Sicilian people. This is obviously not representative of every person in Sicily, or Italians in general (Italy is a big place with lots of different regions), but I'm not in a hurry to go back to Palermo.
In my opinion, different kinds of travel inspire different things. Back in the day, travel necessarily meant mixing a lot with the people and culture you were visiting. Nowadays it's much easier to travel in a "bubble" with much more limited contact to locals and culture, besides those trying to take advantage of the tourists
A lot of rich people like to feel like they’re getting an ‘authentic’ experience on vacation so they visit remote villages and hire locals (who are usually well versed in entertaining rich tourists) to give them ‘authentic’ tours and taste the local booze. I doubt this is what Twain was talking about though.
I can see that. Traveling while white invites a lot of peddling and harassment. The adult thing is to ignore all that though.
One of the Egypt stories involved men following a woman back to her hotel room, and she had to lock herself inside. They continued to come to her hotel everyday, and bang on her door telling her to let them in. She ended up spending the whole trip stuck in that room, feeling unsafe to leave until she finally got an escort to make it to her flight home.
Unfortunately in cases like that, it really sounds like it goes beyond something you can be adult about and just ignore. I think her main mistake was not doing better research about where it was safe to travel as an unaccompanied woman, as much as I wish that wasn't a concern.
My friend got a dozen or more marriage proposals in Egypt, some including pretty sizable dowries—which really did not help as much as the people offering the proposals wanted. I’m guessing the only reason she wasn’t followed like this was due to the presence of her family
You're right, some countries absolutely suck in this regard and it's a whole different world depending on which sex you represent and if you're traveling alone or not.
That was after a visit from Madame Guinan.
I love those episodes.
i always wondered what would happen if twain met kant considering this quote from twain and the fact that kant never went further than 25 miles of his home; yet both are respected figures.
idk lots of rich ppl travel and still hella racist
I used to think this. Then some girl in Poland asked me "so are you like, illegal?" When I told her I was Mexican. I've ran into other assholes while traveling but I still remember her.
Isn’t that the point of the quote though? Someone is raised with false prejudice, and then they find out reality is different when they travel.
I'm not that optimistic anymore especially with a comment like that. Even if you know nothing about the immigration experience I think you'd have to ignore a lot for that to even be a question. Nobody goes through that much hardship to get to a place like the US and then goes like "k bye! I'm vacationing in Europe and doing it all over again" I hope they were enlightened at some point but I've also ran into well traveled people with the same mindset.
There's an old meme of this quote superimposed over pictures of Hitler in various countries
Depends. Plenty of travelers end up dead due to malice or greed (among other things such as personal stupidity). I'm pretty sure they would have developed plenty of prejudice had they lived to share their tales.
haha look at all those fucking bigots being too poor to travel
If you didn't want to be a bigot, you should have been born rich and traveled more. That's just science, don't @ me.
I always hear people say this as a 'gotcha' but it doesn't make any sense.
I have travelled while homeless.
People will be renting an apartment in a developed city, owning a car, going out to pubs/nightclubs, and then telling dirty backpackers, "God must be nice to have the money to travel!"
travel vs sedentism, neither one is necessarily more cheap/expensive than the other
It's very similar to the "oh you have time to read books and educate yourself, you must be rich!" discourse. It's very infantalizing.
That's fair, but there's a wide gulph between transient homeless and wealthy enough to pay all your bills and still travel the world. The overwhelming majority of people in the middle have to work full time to maintain their standard of living, and even the destitute will have responsibilities that prevent them from slinging a pack over their shoulder and riding the rails.
I agree that people should be encouraged to get out more and see more of the world, but that's like telling people to eat more fresh vegetables and home cooked meals because processed fast food is unhealthy. People who can and do reap the benefits, but not everyone who would, can.
You could chime in that you grew up poor on a farm where your grandma's garden was your only source of food, and that wouldn't counter the point that for most people, fresh produce is either unavailable, too expensive, or too time-consuming to be a regular part of their diet. Likewise, most people cannot drop everything and become nomads hitchiking across the lands like fucking David Banner or Jarod the Pretender.
To put it another way, Travel is a luxury enjoyed by the unencumbered, whether by wealth or absence. It is not an option available to everyone.