Perpetual Change

Culture Shock

I feel like I probably have a blog like this every year, and if I went back to look, it probably says many of the same things, but in the last couple of days, especially flying into Miami the other night, these are the thoughts that hit me:

- How much ambient light Miami shines into the night sky (it woke me up coming through the windows, before we landed)!
- How big everything is (roads, planes, cars, parking spaces, stores, PEOPLE - and I don't just mean overweight, but just large in general; but also generally more healthy looking, sometimes just too much so)!
- How late/early everything runs! The airport was still a buzz at midnight, and the grocery store was open at 7 am this morning, a SUNDAY. These are things I am very unfamiliar with.
- How flat Florida is! I was thinking of this last week as I biked up my last mountains and hills, and it still caught me off guard in person.
- How religious America is, of all ages! (I'll highlight this again in a post soon to come.)
- How chatty Americans are, even with strangers! I can't remember the last one I met that wasn't one of our guests. I barely even saw any this summer that were co-workers; I worked almost exclusively with Europeans this year. People started to comment that I didn't seem completely American anymore. Uh-oh.
- How few people were reading in the airport! To illustrate the last two points, during my layover in DC I was reading a news magazine, and a stranger sat down next to me and started a conversation. It was obvious to me that we had little in common as far as background or experience, but I am used to that (from work), so I just let him go on. He commented that I was a 'rare breed' to be reading. I looked around and indeed in the whole terminal, I only saw one other person. Many people were on cell phones, talking and texting, or on laptops, but there weren't many books all day; I kept looking.

Amazing.

posted by jjs @ 3:09 PM