Reply #20: By gifts and hospitality.

[potone]

I am most familiar with Greece and Turkey, although I have been to Egypt. What I found most striking in my first trips to Turkey and Egypt is that even in poor villages strangers are welcomed into people's homes and, at a minimum, given tea, and usually food. In Greece, one is given free desserts and drinks at restaurants, and parting gifts if one stays at a hotel in a village. More than once I have been offered a room in someone's house to sleep. It is a source of shame to me as an American that we are so inhospitable to foreigners. Most of us would not dream of letting a stranger stay in our house, for fear of our safety (which is not a neurotic fear in this country), but other cultures assume that hospitality will be treated with respect and gratitude.