culture clash

It's not just language I get wrong. Today a famous writer came to my class and I thought he was going to talk about a beautiful story he had written. He talked instead about the treatment of women since, well, forever. He was very learned, and very engaging, but the point remained obscure to me. Finally, I raised my hand and asked if we could talk about his story; he bristled visibly and said, "I have been for the past hour." To think when I came here I imagined meeting writers and joining a community! I manage instead to offend the first one I meet.

Last night I swam laps in the pool. My family will find this quite amusing as I've been the one who watches all these years. How many thousands of hours have I sat at swim meets, watching, critiquing, cheering? And still, swimming back and forth across the pool yesterday, I was shocked at how hard it was. I was out of breath immediately. I didn't glide gracefully the way Mike and Maggie and Emily do. No, I was entirely conscious of my butt dragging me down to the bottom, of my arms flailing inefficiently. I was utterly shocked. Shouldn't all that watching have worn off on me? Apparently not. This was after my pleasant surprise that, I thought, I could suddenly understand Dutch. A woman and her son were at the pool, and I could understand much of what they were saying, which for some reason I assumed was Dutch. I learned later that they are German, and I studied German, and so of course I could understand it. But why didn't I know it was German? It's sort of like the night I was watching TV and thought I couldn't understand the English. Weird things happen to my brain here.

Because we are so close to the equator, the sun rises at 6 every morning and sets at 6 every evening. By 9 or so it really feels like bedtime, and I struggle to adjust to both warmth and dark, as in Minnesota when it's hot the sun is out until 9:30 or later.

As I walked to my front door this afternoon, I looked down and saw a bright red flower with a long stamen wobbling down the sidewalk. Wobble. Wobble. On looking closer, I saw it was being carried by a very determined ant. That flower was at least 20 times the size of the ant, and yet the ant moved along quickly, an inadvertent beauty made from his effort.

Adios, then, from the dusk of 5:30.