2
Simon, Please Come Home, I Can't Sleep Knowing You're Off Doing Dumb...Stuff
Posted by Miz B
on
Tuesday, September 07, 2010
in
adaptation,
customs,
Honeymoon,
Mexico,
rotary,
school
For those of you following Chris's year in India (commented on in the last post), updates occurred! It was very interesting to find out that his experiences with the first week of college were glaringly similar to my time at my school. I try not to pay as much attention to the teachers as I did when I started out, simply because I don't understand what they're saying, but unlike the first week, I now know enough not to be completely flummoxed all the time. I can generally understand the general direction their teaching is going, but not enough to actually learn. For a knowledge-aholic like me, it's kind of like waking up at 6am every day to go spend 8 hours standing outside a really good chocolate store and never going in. It's a bit of a relief to know that if all the classes were in English, I would probably find a majority very boring. I look forward with baited breath to the unknowable time in the future when I can, once again, be bored with high school level Sociology.
In other news, I've come up with more evidence to confuse my previously mentioned worries about the whole 'End of the Honeymoon' thing (dear god but that sounds like a horrible movie, doesn't it?). The unhelpful papers mention that one of the things that defines the Honeymoon period is that everything seems new and exotic and different. While I am still in awe of my new second home, and I can still be easily surprised (mostly by things I see fleetingly in passing from the car, and by food, but there you are), normal things are no longer a novelty. Trying to take showers in carefully-measured bursts so as to save up enough water-pressure to get the shampoo out of my hair is no longer an adventure, it's just a mildly annoying necessity. Saying 'no' to offers of more food at the dinner table is no longer a worrying, possible rude thing, it's the only way to finish dinner in under 2 hours (and make sure whoever is doing the offering will finally sit down and eat themselves. I usually take whatever I am given to eat and wait until everyone is sitting and eating themselves before grabbing my glass and sprinting to the kitchen to get water, so no-one has a chance to follow me and help). Washing your clothes in the back yard in the specially made stone basins (built into the house for this very purpose), is...okay, it's still kind of fun, but I do tend to bring my Ipod down so I can break up the quiet monotony. When I sneeze and my nose runs, I now know it's not that I'm sick, it's just an unfortunate side effect of needing bad air conditioners to cool down the house to manageable heat levels at night. It's kind of annoying, but hey? Watcha gonna do? This is all part of life here. Some things are just different, that's how it is. But this hasn't lead me to negative comparisons like the paperwork says I should. I still want to be here. Does that make me abnormal? Or just better at adapting? Or weird? Who can say.
In the vein of differences, I would like to talk about shoes. Namely, the fact that no one, no one every takes them off. I was warned about this ahead of time by a lovely gentleman at the student conference in Grand Rapids a couple months back, whose job it was to 'culturally prepare' all us outbounds, god help him. Mostly, it was warnings about greetings (everyone hugs and kisses to say hello, whether they know you or not. One well connected, polite person entering a meeting can take a whole 10 minutes to finish helloing and sit down. I've seen this first hand); warnings about alcohol (just cause it's there and you'll probably drink it doesn't mean you should get plastered and pass out into your hosts swimming pool. Apparently that's happened before, too. This is kind of a non-issue for me, because I am both mentally, morally, and physically opposed to alcohol. Even mildly fermented things like Kombucha make me feel sick). And, warnings about shoes. He said the whole shoe thing was because of an odd Mexican belief that if you walk on the stone floors (no one has carpet here) in bare feet, the cold will come up through your feet and into your bones, and make you sick (or something like that). I haven't heard anything like that here, but I think it may be some sort of culturally reasoning to deal with a much more basic problem (that's not such a foreign idea, American's have lots of them too. Mostly pertaining to food, for some reason). The reason being, the floors aren't really as safe as they look. Leaving alone the whole 'dirt is everywhere if your house is relatively open all the time' and the 'nothing's really clean in a sterile sense if the only water you have to clean it is full of bad bacteria' issues, I have found a couple of other reasons to hold on to. 1) When you don't have shoes on, it is much MUCH easier for someone with slippery feet to, well, slip on the slippery tile (snigger) and break their heads open on the edge of the couch (or at least get some really painful bruising. Ahem.). 2) Since no-one really has vacuum cleaners, it is much easier to end up needing a tetanus shot without shoes if, say, someone were to drop a glass of the splintery sort on the way out of the kitchen (ahem, herm hm). And 3) without shoes it is much easier to accidentally step on something, like, for example, something that may or may not have been really freaking big cockroach on the way to the bathroom at 12am, and not be able to go to sleep until 2am because even though bugs don't really scare you, you're wide awake wondering where on Earth that cockroach could possibly have been living, and if there is a lizard big enough to eat it and if there isn't, where you could buy one, and if you did, what would you name him (ahem herm *cough cough cough* hm hrm). I could say more, but do I really need to?
