Tag: humor

Categories
The Nomadic Life Travel

Oh Hello, America. Long Time No See…

By Tom Check

Last Tuesday, I was stepping off a flight from Tokyo and being welcomed back into America by the oh-so-cheery Dallas airport.

I’m kidding. Dallas was a weird first sample of America after two and a half years abroad. It was just a little too AMERICA for me to handle after a 12-hour flight in which I intelligently took Benadryl to help me sleep, and then watched 10-hours worth of movies instead of sleeping. I wasn’t in the mood to understand everyone’s conversations, and was a bit of a zombie as I wandered around the airport ogling junk food options and trying to make sense of the fact that I am once again considered a small person (5’3″, if you were wondering…). A man sat down a seat away from me at one point and, as Americans sometimes do, said something about how terrible the weather was at no one in particular, but loud enough for me to understand I was meant to respond. I didn’t respond, I just lapsed into thought about how odd this habit was.

Since last Tuesday, I’d say I’ve become a bit more socially apt than that (being well rested helps), but bits and pieces of life back in America continue to distract and boggle me. Reverse culture shock, I suppose. (Although I don’t really feel shocked, just boggled. Should we perhaps change the term to reverse culture bogglement? Reverse culture confusion?) Anyways, here are a few of the things about America that have stood out:

We really, really love our troops

This is mostly thanks to a bunch of overhead announcements at the Dallas airport. On one hand, it seemed normal to me that, once again on American soil, I’d start to be bombarded with “support our troops” propaganda and that super cheery demeanor airport staff gets around military personnel (mention Peace Corps, however, and you get none of that excited and gushy “we so appreciate what you’re doing for our country!” Whomp, whomp, whomp). On the other hand, it was one of those things that felt distinctly American. We really f*ing love our military, but I didn’t see so much of that abroad.

Christmas and consumerism

Some of the travelers I met in the past couple of months shook their heads a bit when I said I’d be returning home at Christmas.

“All of that consumerism is going to be shocking!” They’d say.

Those who didn’t, were probably fearing their own Christmastime return.

It has been a little shocking, but Tokyo helped lessen this blow a little. At least in Japan, where Christians account for a minuscule part of the population, Christmas is a blatantly consumerist holiday. It seemed to be nothing more than a nice excuse to buy a small gift for a friend, and I kind of liked the simplicity of this notion. In America, however, there’s so much pressure to buy for everyone you know, and wrap it in pretty boxes and paper that will quickly go into the garbage. Furthermore, with all the options of things to buy in America, and so many options of each specific item (color, price, best deal, sales, etc.) I find this attempt to acquire gifts a bit daunting and time consuming. Perhaps, this is a good time to implement my friend Chacha, of The Rich Life’s December challenge: The Gift of Giving No. I’m not sure my 3-year-old niece would appreciate this though.

We create and sell some pretty useless crap

Today, I saw a commercial for a cut in half birdhouse you can suction cup to your windows so you can watch what birds do inside birdhouses. Enough said.

Washing machines are fantastic

And why are they fantastic? They shrink your jeans back to a fitted size, you can have your clothes washed while you sleep, and do I really have to explain the simple joy of pulling a towel straight out of the dryer? Yeah, washing machines are fantastic.

So many choices!

Like I already expressed, the seemingly endless array of choices can be a bit overwhelming — but in the case of food, it’s also very exciting. Menus take me about 10-15 minutes of processing, and grocery stores are a whole afternoon’s worth of entertainment. I’m really trying hard not to every delicious thing at once, especially after going a little crazy with the 7-layer dip and pigs in a blanket at a recent Christmas party…

Americans love friendly banter

I was still in Tokyo when this one hit me. I made a joke to one of the stewardesses using grammatically complicated English and slang — and not only did she understand, she laughed. I had two epiphanies getting on that plane: I could stop speaking like an ESL teacher with strangers, and Americans really do love to make friendly small talk with just about everyone and anyone. The conversation with my waitresses aren’t just “one coke and a pizza, please,” but also an opportunity to announce that so far, today’s been a good day, and by the way, how are you? Americans really are friendly — and I’m glad that my experiences this week have been living up to this awesome stereotype.

