International Travel Essay

No matter how much you read ahead of time, you’ll be confronted with culture and custom that you are unprepared for. The farther removed the culture is from your own, the more you can expect to be surprised. Novice travelers will struggle with the basics†¦ everything from getting a cab to finding a public bathroom can offer a challenge. Veteran travelers will be more secure with the small stuff and that may offer them a firm-enough foundation to give them the confidence to try the more challenging things. That is where we were on our recent adoption trip to China: Veteran third-time travelers who were confident that we could do anything and blend right in. Our trip to the real Chinese restaurant taught us otherwise. It was our second week in China. We were there with our two previously adopted Chinese children, ages ten and eleven, and we’d just added a new family member. She was a new daughter, age twelve, and she spoke not a word of English. Things had been going very well, and our new daughter was really fitting in seamlessly. This being our third trip, we felt pretty cocky. We snickered good-naturedly as first-time travelers timidly peeked outside the doors of the hotel onto the Chinese thoroughfare. They might make a run for the McDonald’s now and again, or go all the way up the block to KFC, but actually heading out into the big city, sans guide, was not on their bucket list for the time being. That was not for us. We decided that we’d all head out to an authentic local restaurant, the sort frequented by the Chinese rather than by westerners; the type with plastic curtains rather than doors; a restaurant with no western influences beyond the ubiquitous presence of Coca-Cola products. Three hungry children herded between us, my wife and I set out to find just the right place. We headed out the less-frequently-used rear entrance of Guangzhou’s China Hotel, which spilled out onto the broad Panfu Avenue, a typical busy main thoroughfare. It was filled with small shops and stalls, looking shabby and temporary to Western eyes, though in reality, permanent centers of street commerce. We wound our way through typical robust foot traffic, straining to keep the kids together amidst the crowds. We passed up several restaurants close to the hotel in an effort to separate ourselves from the tourist-oriented places, but several blocks away we came upon the Liushen Xiguan restaurant, which translates roughly as â€Å"Traditions of the Six Gods† restaurant. It was clad in gold paint, trimmed with red cloth, and several large Buddhas smiled at us as they stood sentry on the sidewalk. The wall in the entryway was covered with awards given by the local of chamber of commerce, and as an added benefit, the awards each offered a picture of the winning dish. Velvet padded bamboo chairs lined the wall in the waiting area. Peeking through the windows, we could see that the dining area was enormous. Such a place was likely to have good food, was clearly worth a stop. It was 4:50 when we asked to be seated, but oddly, the dining room was dark and the hostess desk was empty†¦ as were the tables. No table cloths or place settings were to be seen, and the chairs were upended and sitting atop the tables. A hostess apprehensively approached us to talk. After much arm flapping and hand gesturing, we came to understand that the restaurant would not open until five P. M, although we could not see how it would do so. Not a soul was to be seen besides the hostess, and nothing was prepared for customers. We began to have second thoughts and we started to wonder if we’d misunderstood the hour that service would start. We decided to wait for a bit, if only to rest. At the stroke of five the lights came on to illuminate a dozen employees rushing from the kitchen, bearing ornate livery for the tables, and tools of the trade for the hungry guests. The dining space went from abandoned warehouse to friendly, well-lit, white linen appareled eatery in a matter of moments. Once seated, we began to notice differences from what we expected in a restaurant. Soup bowls appeared, as well as a pot of tea, tea cups, and a large empty ceramic bowl. We watched the other tables to see what use our fellow diners would have for the bowl. Some diners were watching us. Perhaps they didn’t know what to make of the empty bowl either? More likely, they were wondering what a couple of Americans were doing here staring at them too. Other diners were taking the cups, bowls, and spoons and washing them in the tea, using a rather practiced method. The used tea was discarded into the empty bowl. I wasn’t sure if this meant we needed to do our own dishes, or if it was simply a custom. To be on the safe side, we started washing. I noticed curious grins. Was I doing it wrong? Did we appear like children playing in a wading pool? Unblemished by the bemused stares, we toweled ourselves dry, and with confidence in the cleanliness of our place settings, we dug into the menu. There were thirty pages of menu items. Many had pictures and some had English translations, though mostly the translations read â€Å"Pork and vegetables in sauce† or â€Å"Chicken with vegetables in sauce†. While I’m certain that was accurate, it was of little value in helping us to choose from amongst the twenty five varieties of â€Å"Pork with vegetables in sauce†. We struggled with the pictures and each made the best possible dinner choices we could, with a few appetizers added in. The waitress took our order promptly and returned in a few minutes with my meal, and nothing else. No appetizers. No other orders. Just mine. She placed it in the center of the table and left. My meal was far larger than I expected. In fact, it was large enough to feed us all. Suddenly we grasped what we had missed. The table top was essentially an enormous lazy Susan. It appeared that we would be eating family style. Other tables were sharing food as well, so we set out to share the barbecued pork I had ordered. A few moments later the next meal appeared, and shortly thereafter, the next, and then the next, each meal large enough to feed a family of five. Even the items we’d been led to believe were appetizers seemed enormous. Before long, we had enough food for forty people. There was so much, that the server was barely able to find room for the last steaming bowl of fried rice. I’ve been to weddings that served less food than we’d purchased. We were clearly the center of attention now as we made an effort to at least put a dent in the spread we were responsible for. The pictures didn’t do the food justice, nor were they worth the thousands words I’d so often been promised. The fried rice was filled with boldly colored fresh carrots, peas and sprouts, and those turned out to be the only vegetables on the table that we easily recognized. We were served steamed and pan-fried dumplings, bursting with juices and filled with meat stuffing. There was a whole roasted chicken, the bright yellow color of a school bus. When I say whole, I mean it. Chicken in China often comes with feet, head and beak attached. It appeared that our dinner had walked straight from the barnyard to the oven. A second chicken was served in pieces which had the bright red color of a fire engine. Both birds were juicy and offered bold flavor, the yellow one having been seasoned with a curry and the red one more of a peppery spice. The seafood dish seemed a bit more tentacle-filled than we were used to, and it went largely unloved. I still have no clue to this day what was in it, though I will admit that the description â€Å"fish with vegetables in sauce† seemed unerringly accurate. Our crisp pork on a platter seemed straightforward. No sauce or vegetables, though I could swear that the translation of the dish said they were included. Our meal was rounded out by a course of tea smoked duck. The dark meat had been roasted over a tea leaf fueled fire and had a deep rich flavor. After some of our other mis-translations, I would not have been surprised to have had it served in a pipe for actual smoking, but it wound up being the best part of the meal. I do hope it was duck though. We left a great deal of food on the table. In very American fashion, we asked for containers to take the remaining food for thirty back to our hotel. That doesn’t seem to be the norm in China, but we packed up our bags and loaded up with more victuals than a United Nations food convoy. I was concerned about the cost, but for all the entertainment that our endeavors provided for the patrons, perhaps they should have paid us. The price was thankfully low; bless you generous exchange rate. One last problem appeared. The tip. It is insulting to over tip in China. After having the experience of being publicly chastised by a cab driver for over tipping, I was leery. Loaded down as we were, there could be no quick escape should I insult the staff with too many Yuan, or too few. The Six Gods must have been watching out for us though. The older hostess (manager, cook, waitress, cashier†¦ no real idea) took pity on me and selected a bill to leave as a gratuity. It was far less than I would have chosen. I’d have given her double that just for getting me out with my remaining dignity intact. We wound our way back to the hotel, filled with a good meal, good stories, and a good deal of new knowledge about how things are done in China. I mentioned the experience to our guide, who filled in a few of the blank spots. He was happy to hear that we were treated well by the local people. I was happy for the experience. A few days later, we coaxed some other group members to come out with us to the restaurant. We displayed our dining skills for them without ever mentioning the difficulties with which they were acquired. After all, that is how veterans maintain their mystique.