In other news, I've come up with more evidence to confuse my previously mentioned worries about the whole 'End of the Honeymoon' thing (dear god but that sounds like a horrible movie, doesn't it?). The unhelpful papers mention that one of the things that defines the Honeymoon period is that everything seems new and exotic and different. While I am still in awe of my new second home, and I can still be easily surprised (mostly by things I see fleetingly in passing from the car, and by food, but there you are), normal things are no longer a novelty. Trying to take showers in carefully-measured bursts so as to save up enough water-pressure to get the shampoo out of my hair is no longer an adventure, it's just a mildly annoying necessity. Saying 'no' to offers of more food at the dinner table is no longer a worrying, possible rude thing, it's the only way to finish dinner in under 2 hours (and make sure whoever is doing the offering will finally sit down and eat themselves. I usually take whatever I am given to eat and wait until everyone is sitting and eating themselves before grabbing my glass and sprinting to the kitchen to get water, so no-one has a chance to follow me and help). Washing your clothes in the back yard in the specially made stone basins (built into the house for this very purpose), is...okay, it's still kind of fun, but I do tend to bring my Ipod down so I can break up the quiet monotony. When I sneeze and my nose runs, I now know it's not that I'm sick, it's just an unfortunate side effect of needing bad air conditioners to cool down the house to manageable heat levels at night. It's kind of annoying, but hey? Watcha gonna do? This is all part of life here. Some things are just different, that's how it is. But this hasn't lead me to negative comparisons like the paperwork says I should. I still want to be here. Does that make me abnormal? Or just better at adapting? Or weird? Who can say.
In the vein of differences, I would like to talk about shoes. Namely, the fact that no one, no one every takes them off. I was warned about this ahead of time by a lovely gentleman at the student conference in Grand Rapids a couple months back, whose job it was to 'culturally prepare' all us outbounds, god help him. Mostly, it was warnings about greetings (everyone hugs and kisses to say hello, whether they know you or not. One well connected, polite person entering a meeting can take a whole 10 minutes to finish helloing and sit down. I've seen this first hand); warnings about alcohol (just cause it's there and you'll probably drink it doesn't mean you should get plastered and pass out into your hosts swimming pool. Apparently that's happened before, too. This is kind of a non-issue for me, because I am both mentally, morally, and physically opposed to alcohol. Even mildly fermented things like Kombucha make me feel sick). And, warnings about shoes. He said the whole shoe thing was because of an odd Mexican belief that if you walk on the stone floors (no one has carpet here) in bare feet, the cold will come up through your feet and into your bones, and make you sick (or something like that). I haven't heard anything like that here, but I think it may be some sort of culturally reasoning to deal with a much more basic problem (that's not such a foreign idea, American's have lots of them too. Mostly pertaining to food, for some reason). The reason being, the floors aren't really as safe as they look. Leaving alone the whole 'dirt is everywhere if your house is relatively open all the time' and the 'nothing's really clean in a sterile sense if the only water you have to clean it is full of bad bacteria' issues, I have found a couple of other reasons to hold on to. 1) When you don't have shoes on, it is much MUCH easier for someone with slippery feet to, well, slip on the slippery tile (snigger) and break their heads open on the edge of the couch (or at least get some really painful bruising. Ahem.). 2) Since no-one really has vacuum cleaners, it is much easier to end up needing a tetanus shot without shoes if, say, someone were to drop a glass of the splintery sort on the way out of the kitchen (ahem, herm hm). And 3) without shoes it is much easier to accidentally step on something, like, for example, something that may or may not have been really freaking big cockroach on the way to the bathroom at 12am, and not be able to go to sleep until 2am because even though bugs don't really scare you, you're wide awake wondering where on Earth that cockroach could possibly have been living, and if there is a lizard big enough to eat it and if there isn't, where you could buy one, and if you did, what would you name him (ahem herm *cough cough cough* hm hrm). I could say more, but do I really need to?
