Learning the Culture
This is not going to be a post about specific cultural norms, though I am sure we will share those in the future, but rather a general explanation of what it feels like to enter a culture so vastly different from your own.
The process of culture acquisition often fluctuates between feeling like a lost child and elation. What I mean by this is that we are learning social norms that have been instilled in the people here since childhood. So things that children instinctively understand leave us scratching our heads. But the elation comes in when that light bulb clicks on and something makes sense for the first time, like when and how it is appropriate to give a gift. Before learning something like that, you come off like a selfish punk who just takes the gifts others brings and doesn’t do anything to reciprocate. Don’t you hate those people?
So we are glad to announce we are slowly moving from the clueless child stage to the not-quite-as-clueless child stage. Who knows…maybe in a few years we might hit puberty.
