As histórias de viagens 1: Giving people the benefit of the doubt

Hi guys, the last piece was quite technical, exploring what it was like to travel to Portugal during a pandemic with all of these restrictions - in this piece, I am going to go back to what I enjoy writing about which is to share with you some of the social interactions I've had with the locals during this trip. I love meeting people when I travel, that's one aspect of holidays that I enjoy the most. I would like to contrast two experiences I have had in Portugal, both relating to restaurants/cafes. In the first story, I was at the Riberia in Porto - this is the most touristy spot of Porto where you have loads of nice restaurants facing the waterfront, offering spectacular views. I would compare it to Boat Quay in Singapore, except of course the views are even more stunning and the weather is so much better. Prices there are typically higher than other restaurants in town where the locals eat but I thought, why the hell not - I'm on holiday, I want a nice experience and I'll have one dinner there. The food wasn't too bad but it wasn't that great either but the restaurant made a mistake with the bill - you see, we took the set menu of a starter + main course + desert + coffee for a fixed price and the waiter who brought us our bill charged us for the coffees which were supposed to be a part of the set menu. Normally this will be the kind of mistake I would try to rectify on the spot - but do allow me to explain what happened that evening. 

There is an 11 pm Covid-curfew in Portugal so the restaurants needed to get everyone out before 11 pm or risk a fine if we had remained on the premises a minute after 11 pm. However, the staff were quite disorganized - at exactly 10:53 pm, they made an announcement that they needed everyone to pay up and get out before 11 pm, giving us exactly 7 minutes to finish what we were doing, settle our bill and leave. I needed to use the washroom so my husband paid up whilst I went to the toilet but when I got back, I realized that we were overcharged for the coffees which were supposed to have been a part of the set menu. I tried to speak to a member of staff but all she would say to me was, "you must leave now, please go down the stairs." I tried to look for the waiter who made the mistake with the bill but he was nowhere to be found. The situation was downright chaotic - I was trying really hard to find that particular waiter whilst every other member of staff was pleading with me to evacuate the building at once. My husband said, "it's just 3 euros, leave it, it's not a big deal." But for me, it was more a matter of principle because I did suspect that restaurants like that would pull this kind of cheap scam to add items to the bill secretly at closing time, then hurry the customers to pay up whilst everyone was in a terrible hurry to leave. In the end, I was practically forced out of the building via the back door by a member of staff as if the building was on fire and thus I was very unhappy about the way I had been treated. So, was this a deliberate attempt to scam me of 3 euros, or simply a sign of a completely disorganized, incompetent team of waiters?

I went another restaurant in Porto for dinner and this was how they handled the situation: as they sat me down, they told me exactly what time the restaurant had to close because of the Covid-curfew and if I could pay up once the food had been served, so as to avoid a mad rush at closing time. It was calm and well-organized, you could tell that the staff there knew exactly how to handle the situation when it came to closing time. So when I got back to London, I left the restaurant who overcharged me a bad review on TripAdvisor but I also went further to write them an email to complain about the way the situation was handled. What happened next surprised me: within 20 minutes, I got a reply from the general manager there who offered a groveling apology about what happened and whilst the email was in bad English, it was very clear that he genuinely felt bad about the way his team had messed up and he asked me for my bank details, so he could send me the 3 euros at once. I thought okay, fair enough, I then told him to cover the cost of the transfer so I would not have to pay for the money to be converted to pound sterling, since I didn't have a Euro bank account. He then said sure, just tell me what the cost will be and I will cover it. I offered to send him photos of me in the restaurant along with a scan of the receipt detailing the mistake but he said that wasn't necessary at all, he just wanted to put things right with me. Within minutes, he had done the transfer and sent me a scan of the receipt of the transfer, the money ought to hit my bank account within three working days. Well I really didn't expect that; after all, they could have just ignored my email and it would be just yet another bad review on TripAdvisor. But no this was a genuine mistake and they are indeed sorry. 

