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nationalities and coffee
Jan. 25th, 2011 08:15 pmAt the conference, there's some hot water available, and some coffee, already ground up. This was described as Turkish style coffee, and kind of surprised me...
I had a small conversation about this with one of the other guys here, Alesj, who's from the Czech Republic. He said that Czech people do that sometimes too, but consider it kind of uncivilized, just putting the coffee in your cup and adding hot water. I explained that when we do that, it's this magic special occasion, like you're at a Turkish restaurant and it comes out in an ornate little pot!
"Well, I guess you're not that far from Turkey..." I mused.
"You shouldn't say things like that to Europeans!" Alesj said. "We try to emphasize how special our local cultures are; totally distinct from our neighbors..." (he wasn't upset)
Later, on a shared taxi (sherut), Alesj and Ondrej (his advisor) had a conversation with a nice older lady in Czech. I was briefly surprised that they were able to do that linguistic handshake, and just listened (Czech sounds learnable, but I could be fooling myself); the answer was, she heard them talking and said hello herself. Ondrej said that he can sometimes pick out Czech people abroad, which brought up a conversation about identifying people by nationality: the girl on the taxi noted that we definitely seemed too polite to be Israelis, and couldn't easily decide whether I was probably Canadian or American.
I had a small conversation about this with one of the other guys here, Alesj, who's from the Czech Republic. He said that Czech people do that sometimes too, but consider it kind of uncivilized, just putting the coffee in your cup and adding hot water. I explained that when we do that, it's this magic special occasion, like you're at a Turkish restaurant and it comes out in an ornate little pot!
"Well, I guess you're not that far from Turkey..." I mused.
"You shouldn't say things like that to Europeans!" Alesj said. "We try to emphasize how special our local cultures are; totally distinct from our neighbors..." (he wasn't upset)
Later, on a shared taxi (sherut), Alesj and Ondrej (his advisor) had a conversation with a nice older lady in Czech. I was briefly surprised that they were able to do that linguistic handshake, and just listened (Czech sounds learnable, but I could be fooling myself); the answer was, she heard them talking and said hello herself. Ondrej said that he can sometimes pick out Czech people abroad, which brought up a conversation about identifying people by nationality: the girl on the taxi noted that we definitely seemed too polite to be Israelis, and couldn't easily decide whether I was probably Canadian or American.
