Culture Startled and Settled

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August 15, 2011
I’ve only been here for 5 days now but I am definitely starting to feel a bit more settled which is good. Like I said in the last blog, we did find a place to stay! The hotel owner was very helpful in pointing me in a good direction and we ended up renting a two bedroom apartment from a very nice couple, Ludwig and Curlotte. Ludwig, is a vet/artist/gallery owner/chem teacher at the university campus in town. Very interesting fellow to say the least. Curlotte seems to manage the property and run the background stuff for the gallery. She was really helpful too. The apartment is close to both mine and Tom's schools (really, the whole town is close to everything...) so we're set! It's also been kind of nice that the other tenants of the building are expats (Japenese and American) - we've arranged to use the washer the japanese girls upstairs bought, and we had a nice chat with the man around the corner who just moved here for a change of pace - he sells software from his computer so he decided to move to do the same thing here!.

The apartment has been nice so far, although it definitely highlights my dependence on material goods! For example, for dinner tonight I only had one pot, so I had to cook my rice in it, clean it out, sauté my veggies in it, clean it again, then use it to toast my bread! Haha This semester is going to be very helpful for my resourcefulness. I am spoiled in Canada with my rice cooker and plentiful utensils! It was nice to cook though. I find cooking very calming and relaxing, it was nice to spend some time doing something familiar when today was pretty stressful at school.

I have also been feeling more comfortable around town, I figured out which streets are one way and where I should turn to get to which store. There are 5 main streets running parallel with the coast, and in order from east to west they go Front St, Main St, Main Middle St, West St., Far West St. haha! Sounds easy enough to figure out where you are, but at first it is confusing because street signs are not really a priority for PG. There are more after that, but these 5 are where the town is basically. After that there are maybe a dozen streets running north to south, those have been the most confusing, trying to figure out where to turn.

People are mostly helpful, except there are still lost-in-translation moments, when my English isn’t their English, and Spanish doesn’t work either. In which case I say thank you and find someone else to ask for help, haha. Sometimes they just stare at me like I am speaking Swahili, and I swear I was talking slowly and clearly (I really am working on that).

It is in moments like that when I am very grateful to have gone on exchange. At least when I was on exchange and had those moments of frustration, when you don’t know where you are, where you are supposed to go or what to do, can’t seem to communicate to get help with either of those problems, I had Rotarians and people who were basically assigned to help me. If this was my first time experiencing it, and I had never gotten used to the slow pace of Latin America, or the way people stare at you on the street because you so clearly are not from there, or gotten used to a different style of living in general, these past five days would have been totally overwhelming I would say. But they haven’t been – so thank you to the exchange program and everyone who helped me participate successfully in it!

Photos of my apartment and other things so far are here .

Next post: School!

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