Cultural differences

I chatted yesterday with a friend who spent the summer in New Jersey. She remarked to me that Americans are much friendlier than Belarusians. I found this amusing because I’ve been telling everybody that I think folks here are more friendly than folks where I come from. Truthfully, I suppose, neither of us is in a position to judge. When we are visitors to a new culture, greeting the new culture with curiosity and acceptance, the people we meet are nice to us.

I can go back to Boston and be curious and accepting too. That’s the way I am. But I won’t be perceived as a foreigner, and I have no doubt that my very foreignness here makes people think more about me than they would in Boston. And as for Irina, well, she’s very cute and you can tell as soon as she speaks that she’s well educated but not in an English-speaking country. So we each came away from the other’s country with the impression that the new culture is friendlier than the culture we came from. I have no idea, then, how to decide who gets the “friendly culture” award. But I’m glad to know that folks all over are still nice to strangers.

I have made some adjustments in order to live in the Belarusian culture. Specifically, I have become a very opportunistic grocery shopper. We had the lesson brought home to us last week when Alla bought some especially nice potatoes one morning at the local grocery store. She had no idea just how nice they were until she began cutting them up at dinner time. They were great! We knew, of course, that I’d better go out and buy more that very day. We also called our landlords and offered to pick up some for them. Then I washed the dishes.

After finishing the dishes, I walked down to the store to load up on those red spuds. Ha! Sold out. The produce lady consoled me, saying that she’d sold out well before dinner time. But we remembered the lesson. Today, Alla bought some nice-looking Mineola oranges on her way home from the library. We ate one as soon as she came into the house and realized that she’d found something great. Immediately, I put my coat on and went back to buy more. I arrived at the store just in time, too. I got a good bag of these orange jewels, but there weren’t many left and I would have been sorting through dregs within another half hour. This is one system we’ve definitely learned to work.