In a few months time I will be returning to the American way of life, and so today I decided to do a test run. I had a meeting that was set for 8:00 a.m., so I figured if I was getting up that early, I might as well make a day of it. Throughout the day, I worked, cooked, cleaned, did laundry, showered, worked on my computer, and talked on the phone. Sounds very American, I know, but while the verbs are the same, the actual actions were very different.
First, work. For my 8:00 meeting, I managed to stop hitting the snooze button by 7:45, threw on some clothes and put my hair in a ponytail, ignored the makeup but remembered to brush my teeth, and arrived at 8:30. Now, I realize that showing up thirty minutes late for a meeting would not exactly earn me a promotion in any US corporation, but here it meant that I was about an hour early. Realizing my mistake, I headed back home, made breakfast burritos with homemade tortillas, worked on my “to do” list for the day, then headed back at about 9:30 for the meeting. I had another meeting that was supposed to start at 10 (aka 11), but the school was having its Mother’s Day celebration today, so we rescheduled for next week. Of course, this was decided by the fact that no one showed up, which meant that I got to go and talk to the different associations later on during the day to pick another time.
However, in true American fashion, I was not idle while I waited (fruitlessly) for people to show up. I cleaned. I threw my sheets in soapy water to begin returning them to their original color, then cleaned my room while they soaked. During the cleaning process I found a scorpion in my bed, which is always comforting. I also found a ton of spiders, but those I left alone. Now, I realize that leaving spiders and their webs where you find them is decidedly un-American, but most of those webs were stuffed with mosquitoes, proof that they were paying enough rent to continue living in my room. Like they say, my enemy’s enemy is my friend. An hour later, my room was much cleaner (with all of those spider webs I can’t honestly call it clean) and my sheets were drying on the line, but I was incredibly dirty and sweaty.
I distinctly remember maintaining a consistently higher standard of bodily cleanliness in the US, so I headed for the shower. But despite the use of soap and running water, the showering experience here is completely different than that of the US. For instance, when you enter the shower you spend the first ten minutes hunting mosquitoes. The green fungus growing on the walls hides them really well, so they can only be spotted when they are flying. As a result, you spend those ten minutes kicking and slapping the walls, with some mid-air clapping going on as well. It’s like a very weird form of the hokey-pokey, only without any singing and with the risk of large welts and loss of blood if you don’t do it right. And when you do finally start the water, you still spend the entire time randomly slapping yourself every time you think you feel a mosquito. Even so, after all that, you leave with at least three large mosquito bites, generally in either the middle of your back or other, more inappropriate, areas. And what do you do the moment you get clean? Put on bug repellant, got inside my mosquito net, and inventoried the new purses that we just got in (pictures will be coming soon).
In the evening I called my parents, using a calling card and having to hang up and call back due to bad connections. Now it is 11:00 at night and I am typing away on my computer, partly because I felt like writing, and partly because the light from the screen attracts all the mosquitoes that have managed to get inside the mosquito net, and if I don’t get them while I type, I’ll make sure I get them before falling asleep. Yeah, not so sure that people in the US are in the habit of smashing mosquitoes on their laptops or using them as mosquito bait. But I what can I say? I’m easing back into the American world a little bit at a time. Poco a poco.
