“We are pilgrims in an unholy land.”
The above quote is from one of my favorite movies, “Indiana Jones.” In it, Harrison Ford is referring to his presence in Nazi Germany during WWII. While I’ve never been in a situation that extreme, I think of this quote when I find myself outside of the Midwest region I know so well. I think the quote says something about people’s mentality; we like to think we are the normal ones, and the rest of the world is crazy, or backwards, or weird.
As a kid I was under the belief that people were people, no matter where you went. When I traveled through Europe in high school I learned how wrong I was. People are very different. Looking back, it’s childish to think that everyone is like you simply because that’s all you know. Cultures create personalities, so with different cultures come different types of people.
I remember my first night in Italy when we were eating at a café and I asked the waiter for refill on my soda. He looked at me like I had pasta coming out of my ears. Apparently in some parts of Europe there are no refills – you drink what you get, then you’re done. As a child raised in a soda-decadent culture, that baffled me. That was my first experience in crossing cultures.
It’s important to note when I say people are different, I don’t mean inherently or morally, merely superficially. Just because the waiter didn’t like refills didn’t make him a bad person, or me one for loving refills. I’m simply talking about those tiny differences that are the result of cultural upbringing; the ones we all take for granted as being universally apparent. Just wanted to make that point.
The older I got, the easier it became to see cultural differences. The more I traveled the U.S., and the more stories I heard from friends and family, the more I learned about the differences within regions.
I remember my dad telling me about his first time in Boston. He stood in line for 10 minutes at a coffee shop before realizing he wasn’t moving. People were merely walking right in front of him, slowly pushing their way to the counter to be served. To a Midwesterner like my dad, it seemed chaotic, but he was assured by a Bostonian that there was a method to the madness. Apparently something as simple as waiting in line is up for cultural interpretation. They don’t even call it waiting in line there – it’s waiting on line!
I asked a few of my friends about their experiences since moving from the Midwest to other regions. When they tell people they were from Kansas they got one of two responses; either a “Wizard of Oz” reference, or an apology: “You’re from Kansas? I bet that sucked.”
The third most common response seemed to be, “Where is Kansas?”
My friend Sarah said, “I’ve found that many Seattleites don’t really know where Kansas is. It’s mostly just “over there” somewhere. Also, telling them I had to drive 30 miles to go to a mall or a movie theater is mind boggling.”
Mainly what I’ve heard from my friends is that people outside of the Midwest are much ruder than we are. We have all heard this stereotype before, but I was surprised at how often it popped up in people’s comments.
My friend Larry talked about his first few days in D.C.: “I remember my first time in Georgetown, walking from the metro stop I noticed that even if you said “hello” right to someone’s face, they would completely ignore you. That was a first for me. I counted 30 people on that walk. Not one of them seemed to notice I was there.”
So what was the Indiana Jones quote? It didn’t make it into the online edition.
Yeah I noticed that too-
The quote is from the Last Crusades:
“We are pilgrims in an unholy land”
Hopefully someone will get that fixed soon!
Liked the story. As an alumnus now living in Arizona, where many Californians have moved, Kansas seems almost foreign country to them. I find many of the CA crowd to feel that everything was better in SoCal, which always makes me wonder why they moved here in the first place. Also, a minor correction, I believe that the quote was actually Henry Jones, Sr. (Sean Connery) who referred to himself and Indiana as “Pilgrims in an unholy land.” Great quote, nonetheless.
Hey you are absolutely right- it was def Henry Jones Sr. who made the statement. Thanks for catching that!
Also the one said “I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne. Let my armies be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky…”
Hmm not sure where the rest of my blog is-there is more. Here is the rest, picking up from Larry’s quote-
“What causes this rudeness? Obviously it’s cultural, but what created that culture? I think it has to do with the sheer amount of people on the coasts compared to the Midwest. With a population that big, you simply can’t afford to be polite to everyone. Can you imagine a hundred Kansans trying to get on a NY subway car? It’d take forever because we’d be waiting for everyone else to get on before us. It’s just not practical to be polite sometimes I guess.
And on the flip side, what makes us so polite? My parents had an interesting theory. They linked it back to our agricultural days, when the Midwest was still the booming bread basket. Life in farm communities took a lot of work, and you never knew who you were going to need to ask a favor from. So it became good business to just be nice to your neighbors, on the chance you might need their help sometime soon. This spread, and can still be seen, throughout small towns in the Midwest today.
I’ll be honest- I get a little weirded out going to small towns and seeing complete strangers wave at me and treat me like old friends. I know it’s just their way, but it’s not what I’m used to in the bigger cities like Wichita. I guess when I leave the Midwest and encounter strangers I’m sure my degree of friendliness weirds them out too. It’s all relative I suppose- we all like to think we’re the pilgrim in the unholy land.”
Living in Boston now, I can categorically say there are differences, but not as many as people think.
I find most people friendly. They do sort of operate on a self-serving basis, and they don’t say hello to people they pass on the sidewalk. But the weekend after I got here, me and my two roommates (both of whom are also from the Midwest) went garage saling, and I’ve rarely met friendlier people. They chatted to us, asked where we were living, gave us AmeriCorps discounts, and were incredibly friendly. I also went across Boston carrying a Martha Coakley sign close to the election, with two friends, and we were approached by people who both supported and disagreed with us, all in friendly ways, just wanting to chat. I was also wearing an ESU Young Dems shirt in downtown Boston and a woman walked up to me and said “I just saw Michael Moore’s new movie. You have to go.”
It’s a different kind of friendly, but it’s friendly.
They really don’t know where Kansas is, though– one person asked me where my Southern drawl was, another thought KS was close to Pennsylvania. And it’s completely foreign for the closest big city to be two hours away; that’s a several state drive to people from here.
Just some observations, very lately posted.
So what was the Indiana Jones quote?