Before we get to the why, let’s start with the how.

It all started six hours earlier when I remarked to Shanu, the owner of the guesthouse I was staying at, that I’d never experienced an Ayurveda massage, despite the fact I was now in India, the birthplace of the science, invented by the Ancient Rishis in the time of Lord Brahma (Ayurveda is the science of life span.).

“You want a massage?” Shanu asked.

“Um…sure…yeah, of course…um…yes, I’m in India.” I said with the unassertive confidence of a teenager ordering a beer on his first trip to a bar.

Of course Shanu knew somebody and, remembering my earlier insistence that I’d like to experience “life as the locals live,” he said confidently, “and it’s a REALLY local place, local massage, no tourists go there.

This led me onto the back of Shanu’s motorbike for a twenty minute ride away from the tourist town I was staying in, a walk through a series of cement alleys that cut between houses and ramshackle huts to what appeared to be some guy’s home.  As we knocked and walked in, I glanced through an open door leading to a side room, to see a contraption that looked just like a torture device straight out of the Dark Ages.  Shanu spoke to the woman, who appeared in the bedroom doorway, in Malayalam, the local language of which I understand none, besides “tastes good”).  After a few minutes of talking, he looked at me, “7:30?”

“Sorry?” I said not hearing him, because my ears were busy watching the Chinese water torture device still sitting in the next room.  “Do you want to come at 7:30 for a massage appointment?” Shanu asked through a heavy Indian accent.

“Um….I…umm….” I stammered, as the woman in the bedroom glared at me a bit.  “Of course…yes…I want a massage, 7:30 it is…”

Five hours later after again driving to the edge of town, down the cement alleys, past the ramshackle huts and back at the front door of the massage house, the time was now 7:30.

I was met by an old man with gray hair that still had wisps of black streaks that curled a bit over his eyes and across his extremely dark Indian complextion.  He led me to a room (past the Chinese water torture device) and had me sit on an overturned red plastic bucket.

“What kind of massage style was it again?” I asked, hoping he spoke English.

“Ancient Kerala martial arts,” he said. My back winched in anticipation.

A lone ceiling fan, with dust-covered blades, spun slowly above my head, casting ominous gray shadows on the dirt streaked green walls of the room.

“Oh,” I said, a bit nervous, “Me. First time to have.” I told him in simplified, broken English. “I had Swedish massage and Chinese massage before. First time for martial arts massage,” I remarked in what sounded like a poorly dubbed Hong Kong kung-fu flick.

“Take off your clothes and put here,” he said, pointing at a bent hook on the wall, making absolutely no effort to shield his eyes, leave the room or even break his glare at me.

“Right,” I said.  I imagined a drop of water rolling off the top of the Chinese water torture device in the next room, as the only sound to break the silence as now all my clothes were hanging on a rusty hook on the wall.

There I was, sitting on the bucket, totally naked, having reluctantly agreed to some sort of Jackie Chan-style massage from an old grumpy man in what felt like his hidden torture chamber in the bowels of his simple hut in the back streets of India. I had to smile, as the scene seemed pretty funny—and it was about to push the boundaries of the ridiculous.

He proceed to pull out a globular, ceramic container from high on a shelf on over the course of the next hour he covered me in massive amounts of coconut oil, flavored with what smelled like tumeric.  Covering every surface from the top of my head to the bottoms of my feet, he methodically and meticulously massaged every muscle and loosened every joint.  Being it a “martial arts” massage, I expected a bit more violence in the room, but in fact it wasn’t too much difference from the Shiatsu massage that I once had at a sports health clinic in America…well, except now I was covered in 75 gallons of coconut oil….and I was totally naked.

I tell you that story, first cause its funny, and also because it was one of my first excursions on this trip into the world of holistic and herbal medicine.  Coming from the West in a country that is adamant about its “scientific proof,” I’ve never put a lot of stock in the fields of homegrown medicine.  In much of the developing world, which often doesn’t have access to clean drinking water, let alone expensive medicines, cutting-edge medical equipment and highly educated doctors, people must (and have for thousands of years) relied on homespun remedies to cure everything from an upset stomach to cancer.  Further, some of these cultures (particularly the Chinese and the Indians) have been developing these techniques over the last three thousand years, while many Western medical techniques date back to only the last century.

In China, I experience a few different forms of Chinese massage, from foot reflexology to a massage style in which they place a bag of really hot rocks on your back.  Skeptical about the foot reflexology (in which it is said most body aliments can be cured by touching specific parts of the foot or hand), I decided to give it a try and found myself in a local massage parlor in Beijing, being tended to by a masseuse from a small village in the Sichuan Province.  She spoke no English and didn’t have the patience for my terrible Mandarin, so we didn’t communicate at all during the two hour massage session—-except for one moment when, as I winced in pain as she was poking the bottom of my foot, she turned to my friend (who happened to speak the same Sichuan dialect) and said to him, “Tell him he has problems with his kidneys.”