The second incident that I want to share with you was from the quaint town of Guimarães. Porto is a actually fairly small city, there is the quaint and touristy historic center full of beautiful grand buildings then there are the sprawling suburbs where the tourists never visit. I planned a few day trips out of Porto using the Portuguese train network - the trains are regular, efficient and actually really cheap, a train journey that takes 60 to 75 minutes can cost around 3.25 euros only. So when we arrived at the town Guimarães, we decided to have a coffee break; so we went into a small cafe run by an old man who did some stupid things to annoy me. Like where do I begin? I speak Portuguese! It isn't fluent but Portuguese is actually pretty close to Catalan, Italian, Spanish, and French - Catalan is my 9th language, Italian is my 6th language, Spanish is my 4th language and French is my 2nd language, I understand practically everything they say and whilst I may make some mistakes when trying to express myself in Portuguese by accidentally using an Spanish word or pronouncing a Portuguese word with a Spanish accent, but I have no problems expressing myself in Portuguese and I would have thought that solely based on the way I spoke Portuguese rather well, I would have come across as an very cosmopolitan European person who spoke several European languages fluently. In fact, I always joke that despite being of a non-white ethnic minority, my brain is more European than 99.9999% of white Europeans because the fact that I speak more European languages than 99.9999% of white European people given that I speak over 20 European languages. But did this old man at the cafe notice that? No - he was just so fixated with the fact that I looked East Asian. 

So what was the first thing he did was he clasped his palms together and bowed as I entered the cafe. I thought, that's fucking racist because nobody does that shit and you're a stupid, ignorant old man. I then spoke to him in Portuguese but he replied in bad English despite the fact that I told him a number of times that I can speak his language. Then to add insult to injury, he insisted on speaking to my white Irish husband in Portuguese despite the fact that my husband speaks no Portuguese at all and had been totally reliant on me to do all the communicating in Portuguese on this trip. So despite the fact that I had to translate what the old man said to him into English and translate my husband's replies back into Portuguese for him, this old man still insisted on speaking to my husband in Portuguese and to me in bad English. He had this small statue of a Buddha in his cafe (bizarre, don't ask me why) and he moved the statue right next to our table so the Buddha was staring right at me. He then declared to me in bad English, "I have the Santo Buddha!" Santo means saint in Portuguese and holy fuck - like where do I even begin? Buddha is not a saint for crying out loud, the concept of saints is quintessentially Catholic (the vast majority of Portuguese people are Catholics) and in any case, I'm not a Buddhist either. So I explained to him in Portuguese, "Eu não sou budista, na verdade sou ateu." (I am not Buddhist, I am actually an atheist.) I repeated it twice slowly and clearly and he replied in bad English (whilst clasping his palms together as if in prayer), "yes, you like the Santo Buddha?" Oh my husband was looking on in utter horror at that point as he knew just how mortally offended I was then! Here's a popular comedy clip to that does capture exactly how I felt then.

Was the old man at the cafe racist? No, he wasn't - he was just ignorant and had extremely poor social skills. He probably didn't meet a lot of foreign tourists in that little town and thus hasn't met any Chinese or East Asian people before. His efforts to established rapport had totally failed but was there any malice involved? No, there wasn't - I can tell the difference quite easily. In fact, we have a clear case of the Dunning-Kruger effect here: this old man at the cafe was so hopelessly bad at establishing rapport with me that he didn't even realize how disastrous his attempts had been, even though it was evident that it was a car crash in slow motion when observed by a third party. Someone who witnessed that incident could walk away with the impression that older people in Portugal are shockingly racist and that old man was trying to mock or insult me. But no, that would be an inaccurate reflection of the situation: this old man was ignorant, had awful social skills and was just just fucking stupid, but he wasn't racist. I think it is very important to look at the context before jumping to any conclusions. Did this old man have much contact with many foreigners, especially East Asian tourists if he ran a cafe in a very small town in the Portuguese countryside? Probably not, especially since the pandemic had meant that very few foreign tourists actually visited Portugal in the last 18 months and in any case, most tourists would probably only stick to the bigger cities like Lisbon and Porto, whilst a very small town like Guimarães was well off the well-trodden routes used by most tourists. However, there is one more Chinese dimension to this story in Guimarães.

