Here is a paper I wrote about my exerince at Loy Krathong, the "new years" holiday in Thailand. It feels like so long ago now that I am here at the border! The paper looks at my own judgments upon travelers like myself. The festival is beautiful! Lanterns in the sky, little boats made of banana trees called Krathongs floating in the river.The parades are amazing as well, as pictured below!

            Loy Krathong. For all I knew two weeks ago this was an exotic Thai dish I probably wouldn’t order for fear of spicy content. As I heard the word more and more I began to think, well I don’t think this is a dish anymore, you don’t usually have a parade for a dish. (Unless it’s the street Pad Thai, in which case I find a parade totally rational if not necessary). In class one day I came to an amazing discovery: Loy Krathong is a holiday! As Friday drew nearer I realized that it wasn’t a little holiday ether, but one synonymous with new years in the U.S. I began to see people on street corners poking flowers into hunks of banana trees and fireworks stands seemed to multiply by the hour. The streets grew fuller, both with tourists and Thais, and I could feel the atmosphere escalate. Finally, as the full moon of the eleventh month of the year rose, Loy Krathong arrived. It surely didn’t enter like a dancer enters stage left, there were no graceful moves, no planned performance, no star, but it certainly didn’t enter like an drunk enters a bar, attracting unneeded attention to itself. Loy Kratong entered Chiang Mai like a student enters a the back door returning from school, as if it always belonged on the crowded streets and just now was coming home after a long year away.

            Crowded was definitely the right adjective to use above. The streets were packed as the parade passed us by and people swarmed around us like jackals surrounding their kill: “the perfect photo” .The more I walked the more I noticed the foreigners. I live in a tourist area of Chiang Mai, I am a foreigner and avid traveler, you would think I would be okay with foreigners and usually, I am. At Loy Kratong, however, it was overwhelming. Though I would see groups of Thais, mostly children, middle school aged students, and families, around every corner I saw a foreigner’s face and heard English. Guidebooks and maps were open and I couldn’t help but wonder if I could actually experience this holiday with all these other people trying to take pictures for their Christmas cards. Already annoyed the ratio of locals to foreigners I made another realization: only foreigners were carrying Krathongs, the pieces of banana tree covered in flowers, candles, and incense I mentioned earlier. It is tradition to send them down the river along with all of ones worries and hardships from the past year. What was this, a hoax? I felt like I was just taking part in a festival designed for tourists that held no local value.

            To investigate if my sentiments were valid I asked a few people what Loy Kratong was, pretending to not know a thing about it. Thais shyly explained that is was a festival for the water and that, yes, they did attend ever year. The foreigners I talked to varied in their responses. Some had clearly read their guide books and were happy to basically recite the Lonely Planet explanation: It is a Thai ceremony that happens ever year to celebrate the water god and send off the bad of the past year and praying for good in the year to come. It is a Thai new year. Others mumbled something about setting Krathong in the water or lighting lanterns and a few outwardly confessed they had no idea what it was, but were having a great time. Needless to say, talking with these people didn’t make me feel better about being there. I inwardly cursed western society for the umpteenth time, wondering at how tourism can strip local value from most anything, and wandered off to my hostel to sulkily write about my experience.

            What the locals and foreigners alike explained to me is true. Loy Krathong, as professor Mike had explained earlier that day during our Krathong making lesson the festival is a national celebration that happens on the full moon of the 11^th month of every year. Krathong, made out of banana trunks and flowers take to the rivers and moats, taking with them the struggles of the past year and lanterns take to the sky, creating ever-shifting constellations that hold good wishes or prayers for the year to come. The most widely accepted meaning of the festival is that it a tribute to the water gods, but some tie religious meaning to it, some environmental meaning, and some just treat it as a good excuse for a good time. No matter the individual’s view, it is a festival that celebrates the water, the moon, and a new year to come.

            Before we can analyze my (maybe slightly overdramatic) negative response to a beautiful and well-enough-intentioned festival, I have to look at how I define the term foreigner. I like to fancy myself an educated traveler, if for no other reason then because I am in school when I travel and my school studies the culture where I am traveling. This puts me is a different category than the ex-pat who has simply moved away from the U.S., the vacationers who travel for a few weeks to “get away from it all” and especially the backpackers who drink and enjoy their way through their host country at their own pace. If you can’t tell from my language use, let me spell it out for you: I am bias against other travelers- especially foreigners. I have studied many ways in which tourism hurts local communities; in fact I dedicated a research project to the topic. Maybe so that I can justify my lifestyle to myself or maybe to remind myself I am in school I mentally set myself apart from foreigners. I search for flaws and when I see they travel differentially (less educationally) then I do I brush them off as ignorant. This language is harsh and is not always true, I have met an accepted many a foreigner as an intelligent being and friend, but as a general rule I judge foreigners negatively more often the not. The fact of the matter, however, is that I am just as foreign as the backpacker, tourist and ex-pat. More importantly, even in the first few paragraphs of this very paper one can see I can be just as ignorant and bias as the next person.

