Carolyn and I are two weeks into our four-week intercultural communication course; this is the course that meant to is prepare us to live in a brand new culture. The further we get into this course the more we are learning how much we have yet to learn. We are continually learning of precautions that I had never considered, and if you remember my blog post from last fall, you may know that I like to plan for everything. So being told of many things that I did not plan for feels mildly alarming.
I have come to the realization that Carolyn and I are more or less going to start over and become babies again. When we arrive in Romania we will not know how to buy food to eat, and when we do find food we may not know how to cook it. We will need to learn how to find a place to live, and pay our bills – we won’t even know what bills we need to pay much less how to pay them. We won’t know how to hail a taxi or pay for a bus ride. (We will still know how to walk, so that’s a bonus!) We will have to relearn everything. So much for planning again.
