About a year ago, Dan wrote a post about how we would need to go back to the status of “baby”. He talked about how we’d be entering a culture in which we would need to learn how to do all the basics in life like getting food, riding a bus, paying our rent, and so on. Even though all of these things we would be experts at doing in our own culture, we would need to totally learn everything new upon moving into a new culture. We may be adults physically, but socially, culturally, and linguistically we would be total infants.
Well, we are now three months into our new culture, and it’s confirmed we certainly are “babies”. Although we’ve learned many things such as where to buy food, how to pay our rent, which tram to take, and how to interact with strangers who talk to us on the street. One challenge is that we don’t look anything like babies. So while we understand and have accepted that there is always more for us to learn in this new culture, we’ve also needed to learn that often others’ expectations of us are much higher than we are capable of meeting.