Boss Personal Statement Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

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Teen Drinking Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Teen Drinking - Essay Example However, our society has not caught up with the evolution of the teenager. They are still viewed as members of our society who need to be constantly policed and told what to do and when. This is the situation that applies to the drinking laws in relation to American teenagers. The rest of the world though, have come to acknowledge that it is better to recognize that teenagers will drink alcohol due to exterior influences and, therefore, society must learn to adapt and ensure that they drink responsibly instead. That is the focus of the T.R. Reid essay â€Å"Let My Children Drink†, while Joseph Califano Jr. chooses to oppose the view of Reid in his own essay titled â€Å"Don't Make Teen Drinking Easier†. Although I see the point of Mr. Califano, I must agree with the benefits as described in Mr. Reid's essay. That is because teenage drinking does happen and it cannot be ignored. The three points that I will be raising in this paper are that: 1. Teenagers who know their p arents trust them to drink responsibly make for more mature adults. 2. Anything done illegally is more likely to draw teenagers to try the activity and go overboard in the process. Teens will also commit crimes regardless of being drunk or not. 3. Lowering the drinking age will make teenagers mature faster in terms of personal responsibility and logical thinking. The worst age that a human being can be stuck in would have to be the wild, wonderful, and sometimes wacky teenage years. It is during this time in a teenagers life that he learns to experiment and differentiate for ourselves what, as adults, shall be the right and wrong actions for him. This is the time when releasing the parental restraints slowly reaps its benefits most specially in terms of teenage drinking. As Mr. Reid put it so effectively in his essay (Reid): As a wandering Post correspondent, I have raised teenagers in three places: Tokyo, London and Colorado. No parent will be surprised to read that high school and college students had easy access to alcohol in all three places. In all three countries, kids sometimes got drunk. But overseas, they did their drinking at a bar, a concert or a party. There were adults -- and, often, police -- around to supervise. As a result, most teenagers learned to use alcohol socially and responsibly. And they didn't have to hide it from their parents. By allowing teenagers to drink in a supervised situation, they are forced to take responsibility for their actions stemming from alcohol consumption. The presence of adults and other persons of authority is a clear indication to them that they will be allowed to have fun but not go overboard about it. This is the kind of situation that directly appeals to teenagers. It is obvious that the lower drinking age works for the teens mentioned in Reid's article because they are given full responsibility for their actions. You choose to drink, you take responsibility for whatever happens if you get drunk. End of story. That is the kind of maturing life lesson that teenagers so badly need in their lives. It is probably a stand that, if presented to most underage teenagers in America today, they would gladly agree to in order to prove that they can actually be as responsible as their adult counterparts if not more. However, Mr. Califano strongly disagrees with Mr. Reid simply because he is overprotective and unable to trust that a teenager, when given the freedom to choose, will choose to do the right thing. His data that explains that (Califano); â€Å"British fifteen and sixteen year olds were more than twice as likely as Americans to binge drink (50% vs. 24%) and to have been intoxicated within the past thirty days (48% vs. 21%).†

