Cross-cultural communication （91）　

91) A good story from a trip
There were several incidents during my trip to Europe in the summer of 2019, which got me thinking about ID. Here I would like to introduce an episode in which I was helped by someone I happened to meet on the trip, and my thoughts at the time.

This happened when I visited San Sebastian in the Basque region of Spain. On the first night, I visited the old town, where there were lots of bars. My wife and I had quite a lot of alcohol and ended up returning to my hotel in the middle of the night, but the atmosphere of the town had changed completely from the daytime, and I seemed to have taken a wrong turn, so I had trouble finding my way to the hotel. A middle-aged American couple I met on the way asked me if I was lost, and the husband skillfully used the map app on his smartphone to guide me to the hotel, which was very close by. It was only a 10-minute journey, but it was in the middle of the night. When I thanked him, he said, “Don't worry, our hotel is in the same direction.” I'm sure that wasn't the case. He was a nice middle-aged man with glasses like Bill Gates, so I replied, “You look like Bill Gates, you may be his cousin, aren’t you?” He burst out laughing and said, “I wish I was related to such a rich man.” and we parted ways late at night, laughing together.

In the second half of my trip, I was scheduled to arrive in Paris late at night from Nice. However, by chance, there was an earlier flight available at the Nice airport, so I was able to board it. Therefore, I arrived at the address of the “hotel” in Paris not at midnight, but around 8 pm. The address was correct, but there was no sign for the hotel. It looked like a normal Paris apartment. I tried calling the number of the person in charge that was on the hotel reservation website, but I couldn't get through on the mobile phone I had brought from Japan. When I asked several people who looked like local residents in the area, they all said that this was not a hotel. I saw two young men who looked like good-natured people drinking coffee in a cafe around the corner. When I explained the situation to them in my poor French, one of them went around the corner to the address in question, checked that the address was correct, and then called the person in charge on his smartphone to explain the situation. The other young man even said to me, “If it's too difficult in French, you can use English.” While we were doing this, the middle-aged woman in charge arrived and we were able to resolve the situation. As I had thought, this was not a hotel, but rather a room in the owner's apartment. She lives in a different apartment nearby, and the system is that she meets guests at the entrance to the apartment at the time they arrive. So the problem arose because we arrived earlier than the time we had notified them of. There was no mention of this on the website, but when I asked a friend who lives in Paris later, I was told that this sort of thing happens a lot here.

If we had not been able to get help from anyone in these two incidents, we would have been left with nothing but bad memories. But when we were helped by such nice people with whom we could exchange such stylish conversation, the trouble was transformed into a good memory.
The word “omotenashi” (hospitality) that swept the nation when Tokyo was chosen to host the Olympics was not about doing anything elaborate or special, but about providing natural, slightly stylish help like this.

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