“What!?” I said, shooting a look of horror at her.  She looked at me, smiled gently and went back to tending to my foot. “What does she mean by that!?” I demanded.  The woman didn’t answer.  For the next month every time my stomach hurt or I had a pain in my side I was afraid my kidneys were about to fail.

Elsewhere in China, if you are sick, you can simply go to the Chinese medical doctor, explain your ailments, then he measures out an assortment of herbs, twigs, bird’s nests, and other odds-and-ends, puts them in a sack and gives them to you.  Then you go home, boil the sack’s contents, drink it, and feel better.

Next door in India, nearly everyone knows that certain spices/herbs do certain things: Tumeric is good for coughs and asthma; phyllium husks are a perfect cure for diarrhea; yogurt helps calm an upset stomach.  All of which for me, at one time or another, proved to be true.

As I sat there lying on that massage table in Kerala, with the smell of the coconut oil filling the room, it was the first time I began to realize that these cultures with these medical practices and this knowledge—which are often written off by most of the West, has much merit to it.   Chinese and Indian cultures, both full of practitioners of such medicinal practices, are thousands of years old dating back to a few thousands years B.C.—that’s a lot of time to discover useful medical remedies.

We may be too quick to dismiss what seems odd and unfamiliar because we can’t immediately ‘prove’ its value, or it doesn’t fit neatly into our own cultural practices, though if we open ourselves it we’d find there’s certainly something to it.  It’s not weird, it’s just different.  And that’s why I travel: to get a first-hand understanding of such differences, as its the differences that keep our ever shrinking world interesting.

Besides when was the last time you walked out of the doctor’s office smelling like a piña colada.

Hand photo courtesy John Hayes under Creative Commons. Hand chart photo courtesy Cote under Creative Commons.

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• Read about a few of my favorite culture differences in
  • Trash Talking and
  • Sometimes the Smallest Culture Differences Cause The Biggest Problems
• See some of my photos from India in ‘Indian Light’

A funny little travel thought: Many things most American’s find quaint, rare and cool are how people in the developing world live everyday.

1. Farmers Markets

Parking lot gatherings of small, local fresh veggies and fruit sellers are all the rage in America these days, especially for the yuppie, slow food, whole food crowd.  Every town in America is trying to organize and grow these ‘Farmer’s Markets’ to add to their hip, creative class vibe.  Organic is in.

Elsewhere in the world, these types of markets are the only places to buy food, unless you want to hunt down much more expensive food at the supermarkets in a distant big city.   Plus, all the produce at many of these markets in Africa are likely 100% naturally organic (mostly cause they can’t get fertilizers).  [Photo of a pepper seller from a market in Chang Mai, Thailand]

2. Overland Train Journeys

There’s only a handful of epic passenger train routes across America still remaining today, and our obsession with cars will likely bring an end to these ol’ passenger lines one day.  The image of staring out across vast open spaces through a wide train  window as it ‘clickity-clacks’ down the tracks seems so 19th century to us.

Well, in Asia and Africa the BEST and cheapest way to travel is just like that, and most people use trains to travel, over the more expensive airplanes.  I’ve crossed India north to south and east to west via trains and the 2-day epic train ride from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia is probably my favorite single journey of my 3 year trip around-the-world trip.  Trains are my absolute favorite way to travel.  [Photo from the train journey from Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania to Kapiri Mposhi, Zambia, taken somewhere in Tanzania]

3. Coke in Glass Bottles

Coca-Cola is an American invention and it’s iconic curved glass bottle logo is likely the world’s most famous trademark.  Yet, when most Americans come across a proper glass bottle of Coke, they usually pause before taking the first sip to admire the look and feel of the “good ol’ days.” Old glass Coke bottles sell as collector’s items on eBay for ridiculous sums of money.

Elsewhere in the world, the only way to get a Coke is from a worn-out, scuffed-up glass bottle with a tight fitting bottle cap top.  They’re cheap (probably averaging 20-30 US cents a bottle, often times cheaper than water), plentiful (you can get Coke everywhere, and I mean everywhere in the world), and I’m certain Coke tastes better in a glass bottle. [Bottles in Shanghai, China. Photo courtesy of Gregory Perez]

Well, in Asia, on the other side of the world, where everything is opposite—including the direction the water swirls in the toilet—there’s a bit of a difference in what is required to be considered “The King of Karaoke.” In Asia, where they take their karaoke very seriously, it’s not a funny thing you do at a birthday party or drunk at the bar with your friends, its practically a religion. From Japan to Sri Lanka it becomes apparent how serious they are when you see the multiple storied karaoke bars with hundreds of private rooms with large screen TVs, Dolby surround speaker systems, and wireless mics.

