Danish on the Bus

On what was supposedly going to be a relaxing overnight trip on the bus to Mendoza, we happened to be loaded onto a sleeper bus with a tour of Danish folks.  Therefore, what was a regularly controlled and simple trip, became a bus full of consecutive interpretation at 5 times the volume of the Argentine server and drunken Scandinavian revelry for an old Dane's umpty-ith birthday.  Though believing firmly in the celebration of life and being able to enjoy one's later years (though why shouldn't we enjoy the earlier ones as well?), it was still a grueling bus trip for many reasons.

It's curious to see how a busload of white people in a mainly white country interact.  The major difference being in language, and the Danes made sure everyone else on the bus heard that they were there.  Well, I'll say that it was the tour guide who made it known.  I jumped every time he interpreted as he found it important to speak 5 times louder than then Argentine, no rolls of my eyes could tell him how annoying it was.  But if it were merely noise, I'd put it off to just that he was trying to help the old-timers hear him better.

What happened was that he broke out their own stash of wines, mixing the random reds with each other and urging the Scandinavian inclination towards drunken revelry.  As the meal passed and red wine became whisky and rum, there was one moment that sparked me.  The tour guide rang out with (in English) "and the bottle, Made in Chiiiiiina!!!!"  He had obviously spotted me and Syd sitting right behind the massively tall frames of the Nordic bunch, so what could he mean by that declaration?  Why did I even need to worry that he was aiming at us?  The whole Danish kingdom roared with laughter, and the embers in my belly burned like a volcano ready to blow.

Obviously, being in a foreign country and trying to enjoy my vacation, I didn't bother.  However, the fact that a bunch of white folks in some foreign country full of alot of other white folks (Argentines are very European, my friend was told that three of every Starbucks employee was actually from Colombia, and if race/skin color were not one of the main identifiers, I'd be surprised.  And I do hope someone will surprise me with some historical smackdown right now) made me angry on a basis of race (you might argue ethnicity, but how the hell would he have known we were exactly Chinese) was messed up.

Then, I though about the fact that this tour was for one Dane's birthday celebration, a whole group of his old buddies able to traverse oceans and imbibe in peace with a large group of his buddies, and how this compared to my parents.  My parents, who have been working since their early teens, through war, poverty, and struggling through lower middle class aspirations that their children would become oppressors in their golden years, would most likely find it hard pressed to enjoy their later years as these white folks. 

The bus trip was eye-opening, and I only hope that it doesn't take such comparisons to see why our worlds are so fragmented and split up into inequitable divides.  But then again, I'm the one with enough to venture as these old white folks and galavant in a foreign country, no?  Sure.  Minus my credit that I'm relying on and forcing my friend to rough it as much as possible so that I can do this.  Whatever the reality is, I know that mine is not part of theirs, and that theirs is on some plane founded on oppression and exploitation.