International living

When I lived in the US, I lived all my life in a small town 45 miles away from Seattle. I grew up captivated by the sight of Mt. Ranier and I am one of the few who know why Western Washington is so rainy. The people in the town I grew up in chose to live there because it was stunningly gorgeous and close to the city but far enough away that they didn't have to deal with the bustle and liberality of a large West coast city. I didn't choose to live there. When I did, I wanted to get out of there. I wanted little to do with the whole place. I hated the school. I hated the town. I hated the rain. I hated the people. I hated the redneck, narrow-minded, racist idiots that I thought made up the entirety of the population. As I grew up, lived elsewhere and gone back home, I realized that I was a stupid kid. Thank god I got smarter.

Anyway, I lived for 20 years in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. I moved to Oklahoma in August of my 20th year and learned a whole new way of life. It is mind-boggling to think that the people in Washington state and the people in Oklahoma are of the same nationality. Sure, they speak the same language, mostly. Sure, they have the same president. But the similarities are few and far between. I'm not going to get into all the differences here because I'm already having a hard time focusing on my one idea. Even though I moved in country, this is pretty much when my international living started. The only way I could get home to a culture and people I had a lot in common with was by driving for 3 days or getting on a plane and having a layover in Denver. Because I moved there, basically on my own (I had an "aunt and uncle" an hour away) I was forced to make friends from scratch. The university I went to was incredibly small. I think there were more students in my high school than there were in my entire university!

In the process of making friends, I had to understand and accept this foreign culture and adapt myself to it. I didn't have to give up who I was, but I definitely had to change the way I went about things. It took me a while, but eventually I made some pretty tight friends in Oklahoma. Then I moved up to Illinois. Again, this is a new environment. It was a little bit of Oklahoma (because it is definitely still meat and potatoes mid-west) and a little bit of the Northwest (the people didn't care about every little thing you had in your cart at wal-mart) but it was also different. For the first time I had to deal with incredibly impoverished black students and their unique culture. I only lived there for 9 months though and got out of there as quickly as possible.

Since then, I've lived in S. Korea. Not only is this a foreign speaking country, its whole history is completely different from any Euro-based civilization. This is Asia. Absolutely. When you walk down the hair dye section of the local mega-mart, you see black, black, black, and black. Everyone in this country has dark hair. If it isn't black, its close enough that any white person will usually say it is. The fashion is different. The protocols of greeting, hanging out, saying goodbye are different. The dating methods are insanely different. Work ethic is different (my first job I had 3 sick days a year. If I used one, I was frowned upon). To make a long list short, basically everything was different except they drove on the same side of the road. Ah, heck, even their toilets are different!

The absolutely beautiful thing about having lived in so many different cultures is the vast variety of friends I've made. When I look at my blog readers, the US has the most readers followed by Korea, but I also have readers in Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Bahrain, Thailand, and some others I can't remember right now. . .OH! Brazil too. Periodically, I go through the friends I've met and would be happy to have stay with me and I'm pretty sure I could stay with them. Let me do this now. If I was to travel around the world, right now, I could stay for free (may be on a couch or in a van, but its free) in Korea, Japan, UAE, Bahrain, Myanmar, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, India, Spain, France, England, Scotland, Ireland, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Norway, even Nova Scotia! I feel like I'm missing some, but I can't think of them right now. If you are from a different country than I listed and feel like I should've included you, then please let me know. If not, then when I DO remember, then I'll know how you really feel, ha!

Since I've been in Korea, I have become very close friends with English speaking people from so many different countries and I am open to their opinions on anything, yes, including America. This has opened my eyes to some of the cultural idiosyncracies of the US and it is quite interesting to see it. Americans, you know how you can't go a day without hearing about God or talking about him at least 19 times? yeah, that's you. Most other countries don't have this compulsion to express their opinions on religion as we do. Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Atheist, it doesn't matter. Americans speak about religion more than any other people I've ever known. Don't think so? Try this out. Tomorrow, listen closely and pay attention to how many times you hear, see or say something religious. Besides this, my last count was 1 time in the past week.

You know why?

I was speaking to my mum, an American.