I lived in
the United States
for most of my life. And many of the
things that are common place there are not common place in other parts of the
world. I had become used to those things
being part of life, but during my time in Madagascar
I lived without many of those things and in turn that became my new
normal. I didn’t need/have them and when
I returned to America
the came as a bit of a shock to me and found them a little weird. Here are the top four weird things for me
when I returned to America:
1.
Grocery Stores
Grocery stores were easily the
craziest thing to me when I went back to America
for my home leave. I don’t mean crazy in
the sense of not be able to believe that kind of place could exists, but just
in the sheer volume of options that exists.
I know; I sound crazy (that is going to be a theme in this post), but I
had been living in the deep countryside of Madagascar
for two years and had been shopping at an outdoor market everyday. Yes there are grocery stores in Madagascar
and I would stop in one every few months when I was in the capital, but there
is much less options. Walking into the
grocery store in America
was overwhelming to say the lest. There
is a whole aisle of different beers, five different kinds of milk, every where
I turned I was presented with multiple options of the same thing. It was overwhelming!
2.
Air conditioning
Air conditioning comes in at
#2. Again weird, I know. Air conditioning is not something that is
found in my town. I had a fan, yes, but
it could only be used when I had electricity which was only four hours a day
after it had already cooled down (it was mostly just used to dry clothes that
hadn’t dried during the day). I was used
to the heat and escaping it as much as I could by staying in the shade during
the hottest parts of the day. But in America
everything is air conditioned. You go from a cold house, to a cold car, to a
cold restaurant. It was freezing! I had
to wear a jacket during a Texas
summer lol.
3.
Driving
Next is driving. Not all that odd, but I hadn’t done it in a
long time. The scariest part was getting
into the truck just after arriving and flying down a Texas
freeway. The fastest I’ve ridden in a
car in the past two years is probably around 40 mph, so 75 mph is crazy
fast. The actual driving part of it was
not at all difficult to fall back into, but I definitely didn’t have to worry
about getting a speeding ticket.
4.
Tipping
Lastly is the act of tipping. Tipping isn’t a thing here in Madagascar. There is the price and that’s what you
pay. Like in all other forms of work,
people get paid for the service they do, not by the quality of that
service. This is what I had gotten used
to. So my friends in a few instances had
to tell me, “Don’t forget to tip” and I was always curious whether I had tipped
enough.
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