culture

I think I did it.

I think I am finally caught up loading photos on Flickr.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of photos not posted from when my parents came here back in January, and photos from Kabob’s parents’ visit in April, but I have since resorted to assuming I’ll most likely not ever finish loading those.

Oh, and I didn’t do any editing - no color sharpening, no red-eye eliminating, no nothing. The graphic designer in me shudders at the thought, but doing all those things was the very reason I’d never get anything loaded. It just takes so much time. So these photos are the raw file, straight from the camera to your eyeballs.

So now… I’m up to date, with photos even from yesterday. Enjoy.

Complete strangers posing with my son. Those darn blue eyes.

It’s cherry season! Actually, this is the best time of year for everything at the farmer’s market we hit up weekly.

There’s row after row of olives here.

On the ferryboat, heading to the other side of town.

The obligatory “missing link” disclaimer: I don’t put a link to my Flickr site here for security reasons, us being overseas and all. But if we know you in real life (or if I know you around the blogosphere, and you’ve proven in some form that you’re not a psycho), and you don’t have a link to the photos, let me know via e-mail or in the comments here, and I’ll hook you up.

We have friends staying with us that just moved here (as in, 48 hours ago), and when this happens, we’re always reminded of what’s interesting about living here.  Everything is new to them, so they’ve got sensory overload.  We still get culture shock, to be sure, but it’s nothing like it is in the beginning.

They are also tired.  We are, too, of course (re: having a baby still not sleeping through the night), but they’ve got a whole lotta stuff going on.  There’s jet lag and the time change, but there’s also the emotions and the stressors of moving here.  It physically takes a lot out of you.

It’s been said that your first year living overseas, you need at least one extra hour of sleep a night and a few more calories to burn.  Your entire body is going through overloaded stress, regardless of whether you’re aware, and your body has to recover from the stress somehow.  Most people can’t figure out why they’re so tired all. the. time. when they move here.  But they always are.

So the first few days of a newly-knighted expat’s arrival, we let them sleep as long as they need.  We tell them that everyone sleeps until around noon the first morning, and everyone always denies this will happen to them.  No, I wake up early, they say.  I’m not that tired, they say.  And they always do.  Every time.  It happened with us.

Two days ago I bought Chickpea a Looney Tunes VCD for about $2.  It’s entirely in the language spoken here, so I thought it would kill two birds with one stone - cheap entertainment for her, language lesson for the entire family.

Except I forgot that Elmer Fudd can’t say his Rs, Daffy Duck has a lisp, Tweety Bird has problems with the TH sound, Sylvester likewise can’t say his S-es, Porky Pig stutters, and with the exception of Foghorn Leghorn, who - let’s be honest - sounds like he’s from Arkansas, and Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner - who don’t speak at all, every character hails from the Bronx.

Not sure if these speech impediments translate over into the local language, but I can’t really be sure.  Oh well.  We covered the cheap entertainment requirement.

I’ve noticed that things that once seemed really unusual are becoming more and more normal here. Oddities don’t stand out as much, which is good for living sanely here, but not good for blogging. Weird cultural issues make for good fodder.

Yesterday I got off the bus and crossed the street to head home. It’s a busy street with a little median, and it’s best to cross the first side, wait on the median until the other side clears, and then cross the second side.

Except there are times when you have to cross a lane at a time. As in, cross one lane, hover on the dashed line divider, cross the second lane onto the median, then do it again. It’s scary enough by myself; it about gives me a heart attack when I’ve got Chickpea. It doesn’t happen often with her, thankfully.

But when I was waiting on the median last night, an ambulance pulled into the standstill traffic. Its lights were blaring and its siren wailing. No one was moving. No one seemed to even notice. What’s funnier, the ambulance drivers didn’t seem to really be in any big hurry - they weren’t annoyed that people weren’t moving. They were just sitting at the light like everyone else, except for the siren and lights.

Makes me hope we don’t need an ambulance anytime soon.

Kabob is an excellent driver here, as he is in most countries we’ve been. But they are very aggressive here, and we’ve joked around about what his driving style will be when we return to the States. He’ll be honking at everything, lane hopping, and dare-deviling his way around the tightest of corners. Watch out, America.