Where I come from, the more terrible of a singer you are—that is to say the louder, more obnoxious and more off key—the more you are celebrated by the masses as a karaoke champion (which is also the reason the “masses” are usually drunk off their gourds while listening to karaoke).

Well, in Asia, unbenounced to me, the rules of karaoke are different and to be the ‘King of Karaoke’ you—surprisingly—have to actually be able to sing. From the streets of Kyoto to the alleys of Shanghai to the Yurt tents of middle Asia, kids flood the karaoke bars each night and sing like angels to the tunes of Avril Lavigne Rain, Bon Jovi, Fai Wong, and Sammi Cheung among others—and in most cases you’d believe the pop stars where actually there.

Knowing all this did not stop me, my family, and a half dozen friends from Mainland China, Hong Kong, and America from visiting Neway Karaoke Club in Mong Kok (Hong Kong). What do you sing when you have a 58-year old American couple who can’t read Chinese, a few dozen 20-ish Mainland Chinese grad students who speak English as a 2nd language, a guy from Cameroon, and a handful of American-raised twenty-somethings?

The Beatles, of course.

So between choruses of ‘Let It Be’ and ‘Love Me Do’ we sipped on Carlsberg, iced milk tea, and Coke’s and sang, danced and laughed our way through five hours of karaoke. As the clock rolled passed 4am, my parent’s decided it was time to head back to the hotel. They said they stayed out so late (early) because they were having so much fun, but actually I think they couldn’t get enough of The King of Karaoke.

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• See the short video What It’s Like In A Karaoke Bar in Hong Kong
• Read a story about pop stars, terrorist threats, and the hope of a nation in Nepal

Where I come from in America, licking a stamp is so common it is pretty much a cliche, and most Americans have some childhood memories involving stamp licking (Mine happening when I was about 12 and had to lick 500 stamps for an event at my church and there was so much glue on my tongue by the end of the task, that I licked a hotdog and it stuck). On the other side of the world in Hong Kong, where most days things seem very similar to life in America, I sometimes forget that the smallest cultural differences are actually often the most problematic.

I asked my local friend Catherine to take me to a post office to mail a couple post cards and a parcel, and upon arriving, I asked the postal clerk for eight postcard stamps. He counted them out and passed them my way, and as he weighed my parcel, I absent-mindedly picked-up a stamp, brought it up to my mouth, and licked it…

As the postal clerk glanced up and saw what I was doing, my action was met with a paniced look of shock. Startled he pushed his chair back from the counter, gasped for air, and as politely as a man who had just had his pants pulled down on live television, he said, “Sir….sirr….um….there is ah, ah, water over there….,” pointing to a little moistened sponge that sat on the counter.

“Huh?” I looked up still unaware of my social faux pas. As I paused with the second half-licked stamp hanging from my tongue, I glanced over at my friend Catherine whose face had the unmistakable look of horror, disgust and shock, as if she had just watched me eat a pile of steaming, live cockroaches. “U…use….this….” she stammered, as she pointed at the same moistened sponge and took a step backwards.

You see in Hong Kong, a city that still has scars from the SARS and Avian flu epidemics—and with a long, sordid history with food sanitation and health—there is a much higher level of caution towards germs and dirt in ways I’ve never considered at home in the US (For example, everyone uses straws to drink out of cans of Coke and bottles of juice because who knows where top of the can has been, and it is a common cultural practice to re-wash the dishes you get at a restaurant right at the table, upon first arriving and before using). By licking the stamps, I was breaking a minor but significant cultural norm, that gave the postal worker a partial heart attack and a reason to nearly lock down the post office and quarantine me, my stamp, and my post cards.

As the second stamp cleared my tongue, I still had yet to recognize what I had done, and as I followed the motion of his hand pointing towards the wet sponge on his counter, I said, “Oh, ok, thanks,” and after a short pause I proceeded to press the half-licked stamp right onto his wet sponge….

For the story’s sake I wish I could say I was then arrested, quarantined, deported, and the post office was burned to the ground—but unfortunately (or fortunately) for me I didn’t really realize what I had done until I walked out of the post office—but I imagine the postal worker, incinerated his sponge, quit his job, and became a monk—all because I was just trying to send a letter home to my mom.