What u have learned from other cultures? ( Archived) (113)

Plenty of both. But all amount to the same: all cultures are valid.

Maybe not for me, personally, but valid.

There's a scene in the film Pulp Fiction in which John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson discuss Travolta's trip to France. In the course of describing a french McDonald's, Travolta observes, "It's the little things you notice."

Just so. When I first went to Europe I discovered the cigarette-vending machines had different prices for each brand. (Nowadays, of course, such machines are virtually extinct here in the USA anyway. But back then they were common, and prices were universal regardless of brand.) Now, nonsmokers will shrug and say, so what. But it made me think: Well, why not? Here's a different way of doing things, and it actually seems more fair and reasonable.

I knew before I arrived, too, that I could expect to see beer served in the McDonald's, as indeed it was. What I didn't expect to see in the McD's was a spoon-shaped coffee stirrer that had been "banned" in the US some years earlier because of its reputation as a convenient "coke" spoon. And that made me think too: are we, the US populace, sacrificing our own convenience because of some people's paranoia? People want to stir their coffee, and discontinuing this shape of coffee-stirring spoon ain't gonna have any effect on cocaine usage. Only a politician or a McDonald's legal representative would think otherwise.