“Where are you from?” says the street food vendor.
“I’m from Great Britain!… England!” Harry continues quickly, before the men behind the cart look confused.
“Ah… England! Do you support football?” “Who’s your team?”
“Aston Villa,” says Harry, “Who’s yours?”
“Zamalek,” replies the man. …“Egyptian team!”
Every time this exchange happens while Harry is in Cairo, I notice he’s not really finding common ground – he’s exchanging differences with a new person.
As a Western ‘individual’, I’m used to thinking people are separate first, and then work out ways to be together. But maybe it’s the other way around – maybe people are together first and then find ways to be separate – by expressing their differences.
Yesterday I asked the question How do women and queer travellers initiate social connection abroad?
I assumed Harry just goes around like a lad, making easy connections through football. But maybe he’s really making differences, and the connection happens in the sharing of those differences. Football is so sociable because difference is built into it. Team loyalties, opinions, rivalries – it’s all accepted, even encouraged. (Unless someone wants to argue, of course – then football can just as easily become the thing to fight about.)
In Western culture, there is a heavy undercurrent that says connection with others is about sameness – in values, lifestyles, backgrounds etc. Either that, or playing specific roles. If you are a woman, the legitimate connection you can have with the opposite sex is through family or marriage. Maybe a work friendship – and that is mostly in the cities away from the whirr of the nuclear family, where the conditions are better for openness to differences.
So if travellers want to connect with others, in a new culture – that isn’t through work, family or traditional social structures – could football small talk hold the secret? Not for the content, but for the dynamic – an exchange of difference, and curiosity about differences.
What does this mean for me as someone who wants to connect with people as I travel? Maybe it’s not in finding what we have in common but finding openings to talk about what we don’t. I see many westerners who go travelling, or immigrate to new countries, who will only stick to what they know, which I think is the difference between travelling and feeling lonely, or travelling and feeling enriched.