Health and Social Care Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Health and Social Care - Essay Example Unfortunately, the theory was criticized for its inability to explain how humans organized and perceive sensations (Jarrett, 2012). Gestalts theory attempted to solve this inadequacy by validating that the mind organizes sense stimuli in order to produce perception holistically. However, the functionality focused on the functionality of the mind as opposed to the structures. This theory was influence by Darwin’s theory of natural selection thus it focused on the adaptive behavior values. The above theories were limited to the conscious part of the human mind. This prompted Sigmund Freud through the psychoanalytic theory to incorporate the unconscious part of the mind as a crucial part of psychology. The theory assumes that humans are similar to animals since they both have sexual and instincts which motivate behavior (Chadee, 2011). In contemporary psychology, psychological approaches entail some assumptions on human behavior. Despite the existence of several perspectives, there is none that is more correct then the other as each possesses certain strengths and weaknesses (Campbridge Technicals, 2015). Perhaps this is because of their various facets of approaches to the comprehension of the human behavior. The different psychological perspectives are behaviorist perspective, humanistic perspective, psychodynamic perspective, cognitive psychology, biological psychology, evolutionary perspective, and socio-cultural perspective (Jarrett, 2012). This perspective illuminates how humans (animals inclusive) are controlled by the environment. Their behaviors are as a result of what has been learnt from the environment. These environmental factors are referred to as stimuli that influence human behavior. In this scenario, the human behavior is a response towards the stimuli. The approach encompasses the classical conditioning and operant conditioning as that

Personal Understanding and Interpersonal Communication Essay

Personal Understanding and Interpersonal Communication - Essay Example Meanwhile, non-verbal communication (NVC) is something that we do not pay attention to during communication as well as to listeing as it performs functions of face-to-face interaction that do not rely primarily on the content of what we say. Here we are concerned with how we make ourselves known through, for example, a look, gesture, postural shift or trembling voice. At the very outset, however, it should be stressed that distinguishing between verbal and nonverbal communication is not as conceptually straightforward as it might at first seem. As for assertiveness, this quality is nowadays required from professionals and it is a skill that is of importance when dealing with family, friends, peers, superiors and subordinates. It is pertinent to interactions between different groups of professionals, especially where differences of power and status exist, and it is of relevance to interactions between professionals and clients. In a piece of early but still influential work, Laver and Hutcheson (1972) distinguished between verbal and nonverbal, and vocal and nonvocal communication. Vocal behaviour refers to all aspects of speech including language content and accompanying expressions such as tone of voice, rate of speech and accent, etc. Nonvocal behaviour, in contrast, refers to all other bodily activities that have a communicative function such as facial expressions, gestures and movements. These are sometimes referred to as body language. Verbal behaviour, on the other hand, is taken to mean the actual words and language used while nonverbal behaviour refers to all vocal and nonvocal behaviour that is not verbal in the sense defined above. This system seems therefore to insert a sharp and clearly recognisable dividing line between the verbal and the nonverbal, until it is realised that verbal communication has a nonvocal element. It encompasses types of gestural communication such as formal sign languag e that one may have expected to find listed as nonverbal. According to Richmond and McCroskey (2000) precise definitions that introduce hard and fast distinctions between verbal and nonverbal communication are illusory. Instead they suggested teasing the two forms apart by pointing up broad differences. As such, by comparison, verbal messages: - rely much more heavily on symbols (i.e. words) as part of an arbitrary code; - tend to be discretely packaged in separate words rather than represented in continuous behaviour, as in gaze; - carry more meaning explicitly rather than implicitly; - typically address cognitive/propositional rather than emotional/relational matters. Remland (2000) further noted that verbal interchanges must take place sequentially (i.e. participants must take turns) but interactors can communicate simultaneously using a nonverbal code. We tend to be less aware of the nonverbal accompaniment to much of what we say, than we are of the actual words spoken. While we often carefully monitor what is said to achieve the desired effect, how we are saying it may escape censor such that the reality of the situation is 'leaked' despite our best efforts. In other words, NVC can be thought of as a more 'truthful' form of communication through the insights that it affords