Now, please excuse me. I have an afternoon excursion at the supermarket planned…

Categories
Africa Madagascar Peace Corps The Nomadic Life

Really Officer, I’m Not an Illegal Immigrant

Creative commons curtosy of timsackton
Creative commons courtesy of timsackton
Creative commons courtesy of timsackton

I know I have slacked for the entire month of June about blogging… and a lot has happened in that month. The books for the Books For Africa project I’ve taken over have arrived in Tamatave and are currently stuck in customs. I had my Close of Service conference with Peace Corps and will officially be leaving the island on September 9th (onwards to Kenya/Uganda/Ethiopia!!). My Dad will be arriving (with homemade cookies!!!) tomorrow to see this hunk of land I’ve been camped out on for the past two years.

And… a fellow American and I were stopped for being potential illegal immigrants.

Every time I have told this story to other PCVs (and expats in general) they always interrupt me here to exclaim — “who the f– would illegally immigrate to Madagascar?!?” I’ll get to that.

It started when a Malagasy police officer stopped the two of us as we were walking around town looking for breakfast and taking photos. When the police officers started yelling “eh! eh! eh!” at us, I thought they were mad at my friend for snapping an accidental shot of them. Easy problem to solve, right? We’ll just delete it, say sorry, and be on our way.

But I was wrong. Instead:

Officer: “Can we see your passports?”
Me: “Passport? Why? Here’s my resident card…”

The tall, well-fed officer and his two assistants (all donning very official looking, laminated badges dangling from lanyards) took a full five minutes to decipher the card and write down my information — all was good — but started to give us trouble because my friend had left his passport and copy of his passport at the hotel.

Officer: “You’re going to have to come to the station and present it later,”
Me: “But we already have plans, we left the passport at the hotel because there’s lots of thieves. We were afraid of getting robbed.”
Officer: “You need to come to the station.”
Me: “Why are you checking our passports anyways? I’ve lived here for two years and no one has ever asked me for this.” (With the exception of one police officer who, I swear, stopped our whole taxi-brousse just to flirt with my friend, using the passport check as an excuse to talk with us).
Officer: “There’s a big problem with illegal immigrants”
Me: “From where?” (This is when I was thinking ‘who the f– would illegally immigrate to Madagascar??’)
Officer: “The Comoros”
Me: “Do I look like I’m from the Comoros?”
Officer: *Small chuckle* “No, passport please.”
Me: “He left it in the hotel, can’t we just pay you some fee so we don’t have to come back?”

At this point the officer got incredibly offended that I tried to bribe him, and I was equally shocked that he wasn’t taking the bribe.

In the end, we walked away and I was in an outrage at how pointless the whole ordeal had been. Seriously, us illegal immigrants in one of the 10 poorest countries on earth?! The absurdity!! Couldn’t these guys be spending their time doing more productive things? Later, we did end up going to the station and were a little creeped out when everyone knew my name already and had been expecting me (I don’t think the could have pronounced my friend’s name). We figured that they had made such a big fuss about seeing our visas because of the upcoming elections that were scheduled, rescheduled, and now postponed indefinitely, because he wanted to prove that he had been doing actual work before his post came up for elections as well.

Whatever it is, I promise you all, I am not trying to illegally immigrate to Africa.

Categories
Africa Madagascar Peace Corps The Nomadic Life Travel

How Blogging in the Third World is Frustrating Business

AarrrrgggRemember when, back in the day, you’d start up your dial-up internet, most likely with AOL, and your computer would make these obnoxious whrrring sounds, a long, high-pitched eeeeee-rrrrrr, and maybe at some point your family would yell at you to get off the internet because they needed to use the phone? Remember how tediously slow it was? Yeah, well blogging from my home in Madagascar, with an internet stick (a small device you plug into a USB outlet and connects to the internet with 3G through a local phone tower) feels a lot like that.

