Culture Shock, Journal Letters & SPAM

Journal Letters

Some people who read this know I have lived many places. I seem to have finally landed in Arkansas. I've lived here seven years, a record bested only by my childhood stay in South Louisiana (14 years).

There are definite perks to being a bouncy ball type person. For one, more often than not, you're flying! You also get to meet new and interesting people and get to know new and interesting things about new and interesting places.

There are down sides to the bouncing bit and that's the rebound. Culture shock sucks. Counter culture shock sucks even more because you don't allow yourself any rope.

When I first got back from Europe I had loads of counter culture shock.

For example, I'm riding in a car with some friends down a street in Lubbock, Texas. I see a street sign that says Utica St. and I start laughing and saying, "Utica Ulica!" I think it hilarious. No one else is laughing. So, I start trying to explain why it's funny.

Never a good sign.

See, I was pronouncing the name Utica in Slovak like this, "Ooo-tea-tsuh". Utica pronounced like that sounds very, very similar to the Slovak word for street, "Ooo-lee-tsuh", which is funny, or was to me anyway.

My friends blinked in that "you're not funny" way and one of them said, "It's pronounced 'You-ti-kuh".

Oh.

So, not that funny after all.

Then we're still driving and the Backstreet Boys song "Quit Playing Games With My Heart" comes on. I groan and say something along the lines of why are they playing that old song? It's been played to death.

Again with the blinking.

Friend: "What are you talking about? This song is brand new."

That's right folks. I changed continents with the just the right timing to get a double dose of backstreet boys. It's not that they're bad. They can sing and they're music really isn't awful but both in Europe and in the States they were played to death and I got a double dose of overexposure. What is that? Double over exposure or is it over over exposure?

Over exposure. Northern exposure. Who cares? Blah! The point is, it was just too much Backstreet Boys.

Then there were the doors.

No, not The Doors (how old do you think I am?).

I guess I should say, door handles.

In Europe there are a lot of lever like door handles. In fact, where I lived in Kosice, Slovakia that was pretty much all they had.

I developed this habit of slapping the handle down and then pushing the door open with my shoulder.

Slap. Slam.

It worked quite well.

Now imagine me returning to the United States, or as I like to call it, The Land of Doorknobs.

When you slap a doorknob, nothing happens. It does not magically retract the spring-loaded latch. It just gets slapped.

So, when you slam your shoulder into the door the only thing that happens is you bruise your shoulder...again...and again...and again.

It took me f-o-r-e-v-e-r to break that habit despite the painful incentive to cut it out. It had somehow been burned into my brain.

Slap. Slam. Slap. Slam

So, yeah. Culture shock is a definite downside and it's not limited to different countries either.

Moving from South Louisiana to West Texas is a pretty huge adjustment as well.

Cajuns are very friendly, touchy feely, huggy people. We went for a visit recently and, I'm not kidding, our waitress gave me a hug at the end of our meal. My hubby was confused.

Hubby: Do you know her?
Me: Well, sort of. She's Jessie, our waitress.
Hubby: But you don't know her from somewhere else?
Me: No, why?
Hubby: She hugged you.
Me: So?
Hubby: (rolling eyes) Cajuns.

Texans aren't huggy people. I guess with all those wide open spaces, they adopted very wide open personal spaces as well. You hug them and they get all stiff. It was a HUGE adjustment for me. Then there was the water.

If you poured water from the tap the first thing it did was get all cloudy and fizzy. I'm serious. There was some distinct fizzing going on. Then, once everything settled down, this filmy stuff formed on the top not unlike the stuff that forms on the top of warm milk when it's been left out to cool.

Ew.

You did not drink from the tap. Everyone kept these huge five gallon bottles of water in their houses or those water coolers you usually only see in offices. There were little kiosks everywhere that sold water. You'd put in your money, pick the number of gallons and then hold your bottles underneath while it spewed drinking water.

For someone raised in a place where you could practically drink the air, moving to a desert involved serious adjustments. Dust storms. Ugh. Don't get me started on dust storms. I'd come home, open the door to my apartment and there would be a line of dusty dirt that the wind had managed to blow through even the miniscule spaces left by the weather proofing.

The horizon was also just way too big. I was used to the sky being hugged by giant trees strung with Spanish moss like freaking Christmas tensile and I got huge, gigantic, down-right intimidating horizons and these poor tiny wind stunted trees that look like overgrown bushes.

Everything hugs you in SoLa (South Louisiana). The air is heavy with humidity that seems to hold you there in an ever-present hug, for crying out loud.

Texas was space, space and more space. You know why the cowboy is always riding toward the sunset in Westerns? Because it's the only freaking thing there he CAN ride toward! There is nothing else!

Like Red Skelton said. "In Texas they got miles and miles of nothing but miles and miles."

Now, don't get me wrong, once I got used to Texas I loved it. The prairie dogs were cute. The stars, oh my freaking goodness me, the STARS! You've never seen stars until you've seen them from the middle of a West Texas field.

Okay, rattlesnakes? You can keep 'em. Not a fan.

And Texans are friendly in their own special way. The friendliness is different and harder to understand when you're an outsider but it's there.

Cajuns are a touchy friendly. Texans are a wordy friendly.

The affection and friendliness is there in the y'alls and yes'ems. These almost coded messages of not just love but respect for each other. The gesture of the tipped hat (even when they're not actually wearing a hat) and "Y'all come back now, y'hear?" is the Texas version of a hug. Once you figure it out, it's just amazing.

Why am I writing about this? Because I was thinking about it. I was writing in my journal letter to a friend from Slovakia and thinking about friendships and the past and culture shock.

BTW, a journal letter is when you take a small notebook or journal and write a little bit in it everyday. You send one of these little journals once a month to a friend who is very far away and for whom mailing a daily letter or even weekly letter is cumbersome.

This is something I came up with back in the days when email wasn't quite as commonplace as it is nowadays. I, actually, only exchange journal letters with one person at this point. It can't be beat for long distance relationships and, if you have a long distance friend, I highly recommend journal letters. They take a certain amount of discipline but are totally worth it, in my humble opinion.

There is no real conclusion to this blog. Its just a blog of random reminiscing and so I will end it with random trivia.

Spam was invented by Hormel because he was tired of throwing shoulder pork away after packaging his hams. Because it had to be pulled in small pieces from the bone, no one wanted to buy it and he just thought it was wasteful.

So, he had the meat cooked pulled, ground like beef and then canned.

When it came to naming this new product though, Hormel was stumped. So, he didn't name it.

It was actually named by a friend at a party he threw to introduce it. He had a chef prepare several dishes from the ground shoulder pork product and asked his friends to come over, sample it and help him name it.

One of his friends finally said, "It's a shoulder pork ham, right? What about SPAM?"

And that is how SPAM got it's name.

Hey, I said it was random trivia.