As we were exploring the old town, we stumbled upon a Chinese restaurant in the old town - it was the last thing I expected and I just couldn't resist taking a look at the menu. Whilst I was standing there reading the menu at the door of the restaurant, two members of staff noticed me and they probably hadn't seen a Chinese tourist in ages because of Covid-19, so they started talking to me in Mandarin as they were curious where I was from. They were friendly and we started chatting, mostly about the pandemic. Sure enough, they tried to speak to my Irish husband in Portuguese and so I asked them if they could speak to him in English instead but no, they couldn't and one of them said, "好心你呀, 我连葡萄牙语都还没有学好, 你还要我说英语!" (Goodness me, I can barely speak Portuguese and you want me to speak English too?) So I asked if they had arrived recently from China but they had both been in Portugal for well over ten years and when I switched to Portuguese with them, they thought I had been living there for my whole life as I didn't have a Chinese accent. I hate to bitch but they had a really strong Chinese accent when they spoke Portuguese but that's hardly surprising - go to any Chinese restaurant in London Chinatown and the staff there will probably speak English with an equally strong Chinese accent. Sorry to have to point out the obvious but waiters and chefs who work in Chinese restaurants in Europe tend not to be highly educated or rich - there are probably some highly trained chefs in the top end restaurants who command a higher salary but your average Chinese restaurant in a small town is unlikely to hire a top-end highly skilled master chef and would instead hire staff from China - who would work long hours for a very low salary. 

So if the old man from the cafe in Guimarães would have probably crossed paths with the stereotypically Chinese staff from this Chinese restaurant given that the Chinese restaurant was only about 490 meters away and just a 6 minute walk from the old man's cafe (according to Google maps). Hence it wasn't like this old man has never ever met Chinese people in his life before given the presence of that Chinese restaurant in Guimarães. If I may point out the obvious, these people at the Chinese restaurant are nothing like me - they speak Mandarin as a first language and struggled on in Portuguese as a second language, they probably spoke enough Portuguese to communicate with guests and their vocabulary probably revolved around Chinese food but they would struggle to have a conversation about politics or philosophy in Portuguese. Culturally, they were as Chinese as they come and dare I say, if I were to imagine an un-PC image of your stereotypical Chinese migrant in the West working in a Chinese restaurant, then they would fit the bill perfectly. I don't want you to think that I am looking down at the staff in that Chinese restaurant or that I somehow think I am better than them - I am merely pointing out that if that old man from the cafe had interacted with the staff from that Chinese restaurant in his town, then it would have been obvious where he got those stereotypical impressions of Chinese people from. After all, there's no smoke without fire. Still, if he had better social skills and had been more observant then he might have at least realized that I was getting seriously annoyed with him and wasn't at all impressed. 

So let me analyze it this way: statistically, there are approximately 1.75 billion people in the world who look East Asian - I'm including anyone who is Chinese, Mongolian, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese and generally from that part of the world who would have facial features like mine. If you were to look at that sample, then the chances of you finding an East Asian person who is yellow on the outside and totally white on the inside like me (ie. the famous banana) is actually pretty darn rare - you are most likely to find such bananas amongst second or third generation Asian Americans who were born and bred in America, thus they would be culturally a lot more American than Asian as a result of growing up in the United States. However, the vast majority of East Asian people would be a lot more Asian: they are as yellow on the outside as they are on the inside, just like the people working at the Chinese restaurant in Guimarães whom I had that friendly chat with. Yes I recognize that I am an exception to the norm in this case in being a banana. But this begs the question: do you default to stereotypes when you meet someone - is that ever an acceptable strategy to establish rapport? The answer is no, that's never the case. I know what is going on in this old man's head: he noticed that I looked Chinese and so he wanted to impress me by trying to say and do everything he knew about China and Chinese culture - that was a really dumb strategy to establish rapport because it was evident that he knew really nothing about Chinese culture. Whilst what this old man did was at best foolish (for he certainly made a fool of himself), allow me to compare this to something my nephew did quite recently in a lesson, to illustrate how a lot of people can make this same mistake. 

