There are two cultures I find I hanker to visit.
The first is the Japanese. As an Englishman, I try to be formally polite to others as I wander around. It’s not just please and thank you, although they obviously help. Politeness can be seen, in its own small way, as social oil that soothes and improves the small interactions that occur so often. I’m not perfect; certain incidents, to me, demand no politeness, usually because I’ve received none when some is due. Of course, as an Englishmen, I can be rather rude with extremely sarcastic politeness.
The Japanese people I’ve encountered have always out–polited me. I’ve never known them to be rude to me, although that might be because I’ve not picked up on their rudeness, just as some people don’t pick up on mine when I’m using sarcastic politeness. I would like to visit Japan and experience their politeness culture in situ, to gain a deeper feel for how it works. Of course, this is all a bit too optimistic, since I speak no Japanese, so it would be virtually impossible for me to gain a true experience, filtered as it would be through translation. Politeness is a poetry. Fortunately, politeness is also expressed in body language, and that won’t need translating.
The other culture I would love to visit and experience is quite different: that of Nigeria. Now, Nigeria is a culturally rich and complex country, so what I imagine as Nigerian culture may actually be the characteristic of one small corner of its vast cultural vista, but that would be one of many things to learn if I were able to go there and experience it for a reasonable length of time. The cultural behaviour that I find fascinating and really want to explore is that of competitive complements. The few times I’ve met a Nigerian and found myself playing this complement game, they’ve always been able to thoroughly out complement me with ridiculous but not obviously insane things. This is quite the opposite to the UK: the better we know someone, the more and deeper we insult them. We rarely indulge in out–complementing each other, although it does happen. Again, I want to experience this in situ, explore how it works, and gain a deeper understanding of its underlying poetry. Language is likely to be less of a problem than as in Japan, because in amongst the hundreds of Nigerian languages there is a common lingua franca: English.
Might this happen? The thing is, what I’m talking about is not a holiday, but a form of cultural immersion. That isn’t a week or so in a swanky hotel, but living in the culture for a few months. To be absolutely honest, I don’t think that’s practical, but, all the same, I will investigate it.