The perils of multi-kulti

It was kind of a stupid thing that made me remember that I had a blog. Probably everyone else has forgotten but I'll write here occasionally anyhow. Make that two stupid things. First off, a sign from the shower in a hostel I stayed in last week:
Doesn't this make it look like the shower will change your gender? Like, it looks like a sequence.

OK, the other thing: I am currently in France, having spent most of January traipsing around different parts of Germany. I stayed in a bunch of hostels, which was more or less miserable except for one great encounter that maybe I'll write about eventually (I've been archive hopping). I spent last week at a miniscule little village outside Strasbourg. I mean, smaller than you really thought existed anymore. When I think "small town", I think "American small town", i.e. "the town in which I grew up", which features many Checker's, Applebee's, etc., and I didn't think that in France it would be any different. But it was. The view from my street:

Not only are there no Sonic establishments, there is only one place in the WHOLE TOWN to buy food, at all, and it's only open a few hours per day. I felt like I was on an Antarctic science mission, periodically getting supplied from the mainland. To get meat: you are supposed to order it a day in advance, and then this little van comes through the town and a siren goes off, and all the peasants scurry out to get their meat! It was bizarre. Also, I was staying in a little compound that was more Catholic than the Vatican. My room featured a creepy angel, watching over me while I slept and condemning my dreams. It was also directly next to the church; like, it shared a wall. I think I was next to the bell, because when the bell rang it was earth-shattering inside the apt. And the bell rings all the time, presumably to structure the daily lives of the village people, but the # of times it rang was mysterious. Most prominently, it rang precisely 102 times every morning, at 6 AM.

But anyway that's all a digression: my point is about this guy I stayed with the night before the village, in Strasbourg proper, where I stayed in a hostel. My roommate was an Algerian guy with whom I had a short, painful interaction in French (my French is currently atrocious), and then the guy gave me a huge box of dates! He held out this bushel of dates to me and I took one, not thinking much of it, and then he pushed the whole thing at me and said it was a gift. I don't know how to describe the size of this box of dates. It is very big and extremely heavy (I just finally ditched it this morning). He also gave me a sandstone painting of his hometown in Algeria, which helpfully says "SOUVENIR" across the top.

Anyway, I'm not much of a gift person, and I definitely did not know how to respond to this potlach-level of extravagance. It made me extremely nervous. I didn't even want the dates. I do not like dates, especially not 5 pounds of dates that I would have to carry around with me. I had a minor mental freakout in which I tried to cycle through possible gifts I could give in exchange, as I didn't have a crate of oranges on hand (a pair of my shoes? an ipod cable?). In the end, I gave him nothing and instead made a big show of how the dates would not fit in my luggage, which they would not. His smile said, "Yes, it certainly is a huge box of dates! You are welcome!"

So after this I did some research and ascertained that, according to the interweb, gift giving is a very important part of Algerian culture and is not uncommon. So then, yesterday, I was at a restaurant staffed by Algerian people, and they put down in front of me a beer that I had not ordered. I attempted to draw lessons from my Google-anthropology, and instead of saying something I thought, "They are giving me a gift! It is part of their culture!" So I drank it, and was duly charged for it. Thus I have learned an important lesson about cultural essentialism.