In a pre-Borat era, I traveled to Kazakhstan to write about the privatization of copper mines (sorry Borat, no potassium) for the now defunct newspaper The European.
I boarded an old Soviet plane at Frankfurt airport. Its huge belly opened up and swallowed its passengers, including me the only Westerner. I sat on my rickety seat and watched in a trance-like state the great expanse of Russia mutate into Central Asia, while tea was being served out of a colorful tin pot.
I arrived in Alma Ata in the middle of the night. With nobody in sight at passport control, I was already contemplating the prospect of having to turn my bags into a make-shift bed and spending the night in a corner of the arrivals hall.
While those scary thoughts were going through my mind, a Central Asian smile materialized out of the blue, sat down behind the counter and beamed at me.
The round smile went through the pages of my Italian passport and began to chant the usual questions. All of the sudden he paused (see, Borat, in Kazakhstan they do know what a pause ¦). What is your favorite sport? “Do you like football?”
I happen to highly dislike football, but, for a number of reasons, I did not think that would have been a wise answer to give at that stage. While I was scanning my brain for something polite to say, my smiling Kazakh friend continued his line of questioning. I love the Verona team. They have been doing very well this year. “Do you think they will be able to keep it up?”
I could not believe my ears. Verona is the town in Italy where I grew up (and which shows up in my passport as my place of birth), but having left a long time ago and not liking football, I did not have a clue about the glories of my fellow Veronese.
Honestly, this was the last thing I expected to hear after landing in the middle of Central Asia. But my friend did not seem to mind if I looked puzzled. The fact that I came from a place that had such a great football team seemed to have put him in an even better mood and to have created a bond between us.
His smile got bigger and filled the entire bottom part of his round Central Asian face. He proceeded to merrily stamp my passport and wish me a great time in Kazakhstan.
In the years to come, I would often think of this odd encounter, every time I had to come up with a strategy for bonding with somebody from a culture I knew very little about. This man’s passion was football and that built some kind of a bridge between us. I am on the lookout for other bridges.
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external messages and internal culture. “It’s no longer possible to look nice on the outside and have an axe-murdering culture on the inside.”
