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| How eating in Europe feels Image Credit: Eat Pray Love |
Some Destinations Seem So Perfect.
I remember traveling through Europe. Every cafe, every hotel, every shop, every museum, everywhere was just so perfect. Some beautiful soul following his or her passion carefully strung together the details to create a specific, refined, and effective ambience. Every door you enter makes you think, “Wow, isn’t this wonderful? Nothing could be better.”
But Asia is a Different Story.
In backpacker Asia (SEA and India), almost every cafe, hotel, shop, etc falls somewhere on the spectrum between “no fucks given, but it’s cheap and good enough” to “well, at least they tried…I guess.”
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| How eating in Asia feels Image Credit: The Beach |
The restaurant with the best view blares American club music at noon.
The owner of the cafe with the best WiFi won’t stop talking at (not with) me about the restaurant he used to own in Goa and the times he tried heroin.
The perfect little guesthouse tucked away in the tranquil mountain side attracted a party of drunks after I unpacked all of my stuff.
Nothing is perfect here. Not even close. It seems whatever you came for is the only thing you get (if you’re lucky) and all the other things are the dirty details you have to deal with in the meantime.
Thank Buddha for the ashrams and monasteries because it is a spiritual exercise to keep dissatisfaction from majorly tainting the Asia travel experience.
How can we deal with all of the little details that poke at us as we try to go through day to day life here?
We have to have a good answer to this question or else our dissatisfaction and irritability will get the best of our experience.
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| If you want a masala dosa, find yourself a masala dosa. Image Credit: |
1. Know what you want.
If you want a masala dosa, find yourself a masala dosa. If you want a quiet room because you just spent the night riding next to a bus blaring Hindi disco-tech music and didn’t get any sleep, find a quiet room. If you start off your experience with a place sacrificing your top priority, all of the little things that will inevitably annoy you won’t seem worth it and you’ll feel stuck in a bad decision.
2. Know what you don’t want.
If hearing American pop music in foreign countries makes your heart sad as you see cheap material culture destroying ancient civilizations, ask yourself if said masala dosa is worth it. Maybe it is. But be self-aware enough to know if it isn’t.
3. Feel free to walk away.
You sit down, open the menu, and you realize the atmosphere is really just too obnoxious, or the menu isn’t so appealing, or the WiFi is shit and you only chose that cafe because you needed to catch up on emails and they had a free WiFi sign on the door. If you haven’t ordered yet, you are not obliged to stay. It is perfectly fine to walk out of a place if you aren’t feeling it. Obviously don’t attach to the “perfect place” because you’ll be searching for a long time.
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| I did not come here to party. I came to enjoy a masala dosa at 1 in the afternoon Image Credit: discotech.me |
4. Make suggestions to change what you don’t like.
If the sun is in your eyes where you are sitting, ask to adjust the curtains. If there aren’t many people in a place and the music is too loud, ask to turn it down or even to change it if it is really so terrible. That cafe may have no idea what music to play and they are perhaps just guessing at what you might like. Telling them what you’d like to hear is valuable market information that they might appreciate…or they might spit in your food…so wait until you have received your plate.
5. Control what you focus on.
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| Man, that’s a good looking cow. |
Maybe the music is obnoxious and the place is too crowded to ask to turn it down but you decided that masala dosa was worth it. Don’t pay attention to the music. Find every nice thing about that place. Maybe through all of the buildings, you can see a sliver of the river in the distance. Embrace that scenery. The cow laying outside is quite handsome. Admire that cow. You made the decision. You already ordered. Anything that is irritating needs to be brushed off now and everything positive needs to be appreciated. You best enjoy every single bite of that masala dosa. It’s your only hope of sanity.
May all beings be free of suffering.
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