Eastern Europe: western perception vs reality / Part 4
4. Have very high opinion of westerners
Post-soviet Europe neither admires nor disrespects westerners. Locals have few experiences of living abroad (because of high prices and visa restrictions in the West). Therefore, whenever they have opportunity to talk to a foreigner, they do it with pleasure. This factor, coupled, above of all, with the natural hospitality of locals mean that here even a person with zero knowledge of English would still be open with you and, if asked for a direction, would explain it with hands or find some other way to help out.
Huge numbers of westerners, however, look down upon locals, avoid the contact with them and not seldom show obvious disrespect:
If westerners struggle a lot to find an address and absolutely must ask a local, they do it in a tone of a posh hotel client talking to a security guard;
If you as a local happen to see a group of foreign journalists with a camera and out of curiosity ask them what they are up to, the response may be a passive-aggressive ‘leave us alone, we are doing nothing interesting here’;
When travelling in quiet local public transport non-locals find it OK to speak loudly (practically shout) and, to polite requests to be quieter, they react with hostile refusal or pretend to not here you at all.
As I said in a previous post, such attitude may lead to troubles, but today I would like to touch on a different point.
Namely, that western condescension often goes unnoticed by the locals. Ways of talking here are more direct and unless a stranger crosses the red line by doing something confrontational (saying ‘fuck off’ in the public transport), all small snobbish acts come across simply as weird and may make a local think something like ‘uh, those folks must be a little bit crazy or they are just having a bad day’. Such would be the thoughts of a local unacquainted with subtle western arrogance.
But locals who lived in the West and who know the real meaning of foreigner’s condescension, they get really disgusted by such attitudes. In my case, up until now I never even had a single pleasant chance encounter with a westerner (no, not true, one was OK, to be honest). Apart from it, all others were either coldly neutral or deeply negative. Such impressions push me to imagine that some evil magician on our state border must turn polite and delicate westerners into repulsive snobs. So stark is the difference between westerners there and here, that it is impossible to not notice.
Conclusion: the reputation of ordinary westerners in Post-soviet Europe is between average and mediocre.
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To be continued …
