Immersion ramblings

Culture is like those rose-tinted glasses that my gramma always referred to optimists wearing. You see the world tinted by your culture. You understand conversation as it is tinted by your first language. You interpret body language and signals as good or bad because of the warm-fuzzies or baggage related to what accompanied those signals in your past.

Immersion and cultural exchange is where the shock of culture becomes comical and the rosy glasses I didn't know I had became the elephant in the room.

My family used to listen to an old record of two comedians pretending to be vagabonds and gossiping together about companions they had lost track of, "where is ol' Floyd these days?" "Oh I heard he was in... Where you have to take a bath ever' day!" "Eh, I couldn' live like that!!" This was akin to seeing my red-white-and-blue practices through green-white-and orange glasses:

Friend 1: We don't really take showers so when our friends set us up where we would stay, they made sure we had a bucket and cup we could fill up and stand in the bathtub to dump the bucket water from the cup over our head to take our bath...

Friend 2: When I visited America to do some talks, I remember going outside and I was so shocked thinking where are all the people?! 

Friend 2: We don't have the habit of this toilet tissue. How can you get truly clean that way?! So when I married my wife, this is from her culture you know, I would use the tissue, then get into the shower and wash off my backside with soap and water do I could be fully clean, like I'm used to being after I go. 

Friend 3: Do parents really not arrange marriages for their children? At all?! How can you find a respectable partner, then?

Friend 4: When we ate with this foreign family, they gave us mashed potatoes and beef. There was beef at every meal. It is too heavy! One day we saw rice and were so excited wanting to buy it, but when we converted currencies we found it would be too expensive! If we don't eat a lot of rice every meal, we feel we haven't had our dinner at all.

Friend 3: How can you stand how lonely it is in your home town with neighbors who live that far from your home?! If they go to the grocery all at the same time, you will be the only person in walking distance! How lonely!!! 

Another shock is that the things that really irritate me about this place are generally irritating to most people, but it is home and that do you do?! For example, we hate the traffic on the Waterson Expressway when trying to get to work and know that there are creep characters who could mug is on 4th Street, but we love Louisville in spite of its craziness. South Asia is the same. We all hate the pollution, the traffic and over-the-top loud honks... It was fun to feel these things aren't necessarily desirable for anyone.