Some days, I’ll click on a link to an article I want to read, get up, make some coffee, write a few things on word, check it – still not loaded – get distracted, and before I know it, half an hour has gone by and all I can see is half an image, slowly loading line by pixelated line, and I give up. I’ve had days when even twitter, a relatively low bandwidth site, takes ages to load. For one of my most recent posts, I spent a day and a half uploading the seven images I wanted to include with the post – and that was with comparatively “good” wifi at a hotel and not my dinky internet stick. Blogging in these conditions can be seriously painful.

And of course, there are all the other weird obstacles in the way. I missed a Skype date once because a cyclone had somehow wiped out all the wifi in the entire city of Antsirabe (then again, it was a Malagasy waitress explaining this to me, so you have to take the explanation with a grain of salt). I biked to all the places I knew with wifi, and nothing. There’s the fact that my electricity for the past month has consisted of a single light bulb strung from my neighbor’s house with all sorts of sketchy electrical wiring that I’m a wee-bit afraid of. (I walk to the other side of the school compound about twice a day to charge my computer in the English Center, if you’re curious.) There’s even that one goat that jumped on me while I was biking to get to a wifi spot, leaving me limping into the café after his hoof smacked my foot.

I love blogging and I love sharing my travel experiences, but behind every post I’ve made there was probably quite a few moments of me shouting “ARRRGGG WILL YOU LOAD ALREADY!” at my computer. So guys, for me, tell your kids “appreciate that fast internet connection you have – there are Peace Corps volunteers in Africa with dial up.”

Photo: I may or may not have had a couple of beers when someone tossed that fake turtle at me

Categories
Africa Madagascar Peace Corps The Nomadic Life

How Peace Corps Volunteers and Celebrities Are Pretty Much the Same

Peace Corps Volunteers may have slightly dinkier houses, and the small animals that share our living space are probably not cute chihuahuas, but in so many ways, Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) and celebrities are pretty much same same.

12 Ways Peace Corps Volunteers are Like Celebrities

1. People stare at us no matter what we are doing and are far too interested in mundane things like what we ate for breakfast, who we were spotted walking around town with, and how many rolls of toilet paper we happened to use this week.

2. We both have entourages. Crowds of scruffy, unbathed children totally count, right?

3. African KidIn the words of James Tanner, “we both like African babies“. And apparently the wordpress community can’t resist their cuteness either.

4. We can trash a hotel room and get away with it. Our status often gets us a “get out of jail free” card. Or in the case of PCVs, a “they’re foreign and don’t get it” card.

5. Inviting us to a party means preparing for a whirlwind of craziness and drunken debauchery. Oh sure, we’re fun, but be prepared…

6. Everyone knows our name but we usually don’t know theirs. Who are you again?

7. We’re both millionaires. Okay, so we’re talking two different currencies, but still…

8. People will sneakily take photos of us… paparazzi style.Paparazzi

9. People care about us far more than their political leaders, according to Evan Morier.

10. We take vacations in exotic locations and can be seen lounging on the beach in the middle of January, working on our tans while the rest of America is bundled in sweaters.

11. It’s always questionable as to whether what we’re doing could be considered work or not. Really, watching 5 episodes of Mad Men in a row is hard work.. we swear!

12. And finally, we set the trends with our ever evolving wardrobe and impeccable sense of fashion.

Stylin with a frip find

Photos: (1) Chip + Peace Corps Bob mocking Titanic in Ankarana National Park (2) One of our entourage in Mahajunga cheesing out in front of the camera (3) Our paparazzi in Mahajunga (4) Chip showing off one of our stranger used clothes finds in Ambanja

Did I miss any?

