Well that was my Friday evening anyway :)
It also illustrates something I have realised in the last 24 hours - I haven't actually really met any Americans yet! After work on Friday I went to the local pub for happy hour with the aforementioned guys from work to meet a few more of my colleagues. I met a dutch person, a macedonian a few africans an aussie and several french people. Having been in the US for 5 days I still haven't had a proper conversation with an actual american person - though to be fair I have somehow managed to not meet one of my housemates yet which is possibly stranger.
This came as a surprise to me as I feel like I am settling in quickly but when I stop and think there is still so much left to do before I can claim to have set up a life here. There is still for one thing the question of finding a church, which is rather trickier when you don't have a CU to suggest a few dozen to you, and when the entire place has been designed for people with cars. Then of course there will be the problem of getting past my instinctive cynicism towards preachers with american accents (this is potentially a very big problem).
The trouble is that generally the representations of such speakers we see in the UK are stereotypes in some film or TV show, or targets of exposé documentaries being accused of conning people. So I unfortunately associate the sound of an american accent talking about the bible with conmen and people commiting spiritual GBH with bible verses taken out of context. This is not going to help me settle into a church!
{At this point the post takes on a doppelganger existence as it turned into a musing on Christianty and the media which will probably be published on my other blog at some point but was rather off-topic for this one :) }
The funny thing about living here is that everything is just not quite the same. It's a bit like one of those sci-fi shows where someone stamps on a bug whilst visiting the past and screws up their present or spills coffee on a dimensional warping device that has been carelessly left sitting around the kitchen and ends up in a parallel universe where everything is almost the same apart from a few very important details. For example, when crossing the road look left first not right...or is it r...no it's definitely left. It's probably best not to jay walk here when you arrive, not necessarily because it is a crime, just because you may find yourself stepping in front of 40 tonnes of fast-moving steel staring fixedly away from it happy in the knowledge it isn't coming from that direction.
What I mean is that we have equivalents of almost everything here back home and so you assume that they work the same way here and up to a point that works, but there is normally some small detail of the working that is different and catches you out. This then leads to a paranoia that means you end up catching yourself out when you find something that does work the way it does back home because you keep looking for the catch - for instance you almost had a blog entry here on how most US homes don't have a kettle...when in fact they probably do. My first clue to that one being wrong should probably have been that I was basing the assumption on a sample size of one household which contained precisely zero americans.
So in short I really need to get to know some americans, or this blog is going to be spectacularly mistitled. See I knew this blog might turn into a series of rants, so anyway I'm settling in pretty quick but in danger of living a rather ghetto-ised life which I would like to avoid.. This is I think one of my big weaknesses - I go with the flow too easily, it would be very easy for me to settle into a minimal pattern of life and just exist here as I would anywhere else in the world, as in fact I did for my entire placement year and huge parts of my time in uni. I settle far too easily when God may have much more exciting plans, there are of course times when we are supposed to just get on with living but I tend to just assume that is always the case. Actually that is really no justification at all - in those times I wasn't living I was just existing, letting time happen.
So I need to somehow get out there and get to know this place and why I am here, perhaps watching the superbowl tomorrow will help (even if I am probably more interested in the adverts).
Speaking of adverts, which you were if you normally read things out loud, one thing that amuses me about the adverts on TV here; you know that bit at the end of some commercials where they fire off a quick disclaimer, well here that takes like 50-60% of the ads duration and normally includes "side effects including death" :P
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4 comments:
Listen to more of Mr Campolo. He's American, yet inoffensively so. :-)
when did i register my email address as ncld?! Ah well :-)
Welcome to the land of the random foreigner abroad! Which generally means realising that everyone you've met so far has also been a random foreigner! Occupational hazard, or something ;)
Very, very happy that stuff's working out, and keep going with the blogging of the randomness! From experience, it can be quite helpful in getting your head round the whole thing, however much of a tendency to exaggerate stuff for comedy value one might have (or possibly/probably that was just me...)
Cx
Randomness is definitely soemthing that happens a lot on blogs- tho'is good fun to read! ;-)
You can also get MP3 sermons over the net from the UK so you don't have to listen to an offensive accent while you're still acclimatising!
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