The Expectations We Pack

What France, Ghana and Dubai taught me about comfort, difference and the range in between

We spend a lot of time thinking about what we will pack when we travel. Clothes for the weather. Shoes for the itinerary. Toiletries, medications, chargers, passports and whatever else we have learned not to leave home without.

Some of the heaviest things we carry never make it onto the packing list.

Expectations.

We carry ideas about what good service looks like. What should be waiting for us in a hotel room. How quickly something should happen. What cleanliness, comfort and safety should look and feel like. How strangers should interact with us. What hospitality should mean.

Most of these expectations don't announce themselves as expectations. They feel like standards. Sometimes they are. Cleanliness, safety and being treated with dignity are reasonable things to expect. Others are preferences shaped by where we come from, what we have experienced and what we have grown accustomed to.

Travel has a rather effective way of revealing the difference.

The challenge isn't arriving without expectations. I don't think that's possible. We interpret unfamiliar things through what we already know. The challenge is recognizing when the place in front of us doesn't fit the version of the world we brought with us, and resisting the urge to immediately decide that one of them must be wrong.

Once you have experienced a range of travel, something else begins to happen. You build a certain resilience for the different and unusual. Things that might once have been jarring become something to observe, navigate or laugh about. Not because your standards disappear, but because your range of what is possible gets wider.

For me, that reservoir began filling long before I became a traveler. Born to a Southern country boy and a Northern city girl, I became something of a hybrid, equally able to love and exist in both. That range continued through the family and community surrounding me. I could experience Jamaica, Italy, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Ghana, India, Cuba and Eritrea within a fifty mile radius. Some were family. Others were close family friends who, over time, simply became relatives.

There were always new adventures, stories being told, different foods to try and celebrations that weren't necessarily my own. Chinese New Year was one of my favorites. I knew the red envelopes and sweets were coming.

Difference wasn't something I had to cross an ocean to encounter.

Still, knowing that other places do things differently and actually finding yourself standing in the middle of that difference are two very different things.

France

There were towels.

Plenty of towels.

There were no washcloths.

I checked again because surely I had missed them. I had been to Europe before, so this wasn't my first encounter with a hotel bathroom on the other side of the Atlantic. I knew things could be different. It is one of those things you know and think about when preparing to travel, and then somewhere along the way it falls to the back of your mind. Apparently, my expectations about washcloths had made the journey to France without notifying me.

Before I ran downstairs asking, What is the meaning of this?, I took a few steps back and remembered that Dorothy wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Thankfully, for me and the one child who thinks like me, those little terry cloth hand towels from our Air France flight suddenly became precious cargo. I don't know what everyone else did, but the two of us were marked safe.

The funny thing is, the hotel was wonderful. I thoroughly enjoyed my stay. The missing washcloth didn't make it a bad hotel any more than the more relaxed style of service I encountered in France made the staff inattentive. When I needed something, I could simply let someone know. There wasn't the same hovering I was accustomed to in the United States.

Nothing was necessarily wrong. Some things simply weren't being done the way I expected them to be.

Ghana

Twenty years ago, Ghana became my first truly culturally immersive trip, and the adjustment was considerably less delicate.

While out in the community, I encountered a bathroom I was not prepared for. There was a full structure and a door I could close behind me. Then I peered down into the dark hole beneath me and realized I would need to balance myself accordingly.

Toilet paper was available.

One square.

At a cost.

This happened shortly after I had arrived from Egypt with traveler's diarrhea, so you can imagine my enthusiasm. Yet I laughed hysterically through the entire experience.

Later, I returned to my luxury hotel in central Accra, where the comforts and amenities I was accustomed to were waiting for me.

Both experiences happened in Ghana.

The bathroom I encountered while out in the community was real. So was the luxury hotel in the center of Accra. If I allowed either experience to become my definition of the country, I would have told a true story and still told an incomplete one.

I have peered down many dark holes since.

Somewhere along the way, I got used to them. They don't really bother me anymore. It's funny how that happens if you let it. What once required a moment of mental preparation eventually became another way a bathroom might look in another part of the world.

Perhaps that is one of the quieter things travel does to us. The world doesn't necessarily become less different. Our capacity for difference becomes larger.

Dubai

Years later, Dubai challenged me from the opposite direction.

Everything seemed to work.

Dubai offered some of the most extraordinary hospitality I have experienced. Things seemed to be anticipated before I needed to ask. People went out of their way to accommodate. As you like, habibti seemed less like a phrase and more like an energy.

I also felt extraordinarily safe. There was an unspoken sense of respect that offered a striking contrast to some of the narratives and stereotypes that surround Dubai and the broader region.

What struck me most was the consistency. I encountered Emiratis and expatriates from many places, yet the hospitality, accommodation and respect I experienced felt less like a collection of individual acts and more like something people had collectively learned to embody.

It reminded me of workplace culture. In an organization, employees can be some of its best public relations. Leadership can establish values and policies, but how people behave when no one is instructing them reveals what has actually taken root.

I began to wonder if I was witnessing something similar in Dubai.

It also made me think about leadership on a larger scale. I wondered whether leadership embodied in a royal family or a Sheikh can create a different relationship between standards, identity and place than leadership designed to regularly change hands.

I don't have a conclusion to that question. I noticed the distinction.

There are things that cannot simply be manufactured. They have to be modeled, reinforced and eventually become part of the culture itself.

I loved Dubai.

Yet eventually I found myself asking a strange question.

Was it too perfect?

For all the ease, comfort, safety and extraordinary hospitality, I noticed myself missing something I ordinarily don't go looking for at all.

A little friction.

Not because inconvenience is inherently valuable. I certainly wasn't asking Dubai to confiscate my washcloth or send me searching for a single square of toilet paper.

Something else was happening.

France, Ghana and Dubai gave me three very different experiences across three different regions of the world. None of them can be reduced to the particular story I have chosen to tell about them.

The hotel in France was wonderful, washcloth or not. The bathroom I encountered in Ghana twenty years ago existed in the same country where I returned that evening to a luxury hotel in central Accra. Dubai gave me the most extraordinary hospitality I have experienced while still leaving me curious about what can happen when nearly every point of friction has been removed.

A moment can be completely true and still tell an incomplete story.

Perhaps perspective isn't found at either end of the spectrum. It develops when we allow ourselves to experience the range.

Travel hasn't taught me to stop having expectations. I still have them. Some are standards I shouldn't compromise. Some are preferences I enjoy. Others are assumptions I don't discover until another place refuses to accommodate them.

What has changed is my capacity for what can exist alongside those expectations.

Twenty years after peering into that first dark hole in Ghana, I still appreciate a washcloth. I still love extraordinary service. I still enjoy returning from an adventure to a beautiful room, a comfortable bed and all the amenities waiting for me.

I just no longer need every place to offer those things in exactly the same way.

Perhaps that is one of the greatest gifts travel has given me. Not a world that has become more familiar, but a greater capacity to appreciate the range of what it can be.

What expectation did travel reveal you were carrying without realizing it?

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