One of the great things about familiar old movies is that it doesn’t matter if the movie is just starting or half over. Even more important, it doesn’t matter if I fall asleep watching it. I can enjoy each brief segment, knowing what has come before and what happens after.
The Accidental Tourist is one of those movies. William Hurt and Kathleen Turner star in this movie about an unhappy couple on the brink of a divorce. I have seen it several times and in segments too. I came across it a few days ago after reading a 2010 blog entry from Mauri Ditzler, President of Monmouth College . I remembered many of my own trips abroad and related to the characters to former students and faculty who, like those created by Anne Tyler, “comfort us by demonstrating that eccentricities are often the norm”.
The premise of Accidental Tourist is that while traveling in a foreign country for the first time we experience inconvenience and new challenges at every turn. Unless we embrace the challenge and opportunity to learn something new, we fall back to that which is familiar within a foreign culture. I have shuttled hundreds of Monmouth students and ACM /GLCA faculty through Asia and Europe and experienced this phenomenon first hand.
The main character in Accidental Tourist, played by William Hurt, creates guide books that allow the traveler to successfully navigate exotic and famous locales. One example is finding a hotel where English is spoken, calling a car service for a ride to the airport, or even finding a McDonald’s restaurant when you become tired of the locale fare.
The Accidental Tourist approach to travel is a constant search for the familiar with a touch of local culture. While you are thousands of miles from home, the idea is to find some comfortable. The Accidental Tourist is satisfied when they can touch and feel another culture without jumping in all of the way. An Accidental Tourist experiences the pool with only their toes instead of swimming.
The happiness experienced when seeing something familiar overshadows the discovering a new culture, or mingling with the locals. For me it is just the opposite, I relish the new and unfamiliar. It is a journey I have come to love. But for many of my students, the familiarity of McDonalds in an unfamiliar place is happiness. It may be the central premise of the Accidental Tourist.
This approach is antithetical to what I teach my international business students. When they traveling or studying abroad, I instruct them to jump in, and experience and enjoy the local culture, food, and cultural events. It is particularly helpful when they experience the culture with someone living there about their same age. I encourage them to immerse themselves in all that is new and different.
Don’t search out the McDonald’s in Paris or Tokyo. Don’t be an accidental tourist.
But, in my three years of working closely with Mauri Ditzler, I learned another aspect of the Accidental Tourist principle. He taught me to always be true to our roots. From his own blog entry on the Accidental Tourist, President Ditzler said “Often college students and their professors forget to immerse themselves in the most important culture they encounter — the culture of the town and region that is their host. Many of us spend ten years or even an entire career in towns like Monmouth without enjoying what our hosts have to offer”.
He related the following story: “Some years ago a professor told me how much he enjoyed taking groups of students on study trips to distant city where he had grown up. What a joy it was to introduce them to the restaurants and plays and the hustle and bustle of his childhood neighborhood. I asked him if, in thirty years of teaching in a small Midwestern town, he had ever been to the local county fair or to the banjo festival fifty miles down the road, or the various small town celebrations in the surrounding community. He hadn’t and didn’t seem to see the irony of not allowing his friends or even his students to enjoy introducing him to the culture they had experienced as a child.
Colleges and universities work to provide a self-contained community. Our students eat, sleep, study, and play with little need to leave campus. Professors and presidents can and should return to campus for concerts, lectures, sports, and meals. But, if we are not careful we spend four important years or even an entire career living in a region without experiencing what that community has to offer. And, when we don’t experience a community we can’t truly be a part of that community. We observe but don’t enjoy. We take services but give little in return”.
