My new friend!

Tuesday 6 November 07
Kumamoto

“Aaaaahhhhh… yes… yes… exactly here… no… please a little bit up around the neck… oooohhh, this is so nice”.
The deep massage kept going on relaxing every muscle in my back. This is the best massage I got in my life, and all my previous preservations about massage are not really founded.

I have always thought that getting massages from anyone other than an intimate partner is just pure awkward. The feeling of strange, professional hands touching me while I am naked in a vulnerable position was never something that appealed to me. Anyway, people have always thought that I am a bit weird about this and I never wanted to correct them.

But here I am, getting the most soothing massage that sucks away all my tension and tiredness after the days of training. I have just come out of the hot springs; I was wearing my kimono and getting this incredible treatment.

Oh, this is so heavenly that I think I can stay here for a real long time. But my massage is bound to end at one point and I will have to go back to real life.

But let me introduce you to my masseuse before you get too curious (and that applies especially to Rania). Her name is “Matsushita”. She is a beautiful massage chair that you will never find outside Japan and she will give you the massage of your life for 15 minutes only for 200 yen. A good deal, don’t you think? Another one of those things that gave us the feeling we are on another planet over the past few days.

As far as cultural shocks go, I think I have had my share… I ate muscles in Paris, had a fight with a bedwin in Amman, was held at gun point in Baghdad, had goat meat with spaghetti in Somalia, lived in a tent in Mozambique and crawled in a rain forest in Sumatra… And that is only to name a few… But this place is the only one that gave me the “out-of-earth” feeling I am having now.

It is not only the little things that one sees, not only the technologies - that are by the way beyond imagination. It is something really hard to pin down and name. What I didn’t know when I was sitting on my massage chair was that within an hour, I will get a lesson in Asian culture over a few beers, and from my new friends.

By 9:00pm, we were convened at the usual spot, the smokers’ corner. Alex and Hervé were there alongside Saito, Mamiko, the doctor with really big glasses, and Kim from the Korean Red Cross. Kim started this whole conversation by saying that it is strange to be a foreigner in a kimono (also saying that it looked good on me…). And we very rapidly moved to talking about culture and differences. I told them about Syria, about how we live and how we think, about Islam and our culture. They were listening to me as if I was from another world. It hit me that not only I felt that they come from another planet, but they felt the exact same.

They then told me so much about the differences among Asian countries, Korea, Japan, China and others. We have a stereo-type about Asians, they are all the same. But to my surprise, they are not at all. I have always known some little things about the differences but never in such details as I heard today.

Yes, it is different. I guess you cannot find two groups more different than Japanese and Syrians in terms of religion, social values, behaviour, life, thinking, and cooking. But we share one thing very strongly. We both feel that the others come from another planet, not really thinking that the other planet might simply be… us.

I will drink a toast for Carolyn Stephens, my ethics teacher in London. She has always told me, when I start babbling about such things, that you have to always know that YOU are the other, not them… Cheers, Carolyn…