I have struggled with how to explain this… but what it boils down to is that when you are in a foreign place, and you are constantly encountering new cultures and foreign customs, and everything is exciting and confusing because you do not speak their language, then quite frequently you will find that you have little to no clue what is going on. Not with absolute certainty, at least. You'll find yourself regularly thinking, "This doesn’t make any sense, what am I missing here?" And sometimes, even after applying context clues and all your best deductive reasoning skills, the truth of the situation will still not reveal itself to you.

I never thought I'd say this, but there are some instances where you have to ask yourself, “Just how important it is for me to know exactly what it is I am seeing? You have to ask yourself, “Can I reconcile having this huge gap in my understanding of this one moment in this one day, and sleep at night knowing that I may never fully comprehend the truth of what was going on around me?”

The answer for me is almost always "No," which is why I am such a delight to travel with!

Often to the embarrassment of my travel companions, I am not beyond repeatedly asking dozens of strangers to explain something to me, until I finally find someone who speaks English and will take the time to talk to me. Many people will assume that you must want something from them, something more than just information, and on many, many, occasions I have been given small amounts of money to go away.

The photo above was taken in a men's restroom at a rest stop/gas station-type establishment off the side of the road in a remote part of Jordan. So, finding out what I was looking at unfortunately involved me having to go up to random men in the bathroom. I then asked them to follow me… because I'd like to show them something… and then hopefully have them tell me their thoughts about it.

Yes, it was weird, and I didn't have many takers.

I don't think they thought I was trying to lead them like a seductress to a stall for sexy time, or anything untoward like that (or maybe some did, who knows?) but I'm pretty sure they just didn't understand what I was asking and would rather just wash their hands of me.

Several men were, in fact, just trying to wash their hands, quite literally, after having just used the facilities. Others just shook their heads and walked more briskly past me. They didn't want to get involved in whatever it was I was selling, and I don't blame them. I wouldn't want to either. I am used to this, so I eventually decided to find an employee.

This brings us to another important point about language barriers. Many low-level employees, such as the janitorial staff, are not bilingual. In fact, they oftentimes do not even speak the common tongue of wherever you are currently at in the world; they are refugees or immigrant workers, and their inability to speak the common language of the region may very well be why they took this particular job in the first place. This is just something to be aware of, a factor that frequently contributes to misunderstandings and confusion.

As a seasoned traveler, I am also aware that when confronted, most people are going to assume you are wanting something. Or at the very least, they think you are wanting to do something. If you find an employee and gesture towards something -- say, the array of little hoses and concrete stumps shown in the photo above -- you will most likely get a “Yes” or a “No”response. Yes, it's okay for you to use it, or No, it is not okay. What is much harder to communicate—and even harder for them to respond to— is when the question you are asking is simply, "Yes, but why does this thing even exist at all?"

Even if you have hired the services of a local guide, chances are, English is not their first language and probably don’t speak their native tongue, either. So inevitably, you will fail to communicate your question properly to them in words they know and understand… or they will misunderstand your question… or answer a question that you didn't ask… or not have the right words to convey what they'd like to say to you... everyone is just doing the best they can to communicate with each other, using the limited words they happen to know in a common language.

The result of all this confusion (especially in remote places where there is no internet access available for you to look something up yourself, right there on the spot) is that there are a great many spectacular things that I have seen, experienced, and photographed, that to this day, I cannot fully explain to you, because I do not quite know myself what I was witnessing or what was happening.

This can range from something mundane like not understanding a toilet fixture, to something more dramatic and dangerous, like being whisked to safety after a riot broke out in an Italian piazza, just after 9/11. To this day, all I know about the latter was that a young man gave an ostensibly impassioned speech in a language I didn’t understand, and that speech was resoundingly anti-American. Then every person around us made it unmistakably clear that we needed to get the f*ck out of there, and quickly.

With the bathroom photo above, I eventually learned that the setup was intended for men of a certain faith to wash their feet for religious purposes. And that is all I'm going to say about that, for fear of sounding like an idiot. Since the area was devoid of people and no one was actively doing anything ritualistic at the time when I was asking (I'm pretty sure the time of day, or the day of the week, or both, were wrong for such an activity), it was very hard for me to communicate what it is I wanted to know.

I have struggled for a very long time with how to succinctly ask hypothetical questions to people in other countries, whose language I do not speak, but sadly I have very little advice to give here. Such questions often end in frustration for all involved.

On this particular occasion, the janitorial man kept emphasizing that to use the area in question, I needed to pay a small toll, or "donation," and he kept repeating the amount; and I kept trying to convey that I'd gladly pay that amount, just as soon as someone told me what the area was even for! At that point, I still didn't know it was for religious feet washing and was still operating on the assumption that it was some kind of public enema/bathing area…?

I have so many stories like this, where it is all but impossible to get a coherent answer at the time and place of my question. Luckily, I had taken several photographs, and was able to show them to an English-speaking guide several days later. He knew immediately what he was looking at and gladly explained it to me.

***********************************

I wish such answers were as forthcoming regarding these LICKY LLAMAS in Peru, but no one as of yet has any idea what they were up to. It is possible that these Llamas were just messing with me.

Also, in Nepal, I never did figure out if WINTER WAS COMING...