Tower of Babel

"The Tower of Babel" by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563

Yesterday I spent around 2 hours in a mall and during this time I needed to remind myself where I was because I thought I was in the middle of Tower of Babel as the profuseness of culture and languages I got myself exposed to! It was like a long and pretty good trip around the world and I really enjoyed it!

Just listening to the many different sounds I could go to South and North Africa, to Brasil and South America, to the USA and Caribbean, to Portugal, France, Italy and Germany, Middle East, India and China! All that in just 2 hours! What a trip!!!

Drinking my coffee and eating a delicious damask tart as I usually do in the mall, I like to observe people walking around and something called my attention as never before in these 4 years I’m here! I noticed not just immigrant couples but also a prominent increase in a number of interracial marriages that intrigued me for a long time!

I’m kind of curious for scientific researches in anthropology and sociology fields and I have searched a lot already and I never found any research or study about how this plurality of cultures can affect Swiss way of life in the next 100 or 300 years!
I have thought about that because of the amount of old Swiss men and young as well, but in lower number, married to a young woman from developing countries here in Aargau region! Unfortunately it can have another connotation as well!

Anyway, those Swiss men are having kids with those women and this is a change that cannot pass unnoticed to anyone because even if the kids didn’t have the opportunity to grow up close to the culture of their mothers, they will know for sure that they belong to other places as well. For sure they will eat their mother’s food, they will have relatives in another country, they will listen to songs and stories from the mothers’ nation and this nobody can’t run away from! All this is the purest manifestation of what we are and where we come from, our genuine culture.

Culture is something very strong and in some way we carry it in our DNA, liking it or not!

Looking at some couples, I remember when I took German class at a local school…I had a classmate from Thailand that was married to a man from the town. She didn’t speak other language than her mother tongue and neither her husband didn’t speak her language! I never understood how it worked out…

So, with mimics, drawing and very pitiable German we got along very well. Poor thing, she didn’t know even the Latin alphabet! We were 11 girls, a very nice group and we used to go to a coffee shop after class. One day she told us that she had 3 kids and they were in Thailand with her mother and that she was feeling very sad and alone here because her husband’s work was over there. Besides, she was here for about 4 months, living with her in-laws and they had never tried to make a conversation with their new daughter-in-law!

As soon as she spoke out about it, 3 girls from the group complained about the same situation! They were from Peru, Tibet and Philippines!
Now, Baden has around 16.000 inhabitant, we were 11 in German class and 4 girls shared this odd stories! It is something to think about for sure. It isn’t an isolate case or intrigue from the opposition, myself.

Going back to my original thought… I’m just wondering about the behavior of the Swiss in a near future. For sure it will have some alteration and cultures as colorful, bright, alive and joyful as the cultures of those foreign women who are now living here and generate the future generation will for sure interfere in a way of life of Switzerland, the country where you cannot make any noise on Sundays, where you cannot flush the toilet after 10pm, and where a man cannot pee standing up after 10 PM as well, or where you (I’m talking about Swiss citizen) must be married officially to register your own son/daughter or the baby goes to adoption, the country where women were granted right to vote only in 1971, or where it’s illegal to run up and down stairs, or even leave shoes outside the house is a contravention!

Well, it was just an example of a very inflexible nation that is walking for a huge renovation and I don’t know if they are seeing this or if they are paying attention to all transformations that a melting pot can perform in a “well established” culture as Switzerland! It affects the entire country!

As I said in the beginning, I have looked at all Swiss universities and search for books and I didn’t see any study regard to it! Well maybe having a study for everything is Brazilian mania after all!