We were dealing with an essay question that required my nephew to "discuss the likely effects of this policy". My nephew didn't read the question properly, his eyes merely latched onto terms like unemployment and inflation in the question, so he started telling me everything he knew about unemployment and inflation without actually relating any of that to "the likely effects of this policy". Is my nephew stupid? No, but he has poor exam techniques and that's the very issue I am addressing with him: I am training him to read the question carefully and offering answers that specifically answer the question at hand. Right now, his default response is to react to the words in the question that he does understand and simply furiously writing down everything he knows about the topic - it is a terrible strategy to try to score marks in an exam because my nephew is wasting a lot of time writing stuff that he has memorized from the textbook and even if what he wrote is 100% accurate, if it doesn't specifically answer the question, he isn't going to score any points. Now this may seem like common sense, but you'll be amazed how many people perform badly in this aspect. It is what we refer to as listening/reading comprehension failure - they don't pay enough attention to what they have in front of them and thus offer an inappropriate response. Now this is something I can train my nephew to deal with more effectively in an exam situation, but who is going to train that old man in Guimarães when it comes to this aspect of his social skills? Nobody is there to tell him, "just shut up, don't speak - instead listen hard, observe and pay attention before you open your mouth." He is just going to continue making these ignorant mistakes for the rest of his life in the absence of a 'social skills coach'. 

So here's the moral of the story: when you go traveling, you will encounter people who are flawed in various ways. The staff at the restaurant were disorganized and incompetent, I had terrible service but was there any malice involved? No. Were they dishonestly trying to overcharge me? No, it was an honest mistake which they did put right the moment I had emailed them about it. Was the old man at the cafe an evil racist? No, he was just a stupid idiot with poor social skills - in fact, I actually put up with his idiocy whilst I had my coffee there because simply scolding him wouldn't solve the underlying problem that he had poor social skills. Allow me to use my nephew as an analogy: my regular readers will know that I am tutoring my nephew to help him with his A level economics exam. Admittedly, he is struggling with the subject mostly because of the fact that his teachers are shockingly lazy and incompetent. Would simply scolding my nephew miraculously improve his grades in the subject? No, it would serve no purpose at all; I would only be venting my frustration and that would upset him. Instead, I spend a lot of time studying his syllabus, making sure I am able to guide him through the test papers to prepare him for his exam - I am trying to be the best possible teacher in the world for him. So am I willing to train this old man at the cafe when it came to his social skills? No, I was simply going to finish my cup of coffee, leave and never ever see him ever again. That was why I chose not to raise the topic of his extremely poor social skills even if he was a total moron: that was his problem, not mine; so I chose not to get involved in his problems.  

That's it from me on this topic: this is why I would always try to give people the benefit of the doubt rather than assume the very worst of them for good reason and I hope I have proven to you in this post why this should always be your default response when things go wrong. I have seen pessimistic people simply jump to the wrong conclusion by assuming the very worst of others; they are the kind of people who end up believing that the world is such a horrible place and everyone really hates them. As for me, I refuse to be like that and I urge you to share in my optimism please. So what do you think? Is my optimism misplaced or do you agree with me that pessimism in this aspect serves no purpose? Have you met people like that old man from the cafe? Furthermore, when would really poor social skills finally turn into offensive racism and how do you determine that line has finally been crossed? Please look out for part 2 when I will share more stories from my recent holiday in Portugal. Please leave a comment below and many thanks for reading.