Macroeconomics of Financial Markets Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Macroeconomics of Financial Markets - Assignment Example Foreign businesses that would like to purchase goods in the US have to convert the currencies they have into US dollars. However, a rising dollar makes the foreign businesses to use much of their currencies to obtain a unit of US dollar. Thus, the foreign businesses will use more US dollars to obtain a product in the US. This means that businesses in the US that export goods and services will prefer a rising dollar. As the dollar rises, they obtain higher amounts for the goods that they export. This would be the same for a European tourist who comes to the US to visit the Grand Canyon. The tourist will have to change the European pounds that he or she has for US dollars. However, in case the dollar is rising, it means that the value of the dollar is declining. Thus, one unit of European pound will fetch more units of US dollar (Thomas, 2006). Therefore, the European tourist will obtain more units of US dollars. He or she will be able to access more products and services when he or sh e reaches the United States. Question Two The Fed can use various methods to create money. Creation of money refers to the methods that the Fed uses to manage the quantity of money that is in circulation in the economy. One of the methods is through open market operations. This refers to purchase and sale of United States’ government bonds (Ritter, Silber, & Udell, 2004). The Fed can buy government bonds from the public. This increases the amount of money in circulation in the United States. As the government buys bonds, it releases money into the economy. Alternatively, in case the Fed wants to reduce the amount of money in the economy, it can sell government bonds to the public (Mishkin, 2010). The sale of government bonds makes the Fed take money from the public and offers the public bonds. Therefore, the amount of money in circulation decreases. The Fed can use commercial banks’ reserve requirements to influence the amount of money in circulation (Burton, Brown, & Burton, 2009). Commercial banks must retain a given proportion of the deposits they receive. Thus, commercial banks cannot lend all the money deposited in their accounts. An increase in reserve ratio means that commercial banks will reduce the amount of money that they lend to the public. This reduces the amount of money in circulation. On the other hand, a decrease in reserve ratio requirement means that commercial banks can lend more money to the customers. Thus, the amount of money in circulation increases. The Fed can also influence the amount of money in circulation through the discount window (Thomas, 2006). Commercial banks usually borrow money from the Fed since it is the lender of the last resort. The Fed usually charges an interest whenever commercial banks borrow money. The Fed can increase the interest rate it charges to the commercial banks to reduce the amount of money in circulation. Alternatively, it can reduce the interest rate to increase the amount of money in cir culation. Finally, the Fed can make recommendations to the treasury so that money supply can be increased through printing (Ritter, Silber, & Udell, 2004). The Fed does not directly control money through printing or minting. The treasury prints notes and mints coins. This method can be used to direct the quantity of money in the economy. The most powerful method is the open market operation. However, the most commonly used method is the discount window or rate. It enables gradual reduction or increase in money in

Gay Scouts Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Gay Scouts - Essay Example ive perspective maintaining that its legalization stands for an unholy motive since it goes against religious teachings, the proponents maintained that people should not be prejudiced on the base of sexual orientation or preference. This is mostly because gay people had been denied many opportunities because of their sexual preference. Although the issue is highly controversial, legalizing gay scouts is the best option since older ways of prejudice are outdated and a better way of perception ought to be developed since times are changing. One of the reasons why gay-ism ought to be accepted is that even the gays are people who require the support of the society. Gay activists who have been relentless in ensuring that gay people can interact with other people openly through passage of laws that govern their rights for a long time. This is in spite of the idea that this issue had been ignored for decades. The activists also intended to ensure that organizations that mostly sponsor scouts acknowledge them in the society although a significant number of them were against the move to lift the century ban on gay scouts. Although Americans had been divided on this issue, there have been improvements on perception as the gay individuals are becoming more and more accepted in the contemporary society. This has been the main reason why the lift on the ban was possible. The legalization was justified because it has become widely accepted and even banning them does not solve the problem. Acceptance has been identified even in some of the religious institutions that include the United Methodist Church, which is one of the largest religious sponsors with a sponsor capacity of approximately 363,000 scouts (Richter, 2013). This religious institution had a significant influence on the outcome of the ban lift vote because it has many followers who would follow its views making it easy to lift the ban. The lift was also necessary so as to eliminate discrimination of such