"So tourists photograph our €12 Stroopwafel. And worship cuisines they do not understand. We pretend knowing spice blends makes us cosmopolitan. We reduce thousand year civilisations to their lunch options.
And we call this our culture."
https://heritagestandard.substack.com/p/the-joke-thats-eating-culture
@levisan literally this. A lot of people here have the pretense that this town is a world cultural mecca, so when I ask for a few examples of how, inevitably the fact that several restaurants sell ridiculously overpriced rice and gravy comes up as a primary supporting argument. (Others might include, "look, a man in arab garb!" or in rhetorical form, "do you know how many languages are spoken here?!")
We need a term for this. Something like "Spice whores" but possibly nicer?
@jezza Ahhh yeah students don't count! That's a good point—my town has ~30% of residents French as a first language and that's a lot different in culture than somewhere that's 3 in 10 francophone students.
Office plankton is a great phrase! I love trying to pick up foreign idioms (even foreign English things) and trying to make them stick here. I think that's a good example of culture actually spreading
@levisan in school, there were a group of us ("memetic terrorists" before "meme" means what it does now) who would try to get invented phrases and words to stick.
For example, "reich" as a adjective in the vein of "cool" ("that totally reichs!"), or one of the unfortunate successes, "men are equal, women are lesser" which caught on with many players of team sports.
@jezza Hahaha I love it!
@levisan the language count mostly refers to students. They're not citizens, they don't "live here" in any meaningful sense, and they certainly don't contribute to local "culture" in any meaningful sense (that is, it does not effect the locals except to irritate them when someone is attempting to do business through hand signals.)
It might be a more reasonable count if was restricted to people who properly lived here, but then the number goes down precipitously to something less impressive.
I think a reasonable measure would be how much other cultures contribute -- what habits brought in by X bleeed into the population. Not just at the dinner table, but in common speech and habits at home.
For example, do people adopt the bum gun when exposed to it? Do foreign phrases, even translated, become part of local vocabularies? (I picked up "office plankton" from Russians to describe the infinitely replaceable and mostly useless office workers that inhabit cubicles and reception desks.)