Milton Bennett has developed a test called The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS), a way of measuring an outsider’s intercultural competence in new cultures. Bennett suggests that there are six stages of development, though they are not always experienced sequentially or individually so I hesitate to call them stages. This process begins with denial; refusing to see anything other then ones own culture as a legitimate culture. A person in denial sees their own culture and the others. A person in the second stage, defense, acknowledges that outside cultures exist but are of the opinion that his or her culture is better or that his or her host culture is better. Minimization of differences, acceptance of differences, adaption to the new culture, and integration of that culture into one’s identity follow as the final stages of cross-cultural sensitivity. (Bennett 63). I have found that these “stages” have helped me understand what I am feeling on many occasions in my travels. After breaking out of an exhausting cycle of defense and minimization last year I now strive toward the acceptance and adaption stages of intercultural development in my travels. I try not to judge other cultures too quickly and not judge my own. I search for differences and similarities. I always try to adapt to a new culture instead of expecting the culture to adapt to me.

As I sat on my bed reading about Bennett’s test after Loy Kratong I had a realization. In my flurry to understand Thai culture, Taiwanese culture, Latin Culture, Italian Culture, and other cultures I have been exposed to I sill remain rooted in the defense stage with one culture: the foreigners culture. Foreigners don’t have a specific language, they aren’t all from a specific place (in fact that is what defines them), they don’t follow the same religion, and many are not permanently part of the foreigners’ culture. Nevertheless, there is a foreigner culture. It can be more difficult to spot on the surface because there are fewer physical signs (skin tone, language, religious practice, birth place), but as long as a person travels they are part of it.

As Bennett describes it the defense stage is “Defense against cultural difference is the state in which one’s own culture (or an adopted culture) is experienced as the only viable one - the most “evolved” form of civilization, or at least the only good way to live.” (Bennett 65). I acknowledge my cultural identity as an educated traveler, I actually identify with it more then I do with my country. I am an educated, traveling student. I acknowledge that there are other travelers; backpackers, vacationers, ex-pats. But never have I been accepting of these other ways of travel. Being a traveling student has shaped so much of my identity that any other way of traveling seems useless in my eyes. I can’t believe that someone could achieve such a rich experience from a new culture in any way but my own. As you, the reader may have noticed this sentiment is hypocritical. I am judging people who do the same things as me and range from being less to more educated then myself. I am generalizing an entire group as being all one thing, ignorant, but conveniently excluding myself.

I acknowledge that this is hypocritical and a practice that will just exhaust me, but I still can’t bring myself to accept that there are other ways to travel that are just as good or even better then the way I travel, my three years of experiential travel education hold me in place. I am not sure if I will ever be able to accept that other types of travelers are equally as justified in their travel and actions, but I can try. After realizing this I try to observe my judging mind and let my negative, judgmental blanket thoughts pass without clinging to them in typical meditative fashion.

I suspect, however, that what will help me most to release this newly realized internal bias is not meditation, mindful breathing, or sending compassion toward others, as useful as these things can be. I think my most useful tool in this struggle is a sense of humor. I can’t count how many times I have been reminded about the importance of laughing at others and myself. I did something that makes me seem culturally insensitive and feel like a foreigner? I laugh now, because I am a foreigner. I encounter a group of ex-pats and discuss their sentiments toward the U.S.? I laugh because I can see myself in them. I see a backpacker drunk at two in the afternoon? I laugh because, well, because it’s funny. I go to Loy Krathong with a sea of foreigners? I laugh because I judge them and I am a part of them, I laugh because of the surreal experience of setting my own Krathong in the river, I laugh because the lanterns create a whole new set of shifting stars around the full moon, I laugh because I am with my friends, I laugh because I can’t believe how lucky I am to be alive, I laugh because I am studying in Thailand and this is part of school for me. Mostly though, I laugh because it is reminder to not take myself too seriously. That is the best way to view a bias you aren’t ready to get rid of just yet- with humor.

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