Culture Shock - Part II

Go read Part I first. Go! Part I can be found here:

So I was talking about things that shocks, intrigues, scares, when one arrives from the other side of the globe into the heartland of good ‘ol USA. Here’s part II for your reading pleasure.

* Flushing toilets, electricity, stoves/ovens, toaster, and any other ‘modern necessities’. If you’ve ever been to a 3rd world country, you’ll know what I mean by the toilet thing. The village I grew up and lived in for 10+ years did not have reliable electricity (meaning, electricity was available for perhaps 4 or 6 hours in a 24-hr day, and that’s usually at night when everyone’s asleep), so even if we could afford it, electronic gadgets or fridges or microwaves would be useless anyway. We had kerosene and oil lamps. We cooked using straws/hay/sticks/wood under a brick&mud-combination cook top. When I was 10.5 or so, I went to the City half an hour away to live with my grandmother. She had some modern conveniences in her condo but still lacking compared to the typical standards here in the US.

* Indoor pets. We could hardly manage to keep ourselves fed, therefore pets, especially indoor pets who share beds and living spaces with their owners were a very foreign concept.

* Lotions. Lotions were meant for rich and privileged people. Or at least average middle income folks.

* Soft mattresses (and a whole slew of other ‘common’ items within the civilized world such as carpet or hardwood floor or lamps or showers/baths). See above explanation. Also, showers/baths were not to be had as there’s no indoor plumbing in our tiny brick house - only sponge baths in the winter and outdoor “rinsing” in the summertime.

* Television. As said above, there were basically no electricity. My parents finally got a hand-me-down black&white TV from some richer family when I was about 10.5 yrs old. So after coming here, I was glued to the TV after school everyday until 4 o’clock, when I would have to go work at my grandparents’ business. I watched lots and lots of cartoons. Hey, at least I learned some English through it!

* Weather. I have never ever experienced anything colder than 4C (that would be 39.2F) in my whole entire first 12.5 years of life. We came to Iowa, in December. There were knee high snowfalls and colder-than-a-freezer type of temperatures, combined with bone-chilling winds… NOT pretty. I did not like it at all. It was so cold, so white and glaring everywhere (the sun reflecting off the snow), I got very dizzy and hurled while standing and waiting for the school bus the first week of school and had to stay home for the day. After nearly 20 years, I’m still not used to the cold weather.

I guess some things never change.