Faux Pas

Traveling around the world, in cultures so different from those with which you are familiar, you are bound to have some missteps, commit some cultural gaffes. Sometimes it’s as simple as wearing your shoes inside a place you shouldn’t, using your left hand to do something that your right hand should have or making a gesture that has a very different local meaning than you intended (no doubt, sexual). Or, perhaps, it is a matter of not honoring clear hierarchies that are visible to all the locals, but not to you. Faux pas are a persistent risk of travel.

One of my favorite depictions of a traveler’s faux pas was on an HSBC ad that was running for a while on channels such as CNN International. In the advertisement, a very pasty British businessman is having dinner with Chinese counterparts. As might be expected, the dinner is an elaborate production, with the group of six or seven Chinese businessmen eager to please and impress the visiting guest, who is seated at the head of the table. As you may know, one problem with Chinese cuisine, especially as one goes higher in price, is that the Chinese eat a much wider range of foods, including quite a few “exotic” items with which westerners are not familiar. Ending up with some animal or body part that you really don’t want to try is always a risk in China. The British guest in the advertisement is presented with an eel (shown to him live and slithering before it appears chopped up in his bowl), which he clearly does not find appetizing, but finishes, as the voiceover says, “The English believe it’s a slur on your hosts’ food if you don’t clear your plate.” His hosts first look on with approval, and then order another, larger eel. The Englishman looks a little more troubled, but dutifully finishes the second huge bowl of eel as the voiceover continues, “Whereas the Chinese feel that it’s questioning their generosity if you do.” As the commercial ends, a third, truly humongous giant eel is wrestled out from the kitchen, with the Brit looking even more pale and downright frightened.

We’re usually fairly cautious when traveling. For the most part, we read all the relevant warnings and try to offend as little as possible (although there may be some “customs” that we are aware of and still reject, e.g., my preference for using utensils, rather than my hands, to eat most foods, including especially sloppy cuisines such as South Indian). Nonetheless, we too make mistakes, and in this post I thought I would share a story of an embarrassing mistake we recently made in Mauritania.

We were taking a share taxi ride in Mauritania, one driver and six passengers, two in the front bucket seat and four in back, squeezed into a Mercedes sedan for a twelve hour journey from Ayoun el Atrous to Nouakchott. Now, Mauritanians aren’t particularly small like, say, Indians or Southeast Asians, and so four grown men squeezed into the back is a tight fit, and hours on end with that little room creates in your mind reasonable concerns about your physical and mental states at the end of the ride. That said, there is also a great sense of commiseration and camaraderie from such a long, difficult trip. On the one real break in the journey, we all sat down for lunch, in an Arab/Central Asian style tent with mattresses and cushions on the floor. We couldn’t quite figure out how to order food or even what was available, but, back in a land of compulsive hospitality, hoped that things would work themselves out and somehow we would end up with lunch. (It turned out that, in fact, one of the passengers had ordered for the group.)

Now, just a few days before our entry into Mauritania, we had gone on a 4-5 trek in the Dogon Country of Mali. On that hot and sweaty journey, you break up your trip twice a day, for lunch and for dinner/sleep, at so-called campements, established to feed and house trekkers. There is a certain routine at these campements, one of the first things after you arrive being that they bring you a bucket of water so that you can wash some of the dust and sweat off of your hands and face in preparation for eating. Before the Dogon, we were in Timbuktu, where, at the Touareg/Canadian-owned guesthouse of Sahara Passion in which we stayed, there was a similar routine. Since all food was eaten with hands, a pitcher of water, soap and a bowl were brought out before meals, for washing.

And so here we were, between Ayoun and Nouakchott in Mauritania, under a tent waiting for food. One of the staff of the establishment brought around a bowl of murky white liquid and offered it to Derek. Derek promptly used it to wash his right hand, thinking himself culturally savvy and in-the-know for doing the right thing. The boy looked puzzled and glanced over at one of his elders for support or an explanation, but after receiving neither, smiled at us awkwardly and suggested that we drink the liquid instead. Because of his smile, we assumed that he was joking. Then, one of the other passengers laughed and told us that it was “lait de chamaux,” or camel mlik, which I thought was a joke based on the classic “drinking the finger bowl” faux pas said to be committed by rubes throughout history. We laughed–we certainly weren’t rubes–and I proceeded to put my hand into the bowl, and swish it about.

After I finished with the bowl, the boy took the bowl back toward the kitchen, and Derek and I suddenly came to a realization. Smelling our fingers, it was clear what we had done: washed our hands in the communal bowl of milk.

The writing on the wall

Our co-passenger was indeed kidding, but only about it being camel milk (people do drink camel milk in Mauritania, but this was cow milk). The restaurant boy was smiling out of awkwardness and discomfort, while trying to get us to drink as we were supposed to. As we sat red-faced, hoping that the others hadn’t witnessed our stupidity, we could see the waiter whisk (the wire whisk seems to be obligatory) up another bowl of milk (they often start with evaporated milk, it seems, and then add water and sugar) for the rest of our group, as we had fouled the first one. We should have seen the milk coming. Although it was our first real day in Mauritania, we had already witnessed that Mauritanians drink huge quantities of milk, not too surprising in a desert country where little green grows but herding is a common livelihood, and the liquid in the bowl looked more like milk than soapy water. Even in the Dogon a welcome drink arrived at the same time as the bucket of water. Nobody came even close to trying to make us feel sorry or embarrassed for what we did, although of course we did. We had committed a faux pas several times worse than drinking from a finger bowl–we had used communal food to wash our hands.

Fortunately, nobody had to drink from the polluted bowl of milk, and, after the actual handwashing took place (with clear water from a pitcher, soap and a basin that was so much more obviously for handwashing), we joined at the communal table to enjoy what was incredibly tasty roasted lamb, infinitely better than we had had across the border in Mali. In the communal spirit of the traditional world, one of the passengers paid for the whole group (again leaving us to feel mildly embarrassed, as we had in Tajikistan, given our likely superior relative wealth), and we left again for Nouakchott.