Categories
Africa Madagascar The Nomadic Life

In Case of Emergency, Exit Through the Window: A Malagasy Bus Ride

From my vantage point squished in the backseat of a taxi-brousse meant for the smaller bodies of Malagasy passengers, I wasn’t able to see the man until he was halfway out the car’s window, shoving himself out head first with a hot pink Jan sport-backpack in tow.

“He’s saying ‘fuck this! This brousse is never going to leave!’” The Peace Corps Volunteer taking us to her site translated for us between laughs of amused disbelief. “Oh man, look at Drunky there! This other dude is slapping the crap out of him!”

The man, who couldn’t be much bigger than my 5’3” self, was swaying under the excessive amount of toka-gasy (the Malagasy equivalent of moonshine) in his system, and limply taking a battering to the face by another man – equally small and equally drunk – trying to shove him back into the open door of the brousse.

“So Drunky there is saying that the bus is never going to leave because the driver has run off somewhere,” which was true, “and this other guy, who I’m pretty sure is drunk too, is trying to get him back into the brousse. But look at them! He’s not even defending himself! That other guy is just giving it to him,” the volunteer narrated as we watched one Gasy man slur insults while slapping the other’s face. Drunky leaned against the van to keep from falling, but otherwise did nothing but slur about the brousse never leaving in response.

Meanwhile, other passengers were shouting at the pair, clearly preferring Drunky’s decision to throw himself out the window of the car than to sit next to him for a 6 – 10 hour long brousse ride. Within minutes, the driver was back, joining in on the shouting and successively slammed the door shut and revved the engine… without Drunky.

Finally, we were off at a slow crawl through the crowded brousse station with Drunky left to stagger back towards the ticket counter, luggage still strapped to the top of the van. As we pulled out, the brousse fell silent and Drunky’s seat was taken by a young, teenage girl who came running up to the brousse just before we were about to turn out of the station.

“Damn. Lucky girl,” the volunteer commented, and on we rolled, out of the dusty capitol and south towards the bandit-ridden roads off the RN7…

Categories
North America Oregon The Nomadic Life Travel

Hitching a Ride from an Oregon State Trooper

We shyly put our thumbs down when we realized the car headed towards us had the ominous stamp of a state trooper vehicle. That did nothing to stop them from doing a u-turn in the middle of the highway and slowing to a stop just in front of me. Like an angry parent, the driver motioned for me to come to the car with his index finger and reluctantly I poked my head in to the passenger window and said hello.

“What on earth are you girls doing out here?” he asked.

We were approximately halfway between Yachats and Florence, OR. In other words, no where.

“Well, we were hiking rather unprepared and by the time we arrived at this camp site it was already too late in the day to continue hiking to Florence, and, well, all we have is some hummus and half a cucumber and need to get more food.”

They cracked a smile at my pathetic story and gave me the usual speil about how dangerous hitchhiking is before turning to each other and saying “well I suppose we could give you a ride down to Florence.” They acted as though they were going far out of their way but somehow I got the feeling they had been planning on giving us a ride the whole time.

Locked safely in the hard, plastic back seat of the state trooper car, Marian and I had the uncontrollable urge to giggle. The kind where one glance at the other person is enough to bring the laughter re-surfacing to a hilarious uproar. 

“Hey, hey, did you tell them about the drugs?” Marian joked.

Tears threatened to pour out.

“Ready?” the troopers shouted through the grate before speeding back down the snaking 101, classic rock blasting from the speakers. As we made our descent, they pointed out major attractions alongside the road and we joked that the driver should be a tour guide upon his upcoming retirement. Further down the road, the other went on about how crazy his son was for camping in the woods with nothing but a tarp.

Fifteen minutes later they dropped us outside of a Safeway and wished us luck on or journey. Safely away from them, we burst out in laughter. Besides the absurdity of our ride, I felt pleasantly surprised in the realization that the authority figures of my youth are human too.